Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      How Much to See a Movie at AMC? It Will Soon Depend Where You Sit.

      by

      By the end of 2023, the movie theater chain will offer tickets at three different price tiers, with middle seats costing the most. You’ll pay less if you like the front row.Some middle seats at AMC movie theaters will be more expensive than others as part of the company’s new ticket-pricing strategy, announced this week.AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest cinema chain, said in a news release on Monday that this new pricing system, known as Sightline at AMC, would be in place at all of its United States theaters by the end of the year.The seats in the front row of the theater will be the least expensive and seats in the middle of the theater will be the most expensive, the company said. However, new prices will not affect showings before 4 p.m. or tickets sold at a special discount on Tuesdays, AMC said.AMC’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Eliot Hamlisch, said in the news release that the tiered system “more closely aligns” with the reserved seats and pricing models of other types of ticketed events, such as sporting events and concerts.Mr. Hamlisch said that the change would give people “more control over their experience.”Critics of the new system, including the actor Elijah Wood, have said it would give wealthy people an unfair advantage.“The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all, and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income,” Mr. Wood wrote on Twitter.Under the new system, the most common seats available, the Standard Sightline tickets, would be priced as traditional movie tickets, AMC said.If you’re willing to crane your neck to see the screen, you’ll be able to pay less to sit in the “Value Sightline” seats in the front row. Some accessible seating for people with disabilities will also be priced in the value tier. To access the value tier prices, people must register with the AMC loyalty program, which includes one free membership tier.The seats in the middle of the theater will become “Preferred Sightline” tickets. The extra cost of these tickets will be waived for members of AMC’s top-tier loyalty program, A-List.A map outlining seating options will be available when buying tickets online, through the company’s app and at the box office, the company said in its announcement.AMC did not specify what the price differences would be for each ticket or whether prices would be consistent across cities and films.In New York City, the price differences were about to take effect at some locations later this week. At AMC’s 34th Street location in Manhattan, tickets were listed under the new pricing system for Friday’s showings of films, including “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and a 25th anniversary screening of “Titanic.”For the 6:45 p.m. showing of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the front row seats, a space for a person in a wheelchair and a seat for the companion of someone in a wheelchair were described as “Value Sightline” seats and colored blue on the seating map.A key for the map explained that the value tickets were $2 off and that the preferred seats were $1 extra. Those were the five middle seats in each of the four back rows of the theater with gold-colored icons. Discounts for children and older moviegoers remain in effect.The “Standard Sightline” tickets for this showing included the two to three seats on either side of the preferred seats, the second-row seats and the six other seats made available for people in wheelchairs and their companions.Movie theaters have been experimenting with new tactics to boost ticket sales in response to two decades of weakening attendance, shutdowns during the first years of the coronavirus pandemic and the widening availability of digital streaming of first-run movies.In September, Cineworld, the London-based company that operates Regal Cinemas in the United States, filed for bankruptcy.Cineworld is the second-largest theater chain in the world behind AMC, and the company’s chief executive, Mooky Greidinger, said in the bankruptcy filing that “the pandemic was an incredibly difficult time for our business.”AMC said that by the end of the year, its new pricing system would be in place at all of the company’s theaters in the United States. AMC has about 950 theaters and 10,500 screens worldwide. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘They Wait in the Dark’ Review: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

      by

      A terrified woman finds her childhood home contains more than bad memories in this loopy horror movie.Made with just a handful of actors and a thimbleful of cash, Patrick Rea’s “They Wait in the Dark” is a gruesome ghost story that plays with our expectations. Filmed in 2021, the movie gathers four mothers — one murdered, two murderous, plus the rageful spirit of a fourth — into a twisted tale of abuse and revenge.The delightfully baroque script, also by Rea, isn’t the most lucid, but it is economical. When we meet Amy (Sarah McGuire) and her adopted eight-year-old son, Adrian (Patrick McGee), they are on the run. Hollow-eyed and haunted, Amy is carrying a burner phone and nursing an unhealed knife wound in her ribs. Having survived an abusive mother, Amy is now fleeing her partner, Judith (Laurie Catherine Winkel), who — as a catcalling trucker learns to his peril — might be even more unhinged.From its succinct opening to its exclamation-point finale, “Dark” delivers a tight, demented look at toxic parenting. With admirable speed, the movie installs Amy and Adrian in a creaky farmhouse in rural Kansas, furnishes her with an empathetic friend (Paige Maria) and introduces an initially invisible supernatural presence. Yet it isn’t the home’s frightful history — or even Judith’s remorseless approach — that concerns us so much as Amy’s darkening moods and growing volatility.More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach. As we watch Amy slowly decompensate, trapped between her boarded-up windows and creepy basement, it’s unclear whether her most urgent threat will come from without or within.They Wait in the DarkNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids

      by

      The campaign on behalf of Andrea Riseborough is the latest to provoke controversy, but it’s hardly the most memorable.When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.1961Chill Wills, ‘The Alamo’After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”Variety refused to run it, and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company were in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.1974Candy Clark, ‘American Graffiti’Candy Clark with Charles Martin Smith in “American Graffiti.”Universal PicturesThe nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)1975Liv Ullmann, ‘Scenes From a Marriage’The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)1986Margaret Avery, ‘The Color Purple’Margaret Avery with Bennet Guillory in “The Color Purple.”Warner Bros.After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)1988Sally Kirkland, ‘Anna’Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”1991Diane Ladd, ‘Wild at Heart’After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”2011Melissa Leo, ‘The Fighter’Melissa Leo, fourth from right, in a scene from “The Fighter.”Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesUnlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.2013Ann Dowd, ‘Compliance’Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”) More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The 7 Toughest Days on Earth’ and Super Bowl LVII

      by

      A new adventure series is on National Geographic, the Super Bowl airs on Fox, and President Biden delivers his second State of the Union address.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, Feb. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMartinique Lewis in “Black Travel Across America.”Victoria Donfor/National Geographic for DisneyBLACK TRAVEL ACROSS AMERICA 10 p.m. on National Geographic. Beginning in 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem-based postal worker, published an annual “Green Book” series for three decades. Serving as a travel guidebook for Black Americans in a time of segregation and racial strife (and in 2018 lending its title to the Oscar-winning movie), the book provided a list of hotels, restaurants and service stations from Connecticut to California where Black American patrons would not only be served, but be safe. In this documentary, the travel consultant Martinique Lewis embarks on a coast-to-coast road trip to visit historic “Green Book” locations and speak to local experts about the businesses that acted as safe havens.TuesdaySTATE OF THE UNION 2023 9 p.m. on ABC, CBS, Fox, HBO and NBC. President Biden’s second State of the Union speech will be his first appearance before a Republican-led House of Representatives. “He looks forward to speaking with Republicans, Democrats and the country about how we can work together to continue building an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out, keep boosting our competitiveness in the world, keep the American people safe and bring the country together,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.THE 7 TOUGHEST DAYS ON EARTH 10 p.m. on National Geographic. This unscripted adventure series follows Dwayne Fields, an adventurer and explorer known for being the first Black British citizen to reach the North Pole, as he works to keep himself and a small film crew alive for seven days in some of the most extreme environments on earth, during their deadliest times of year. From the glaciers of Kyrgyzstan to the deserts of Oman, Fields must guide his crew through the elements to a specified extraction point. Their journey begins in Tuesday’s premiere in the forests of Gabon.WednesdayGina Rodriguez in “Not Dead Yet.”Eric McCandless/ABCNOT DEAD YET 8:30 p.m. on ABC. Adapted from the book “Confessions of a Forty-Something ____ Up” by Alexandra Potter comes a new series from the creators of “This Is Us” and “The Real O’Neals.” Starring the Golden Globe Award-winning actress Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”) as Nell Stevens, a broke obituary writer who can communicate with the dead, the series follows Nell as she works to find herself and restart the life and career she left a decade ago.ThursdayTHE KING AND I (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. This Oscar-winning musical film tells the timeless story of an English governess named Anna (Deborah Kerr) who travels to modern-day Thailand as a tutor for the 15 children of the King of Siam (Yul Brynner). Adapted from the Tony-winning 1951 musical of the same name, based on the 1944 novel “Anna and the King of Siam” by Margaret Landon (which in turn was inspired by the memoirs written by Anna Leonowens, a teacher to the children of King Mongkut in the 1860s), the film is beloved for its award-winning score and exploration of cultural differences. In a 1996 column for The New York Times, Margo Jefferson described the story as a “seductive and spectacular artifact” that was “based on facts and fictions about the Orient and the British Empire a century earlier; an extravaganza in which East meets West, a monarchy meets a matriarchy and operatic melodrama meets ethnic vaudeville.”FridayBen Affleck and Rosamund Pike in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 10:15 p.m. on HBOSGe. Based on the 2012 best seller by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, “Gone Girl” follows the alternating narratives of the husband and wife Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), as an investigation mounts once Amy is discovered missing and Nick becomes a suspect in her disappearance. The Times critic Manohla Dargis described the film as “a ghastly vision” in her review of the movie. “At its strongest,” she added, “‘Gone Girl’ plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage.”SaturdayA SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) and SERGEANT RUTLEDGE (1960) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. This week’s selection for Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month Saturdays features two films that focus on the Black experience in the Army. First is the Academy Award-nominated “A Soldier’s Story,” which Lawrence van Gelder described in his 1984 review for The Times as mixing “mystery, history, sociology and inquiry into the psychopathology of hatred and the poison of accommodation to injustice.” Based on Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Soldier’s Play,” a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd,” the film is set in rural Louisiana during World War II and tells the story of Capt. Richard Davenport (Howard Rollins Jr.), a JAG officer who has been called in to investigate the murder of Vernon Waters (Adolph Caesar), a sergeant in an all-Black Army unit. “Sergeant Rutledge” continues this exploration of themes of racial prejudice and justice. Set in the Southwest in the post‐Civil War years, it follows Braxton Rutledge (Woody Strode), a sergeant in one of four all-Black units, as he is tried in the rape and killing of a white girl and the slaying of her father, his commanding officer. Directed by the four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford, “Sergeant Rutledge” represents a shift in the racial consciousness of Ford’s work.SundayPUPPY BOWL XIX 2 p.m. on Animal Planet. Returning for its 19th year, Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl is a call-to-adoption television event that highlights the work of a range of animal rescues and shelters while adoptable puppies “compete” in a series of games. This year’s Puppy Bowl will feature over 120 puppies from 67 shelters, some of whom viewers will learn about in more depth over the course of the three-hour special (in addition to a number of featured kittens during “Kitty Halftime”).SUPER BOWL LVII 6:30 p.m. on Fox. Fox Sports presents its live coverage from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., as the AFC champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, play the NFC champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in a battle for the ultimate title. This year’s game is notable for being the first Super Bowl to feature two Black quarterbacks, and the first time a set of brothers will be competing against one another. The 2023 game also pits Andy Reid, the head coach for Kansas City, against Philadelphia, for which Reid was head coach from 1999 to 2012. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Melinda Dillon, 2-Time Oscar Nominee, Is Dead at 83

