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      How George Clooney and Julia Roberts Quietly Became the Tracy-Hepburn of Our Time

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      “Ticket to Paradise” and other team-ups take advantage of their onscreen glamour and stellar chemistry and their offscreen affection for one another.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.They don’t share the screen until 49 minutes into their first film together, and it’s not an amicable conversation. She’s expecting her boyfriend, but the hand on her shoulder belongs to her ex-husband, and her first words to him (“What are you doing here?”) are loaded with a mixture of shock and residual anger. The irritation quickly takes over; there’s fire in her eyes, enough to dampen the twinkle in his. “You’re not wearing your ring,” he notes.“I sold it,” she fires back. “I don’t have a husband, or didn’t you get the papers?”“My last day inside,” he replies.“I told you I’d write.”Julia Roberts and George Clooney’s first scene together, in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” runs less than five minutes total, but they’re packed with barbs and pronouncements, insults and callbacks, relitigations of ancient arguments and (for him at least) flashes of longing. Tess (Roberts) is the reason Danny Ocean (Clooney) has assembled the titular crew to rob three high-profile Las Vegas casinos — all of which happen to be owned by Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), Tess’s current beau. (When Danny meets Terry, he fidgets with his wedding ring absent-mindedly. Or perhaps deliberately.) The payday is huge, but it’s incidental to Danny; as he tells her during that strained first conversation, “I came here for you.” So Danny and Tess, and thus Clooney and Roberts, have to generate enough heat and chemistry underneath the snippy surface to justify everything else in the movie. It’s a tall order. They pull it off without breaking a sweat.“Our scenes are really fun,” Clooney explained at the time, “because they’re like an old Howard Hawks film where they’re both going at each other and nobody wins. Which is the way it should be.” Roberts concurred: “The dialogue is so sharp and exacting, it’s like a 1940s movie.”Danny Ocean (Clooney) fiddling with his ring during a run-in with his ex (Roberts) and her new love (Andy Garcia).Warner Bros., via AlamySuch callbacks to old Hollywood were no accident. For years now, Clooney has been described as one of the last movie stars of the old-school mold. As GQ’s Tom Carson put it in 2007, “He’s shrewd, he’s virile, he’s merry, and the camera loves him with the devotion of a headwaiter rushing over to light a billionaire’s cigar.”5 Movies Featuring the Clooney-Roberts DuoCard 1 of 5‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2001). More

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      Revisiting ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ and ‘Reservoir Dogs’ on Their 30th Anniversary

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      These dramas, both known for distinctive (and salty) dialogue, didn’t make much of a box office impression in 1992. But their influence is still being felt.In October 1992, two startlingly similar indie dramas hit art houses across the country. Both featured all-male casts, sturdy ensembles of well-dressed men spouting tough-guy dialogue. Both would become notorious for their proficiency in profanity (one notched 269 instances of the F-word; the other, a comparatively tame 138). Both offered grim worldviews and 1970s-style bummer endings. And though both were ostensibly about a robbery, each carefully avoided showing the crime itself — to better allow their writers to withhold vital information until the conclusion.Neither “Glengarry Glen Ross” (released on Oct. 2) nor “Reservoir Dogs” (three weeks later) made much of an impression at the box office that fall. But their influence was heavily felt in the ensuing decades — and from this vantage point, 30 years on, they have much to tell us about the state of masculinity in America at the end of the (first) Bush era.Their origins couldn’t have been more different. “Glengarry,” which concerns a quartet of desperate real estate salesman and the theft of a cache of premium sales leads, was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play by David Mamet; the agent-turned-producer Jerry Tokofsky spent five years assembling the cast and raising the financing to turn it into a film, persuading such marquee names as Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin to slash their usual fees for the pleasure of mouthing Mamet’s distinctive dialogue.