      by

      She was a Broadway star at 23 and then quit acting, but later re-emerged in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “A Christmas Story.”Melinda Dillon, who shot to Broadway stardom at 23, withdrew from acting after a mental breakdown, and then, in her late 30s, staged a comeback, receiving best supporting actress Oscar nominations for her roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice,” died on Jan. 9. She was 83.Her death, which was announced by a cremation service, came to public notice in recent days. The announcement did not specify the cause or location of her death.Ms. Dillon was best known for playing mothers coping with grave or silly problems in popular movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In “Close Encounters,” the enduring Steven Spielberg hit from 1977, she played an artist and single mother living on a rural farm who watches her son get abducted by aliens.She played more explicitly archetypal mothers in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), a family comedy about having Bigfoot as your pet, and “A Christmas Story” (1983), a series of vignettes depicting an all-American Christmas in midcentury Indiana.The latter film, long a classic of the holiday season on television, inspired a 2020 tribute in The New York Times, which hailed Ms. Dillon’s character, a frazzled Everymom, as a “damn hero.”In “Absence of Malice” (1981), Ms. Dillon played against maternal type as a Catholic woman who must admit to having an abortion.Her star turn of that era came late for an actress — in Ms. Dillon’s late 30s and 40s — and it constituted an unexpected re-emergence, following a crisis that seemed to halt her promising career.Ms. Dillon in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” with, clockwise from left, Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella and Darren McGavin.PictureLux, via AlamyMelinda Ruth Clardy was born in Hope, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1939. Her father, Floyd, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Noreen, was a volunteer at a U.S. Army hospital. Noreen fell in love with Wilbur Dillon, a wounded veteran, and Melinda’s parents divorced when she was 5.She took her stepfather’s surname and had the peripatetic upbringing of a child of the military, living for a while in Germany. She left home at 16 and soon began pursuing an acting career.She moved to New York City in 1962, fresh out of acting school. In just a matter of weeks, she landed one of four parts in the Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”She played Honey, the wife in a young couple invited to the home of an older couple for a drink. The premiere, on Oct. 13, fell on her 23rd birthday.“Critics unanimously hailed her performance as superb,” The Daily News announced in a profile published that month that described Ms. Dillon’s “overnight rise from obscurity to stardom.”Her agent, Peter Witt, told The News, “What has happened to her is a one in a million shot paying off the first time out in the theater.”In a 2014 New York Times review of a recording of the play’s original cast, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the production “one of the seminal theatrical events of the 20th century” and said the actors’ performances, including Ms. Dillon’s, “still feel fresh, fierce and definitive.”But as time went on, the pressure bore down on Ms. Dillon. Sometimes she would perform in a three-hour matinee in the afternoon, then study acting with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and then do another three-hour performance in the evening. Talking to sophisticated, powerful people in the New York theater world terrified her.Ms. Dillon in 1998. After suffering a breakdown, she said: “I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”CBS, via Getty ImagesAfter nine months, she left the play and checked into the mental ward of Gracie Square Hospital in New York, where she found herself feeling suicidal.“I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”After her release from the hospital, she took a few acting roles but then sought safe harbor in marriage, to the actor Richard Libertini, and in motherhood, raising their son, also named Richard.But she did not find contentment in life away from the spotlight. By the mid-1970s, she was single and being cast in multiple major Hollywood productions, including “Slap Shot,” a 1977 film starring Paul Newman.“I spent 10 and a half hours naked in bed with Paul and absolutely loved it,” she told People magazine in 1978.After the apex of her Hollywood career, she continued acting, and into the 21st century she occasionally made appearances on television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dillon sang in the choir of a Methodist church as an adult, and she threw herself into film roles as mothers. But she came to reject what she had once sought in the life of a traditional suburban housewife.“I left home so early that when I found somebody who wanted to take care of me, I just stopped everything; I could have soared ahead — I really know that — and I chose not to,” she told The Times. In marriage, “I got buried alive,” she continued. “That’s what got me to act again.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

      by

      David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Directors of ‘Skinamarink’ and ‘The Outwaters’ on Horror Experiments