“Reservoir Dogs,” in which a crew of anonymous thieves assembles for a jewelry store robbery that goes badly and bloodily awry, was the debut film of the writer-director Quentin Tarantino. He penned “Dogs” expressly to be made on the cheap, planning to star in it with actor friends. But the script captured the eye of Harvey Keitel, who not only agreed to play the key role of Mr. White, but also to let Tarantino and the producer Lawrence Bender use his participation to attract a cast of up-and-comers, including Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth.From left, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin and Ed Harris in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”Zupnik EnterprisesTarantino, a would-be actor in the 1980s, presumably read “Glengarry” and seemingly learned from it. In addition to the similarities, both scripts pivot on the shocking unmasking of a sympathetic character as a traitor (though the reveal occurs midway through “Dogs” and at the end of “Glengarry”). Both riffed on the moody nihilism of film noir. And both find conflict and drama in putting their characters together in one confined space after the crime (the warehouse in “Dogs,” the real estate office in “Glengarry”) and letting them bounce off each other, roaring accusations and suspicions, bellowing obscenities and insults.As is often the case when tempers flare and stakes are high, such unfiltered interactions give us a peek into the characters’ collective Id, and their common obsession is their own masculinity, the manliness of the work they do and how well they do it. That subtext is made text early in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” in its most revered scene (one that Mamet invented anew and added to his screenplay adaptation). Alec Baldwin appears as the viperous Blake, a hot shot from the home office who schleps down to the Sheepshead Bay branch to lead a sales meeting that amounts to eight straight minutes of vicious verbal abuse. “You can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them, then go home and tell your wife your troubles,” Blake instructs the cowering sales crew. “Because only one thing matters in this life — get them to sign on the line which is dotted!” As Georgia Brown noted in her Village Voice review, “In the trade’s lexicon, the magic verb is to close. When Aaronow” — the sad-sack salesman — “complains he can’t close ‘em anymore, he’s confessing impotence.”“They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money, are you gonna take it?” Blake taunts the busted-out Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon), later in his pep talk. “Are you man enough to take it?” The director James Foley cuts to an agonizing close-up of Lemmon, steaming; his subsequent actions can all be traced to, and perhaps blamed on, that moment of harrowing public humiliation. As if to somehow make the accusation more explicit, Blake concludes his tirade by brandishing a pair of pendulous orbs on a string, announcing, “It takes brass balls to sell real estate,” before tossing them back in his briefcase.Such hazing rituals are par for the course among the performative brutes of “Reservoir Dogs,” which is filled with male bonding rituals: playing the dozens, chewing the fat over coffee or beers, spinning tall tales about crime and sex, and, of course, breaking into dramatic near-fisticuffs at the slightest provocation. Yet the particulars of Tarantino’s men — their identical suits, their color-coded pseudonyms, their hidden identities — underscore the impersonality of their expected behaviors, rendering them interchangeable, and thus impotent, as the salesman of “Glengarry.”When Harvey Keitel, center, joined the cast, his reputation proved a draw to up-and-comers like Madsen, left, and Buscemi.Miramax FilmsBlake also peppers his speech with insults of implied homosexuality, further tying their sales shortfalls to their notions of traditional masculinity. But this vernacular is by no means exclusive to his scene or character; aside from calling their office manager a “secretary” (with all the gender connotations therein), the unprintable-in-a-family-newspaper insults wielded by the sales force include the most verboten four-letter epithet for the female genitalia. Yet the intricacies of male attraction and intimacy aren’t entirely eschewed. Ricky Roma (Pacino), the office’s only success, is seen landing a client with a pitch that sounds less like a sale than a pickup, assuring his mark of such unspoken truths as, “You think you’re queer, lemme tell you something, we’re all queer.”A similar dichotomy exists in “Reservoir Dogs,” where the other F-word is deployed freely, but outside the gaze of the group, an intimacy and even tenderness blossoms between Keitel’s Mr. White and Roth’s Mr. Orange. When the latter is shot in the stomach during their getaway, White holds his hand, wipes his face and gives him permission to “go ahead and be scared, you’ve been brave enough for one day.” And Mr. Orange, terrified for his life but moved by these gestures, asks Mr. White to hold him.Such chasms in thinking (and action) regarding masculinity were clicking through the culture that fall. A month after “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Reservoir Dogs” slipped into theaters, voters would eject the incumbent president, George H.W. Bush — a man branded by his detractors, during his candidacy and administration, as a “wimp.” Bush was so determined to shed that sneering indictment of his blue-blood upbringing that some pundits believed it influenced his decision to invade Iraq.His replacement, Bill Clinton, offered up his own contradictions. A baby boomer vowing kinder, gentler leadership, he promised an administration informed by the participation and influence of his accomplished wife, Hillary — all while dogged by charges of rampant infidelity, ultimately overlooked by voters, with a collective “boys will be boys” shrug. The ’90s would be a strange time for the American male, and the closing lines of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” delivered by Roma, would prove not only dramatically effective but also socially encapsulating. “I swear, it’s not a world of men,” he despairs. “It’s a world of clock-watchers, bureaucrats, office holders … we’re the members of a dying breed.” More

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      Danielle Deadwyler Is the Beating Heart of ‘Till’

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      After critically acclaimed turns in “Station Eleven” and “The Harder They Fall,” her latest role hit close to home. That’s why she was hesitant to take it on.Danielle Deadwyler’s eyes are an instrument that she can play with precise control.In HBO Max’s postapocalyptic drama “Station Eleven,” they stare into your soul as Deadwyler’s graphic novelist character, Miranda, soaks in the world around her. In Netflix’s all-Black western “The Harder They Fall,” they’re the last thing a baddie sees before he’s killed by Deadwyler’s quippy gunslinger, Cuffee.And in her latest film, Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped spark the civil rights movement, they often fill your entire screen, tortured and unblinking in shocked grief, eyelids fluttering in painful remembrance. Though the actress has been an outsize presence in smaller screen roles in recent years, “Till” is her first lead part in a feature film.“I’d been reared in the history, but I didn’t know the intimacy of it,” Deadwyler, 40, said of Mamie and Emmett’s relationship in a recent interview on a rainy evening at the Park Lane Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “So this was a chance to show what it meant to be Mamie both in public and in private, and how she was intentional about and navigating those two identities.”Deadwyler’s expressive eyes are only the beginning of her critically acclaimed performance as Emmett’s doting mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Deadwyler’s range. “With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes,” she wrote, “Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence.”Deadwyler with Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.”Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion PicturesDEADWYLER GREW UP with three siblings in southwest Atlanta, the daughter of a legal secretary and a railroad supervisor. Her mother, she said, was intent on giving the children a diverse cultural life.“My mom was like, ‘You can’t go to U.G.A,’” she said, referring to the University of Georgia. “She had intentions for us to get out of a certain comfort zone.”As a youngster, Deadwyler dabbled in theater and dance, taking her first dance class when she was just 4 after her mother saw her shimmying to “Soul Train,” and falling in love with theater in high school.But she didn’t necessarily want to be an actor, she said, nor did she even fathom becoming one.“It was just a part of my life since I was a kid,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch in a loose white button-up over black slacks and black crew socks. “It was lifeblood.”She stayed close to home for college, majoring in history at Spelman while continuing to perform in plays. She earned a master’s degree in American Studies from Columbia in New York, writing her thesis on sex-positive representations of women in hip-hop. (In 2017 she earned a second master’s degree, in creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio.)Whoopi Goldberg, an Outspoken StarThe comedian and co-host of the ABC talk show “The View” is known for her provocative opinions — and controversies.