      by

      Kyle Edward Ball, the filmmaker behind “Skinamarink,” and Robbie Banfitch, who made “The Outwaters,” talk about their creepy, buzzy movies.Universal’s evil robot movie “M3gan” is one of the first big hits of 2023. But two new indie horror films are generating buzz too, even though they were made for next to nothing and are driven by distorted audio, disorienting cuts and other defiantly experimentalist techniques.Kyle Edward Ball’s “Skinamarink” is about two children who encounter a sinister entity in their darkened home. (It’s currently in theaters and streaming on Shudder.) The film channels CreepyPasta videos and experimentalists like Takashi Ito, whose 1984 short film “Ghost” looks like “Skinamarink” on uppers. Ball’s film, which had a $15,000 budget, has made more than $1.8 million at the North American box office.Robbie Banfitch’s “The Outwaters” is about a group of friends who encounter a bloodthirsty force during a trip to the desert. (It opens in theaters on Feb. 9 and will later stream on Screambox.) Also made for about $15,000, it starts as a found footage film but pivots into a sustained, confrontational barrage of blood-soaked fast cuts and panicked sound design. For horror fans this is a love language.Critics have been mostly positive. Writing in The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said “Skinamarink” is “as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.” Early reviews for “The Outwaters” are glowing but sound like police reports, with words like “an assault” and “suffocating.” Again, for horror fans these are come-ons.Who are these two directors, and why are their experimental movies getting noticed? Instead of interviewing them myself, I asked them to interview each other. I listened as they spoke over video: Ball, 31, was at home in his native Edmonton, Alberta, and Banfitch, 37 and originally from New Brunswick, N.J., was in Los Angeles. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.ROBBIE BANFITCH Kyle, if you were a collage, what would you be made of?KYLE EDWARD BALL It would be like a 90s high school girl style collage. But also my favorite movies: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Black Christmas,” “The Shining,” “The Birds,” “Woman in the Dunes.” I’d put in movies I watch as comfort: the 1931 “Dracula,” “Black Sabbath” by Mario Bava.OK, so Robbie, what made you want to go into filmmaking?A scene from “Skinamarink.”IFC Films/ShudderBANFITCH I knew I wanted to make movies around 7 or 8. What made me want to get into it was “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park,” Steven Spielberg’s films. They exhilarated me.BALL Why did you want to go into experimental horror territory?BANFITCH I never thought of “The Outwaters” as experimental as I was making it. The logic of the story — what would be filmed or not in the situation — makes it experimental in parts. But that was never the plan.All right. Tell me about your influences during high school.BALL I went to a fairly L.G.B.T.-friendly public school in Edmonton called the Victoria School of the Arts. I also discovered a video store called the Alternative Video Spot that has since closed. I gravitated toward edgier stuff: Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, John Waters. But David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick are the two guys I want to emulate. They pushed boundaries without being pretentious and still reached an audience. You can do that as long as you give them something worthwhile.Growing up, did you look up to gay filmmakers?BANFITCH I don’t know that I did. But I did look up to the character David in “Six Feet Under.” In the beginning, he’s still in the closet, living with his mom. I was watching “Six Feet Under” while closeted, living with my mom and watching the show with her. He came out to his mom and then right after, my mom asked me if I was gay but I said no. But I believe she’d already found my “Queer as Folk” box set under my bunk bed. She knew, but she was letting me take my time.What’s at the heart of “Skinamarink”?BALL I have a canned answer that evolved out of doing interviews: I had a YouTube channel where people would comment on things that scared them. But as I kept giving that answer, I realized there are a lot of things that inspired this movie that I’m not even comfortable to say. At the heart of it is pain and sadness and a little bit of anger.Do you think your movie would have been better or scarier if you had a multimillion-dollar budget?BANFITCH I don’t think it would have. The whole point was to feel raw and unfinished.A scene from “The Outwaters.”CinedigmBALL I feel the same. It works because it’s small and contained. Horror is one of those examples where the glossier something is the less scary it is.Do you like delving into what people say about your film online?BANFITCH I’m interested to know what people think but I’m happy with the movie as it is. The only thing that annoys me is when people make an assumption that’s not true but state it as fact. For example: This is obviously a rich kid who used his parents’ money. It’s like no, I worked at Greenpeace and the movie was made on a budget after I paid my rent and ate from my nonprofit paycheck.BALL Both of our movies are polarizing. How do you process hate your movie gets?BANFITCH I read it and think about it. But it doesn’t bother me.BALL You’re pretty thick-skinned. I take everything personally.BANFITCH I’m thin-skinned about plenty of things but not this movie.BALL The only thing I don’t super take personal are the professional reviews because they plead their case fairly well. Except the one from The New Yorker because it felt like, oh, a poor made a movie. I may have been taking that the wrong way.Truth be told, the other day I said to my boyfriend, oh, The New Yorker didn’t like it and then I thought, even that’s incredibly privileged. Five months ago I would have been aghast that I was saying, oh, The New York Times liked it but The New Yorker didn’t, like I’m Scorsese or something. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Reflections on Star Quality From a Golden Age of ‘Junk TV’

      by

      In a new memoir, a longtime casting director revels in memories of a bygone Hollywood, matching actors with the roles that made them stars.Stop to consider the movie and TV characters that are most permanently seared into the American psyche, and their impact is rarely a function of screen time. Usually, the effect on audiences is immediate: Think Tim Curry’s first appearance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” or Stockard Channing breezing into Rydell High alongside her fellow Pink Ladies.Whether they were memorable because of their abrasiveness (Danny DeVito in “Taxi”), their rebellious streak (Ms. Channing in “Grease”) or their ability to solve a crisis with a slice of cheesecake (the titular golden girls of “The Golden Girls”), every actor who eventually went on to make Hollywood history first had to clear the hurdle of a casting department. And for many of the biggest movies and TV shows of the last half century, Joel Thurm was a central part of those teams, handpicking the actors whose performances would resonate for decades to come.In his newly released memoir, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,” Mr. Thurm, 80, details what he saw in stars like John Travolta, whom he cast in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”“I knew he wasn’t Vinnie Barbarino,” Mr. Thurm said of managing to look past the actor’s biggest role to date, on the ABC sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”Being able to spot the je ne sais quoi that many refer to as star quality is a skill, one that Mr. Thurm has capitalized on throughout his 35-year career.“The best example I have is when someone walks into a room and has something special that you haven’t seen in other people,” Mr. Thurm said in an interview this week. “Are they astoundingly beautiful? Are they so incredibly good-looking? They could be bad-looking! It’s individual; you can’t really explain it.”Mr. Thurm had a hand in casting some of the biggest hits of film and TV, including “The Love Boat,” “The Golden Girls,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Airplane!”Charles Sykes/Getty ImagesThat “it” factor is the common denominator among all the stars who go on to become household names, according to Mr. Thurm, who said he had seen it immediately in Farrah Fawcett when she auditioned for the role of a stewardess on “The Bob Newhart Show.” She didn’t get the part, but Mr. Thurm said he had known “there was something special about her.” He also instantly saw it in a 17-year-old John Travolta when he met him in New York.“He had a presence, and you can feel it,” Mr. Thurm said. “They had that little extra something.”At the time, Mr. Travolta was most popular for his role on “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and producers would not move ahead with “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a TV movie, unless a big star signed on to the project, Mr. Thurm said. He spent a lot of time with Mr. Travolta’s manager sitting on his “back deck getting melanoma and reading scripts,” Mr. Thurm said. When the script came up, they both lobbied Mr. Travolta, who agreed to sign on. Mr. Thurm later cast Mr. Travolta in “Grease,” and the rest is Hollywood history.Mr. Thurm, who retired from a full-time casting position with NBC in 1990, hasn’t kept especially close tabs on the stars of today, but he does know enough to recognize that they tend to skew young.“They’re all 12-year-olds,” he said. “I have only seen them once they are already stars. Ariana Grande, she’s already a star.”Whether or not star quality has changed since Mr. Thurm started his career, Hollywood itself certainly has. In addition to snippets of back-room scenes detailing how some of TV’s most beloved characters came to appear on some of America’s favorite sitcoms, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season” is also filled with personal anecdotes that would — at minimum — raise eyebrows in a world reshaped by the #MeToo movement.It’s difficult — painful, even — to imagine a world in which Tim Curry never put on the chunky pearl necklace of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. In that sense, the most essential duty of a casting director is to save us all from what might not have been.United Archives/Getty ImagesAs a gay man living in Hollywood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Mr. Thurm often found himself in situations that almost certainly wouldn’t fly today — like massaging the actor Robert Reed’s back after he had to undergo several hair treatments for his role “The Boy in The Plastic Bubble.”“I started to rub his back, then I rubbed, you know, started rubbing a little lower,” Mr. Thurm said of Mr. Reed, best known for playing Mike Brady in “The Brady Bunch.” “He was just miserable on the set because he was not used to not being the center of attention.”In his memoir, Mr. Thurm also details an encounter with his teenage idol, Rock Hudson. At a party with other gay men in Hollywood, Mr. Hudson motioned to Mr. Thurm to follow him to a room upstairs.“I was so anxious and nervous that my body below the waist could not cooperate,” Mr. Thurm wrote.It was a moment he has never forgotten.“I saw every single movie that he ever did and so even to find myself at that party, I thought was amazing,” Mr. Thurm said. “This is my introduction to Hollywood.”Besides detailing his sexcapades, Mr. Thurm also takes full accountability for “the damage you may have suffered while watching David Hasselhoff,” he wrote. He initially cast Mr. Hasselhoff as Snapper Foster on “The Young and the Restless” in 1975. He later cast him in “Knight Rider” — a high-water mark in what he described as an era of “junk TV” — after a contentious standoff with producers, who originally wanted Laurence Olivier. (“Yes, David Hasselhoff and Laurence Olivier on the same list,” he wrote.)The memoir is not just about Mr. Thurm’s dealings in Hollywood but his upbringing: growing up on a kosher milk farm in East New York. Attending Hunter College in Manhattan when it was nearly an all-girls school. Hanging out in Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday. Flunking out of college and traveling through Italy in his early 20s.“To me, it was just my experiences — you know, growth going through life and growing up,” Mr. Thurm said. “I have no regrets. Nobody died.” More