‘The View’: Since 2007, Whoopi Goldberg has been the often-irascible moderator on the daytime talk show, helping it become one of the most important political TV shows in America.Holocaust Comments: Earlier this year, Goldberg was suspended for two weeks from “The View” after she said repeatedly that the Holocaust was not about race. She later apologized.On Living Alone: After three marriages, Goldberg told us in a 2016 interview that she knows she doesn’t “want somebody in my house.”A Decades-Long Career: In 2019, the Times podcast “Still Processing” discussed  Goldberg’s career, from her days as a boundary-pushing comedian to her role as professional curmudgeon on “The View.”When she was rejected for the women’s studies graduate program at Emory University in Atlanta — “I cried in the bathroom at the trust fund where I was interning,” she said — she turned to teaching at an elementary charter school for two years. But with her youthful looks and wiry frame, Deadwyler struggled to be taken seriously. “Quinta Brunson’s character on ‘Abbott Elementary’ looks young, but she has a teacherly presence,” Deadwyler said, clutching her knees to her chest. “I just looked young — I was fresh out of grad school. The kids were like, ‘What grade are you in?’”But then came her big break: a role as the Lady in Yellow in “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” mounted by True Colors Theater in Atlanta in 2009.Screen work soon followed, including the lead in the 2012 TV drama “A Cross to Bear,” playing a homeless, alcoholic mother. She also began booking small television roles: the antagonist LaQuita Maxwell on Tyler Perry’s prime-time soap opera “The Haves and the Have Nots,” a recurring role as Yoli on the Starz drama “P-Valley,” and memorable parts in FX’s “Atlanta” and HBO’s “Watchmen.”The latter was the performance that came to mind when Patrick Somerville, creator of “Station Eleven,” was looking to cast his Miranda, the artist whose graphic novel drives the show’s narrative arc.“Her eyes can do anything,” he said. “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”He put her through a lot of last-minute rewrites, but “she was never concerned with change,” he said. “She was always her own center. I was always impressed by her unbelievable confidence.”Deadwyler in “Station Eleven.” The show’s creator, Patrick Somerville, said, “You can feel how substantial the person is inside her whether or not she’s talking.”HBO MaxHER BIGGEST LEAP to date, “Till,” is one she almost didn’t take.Mamie Till-Mobley is best known for insisting on an open-casket viewing for her son’s corpse, to show the world what a mob of white men did to him, but the film focuses on her transformation from shellshocked parent to fervent activist. “My reps sent me the script, and I was like, ‘Do I want to do this?’” said Deadwyler, who is the single mother of a 12-year-old son, “because it’s a joyous endeavor, but it’s a painful one, too.”In the end, the role of Mamie resonated in her bones.For her audition, she submitted a self-tape that included the scene in which she knots a tie around Emmett’s neck — using her son, Ezra, as a stand-in — as he prepares to go down to Mississippi, telling him to “be small.” Then, in a video call with Chukwu, she re-enacted the moment when Mamie sees Emmett’s corpse for the first time. (“I warned my son, ‘Hey, man, you might hear some weird noises,’” she said.)Chukwu, the director, said she knew immediately that she was watching something special.“When I’m casting, I look at whether actors can communicate a story with their eyes,” she said. “Are they able to get underneath the words in a nonverbal way? Are they willing and able to dive into the work in a way that demands a vulnerability and focusedness? I saw all of that in her audition tape.”Deadwyler’s wordless ability to act with her whole body informed how she shot the film, Chukwu said.“I knew that I wanted the audience to see this Black woman’s humanity and that faces would be important,” she said. “But when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Mamie’s testimony scene in the courtroom, for instance — a seven-page powder keg of grief, frustration and rage — is shot in one long take. Chukwu said she originally planned on eight or nine other setups, but when Deadwyler received a standing ovation from the cast and crew on the first take — a close-up on her face — Chukwu decided: She didn’t need any more.Deadwyler said the weight of Mamie’s suffering, her choice to fight battles for future generations even when she knows she cannot win in the present, settled into every part of her body on set. But the minute they wrapped for the day, a waiting car would take her home, Mahalia Jackson gospel songs on the stereo.“It’s a sonic shift,” she said. “It’s the same thing with Mamie: There’s a private self and a public self.”The director Chinonye Chukwu planned to focus on faces all along. But “when I saw how much command and power Danielle had, I leaned into that even more.”Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesYet there were lighthearted moments on set that reflected Deadwyler’s sense of humor. “At first I thought she was very serious, and that she’d get very annoyed with me, because I’m not,” said Whoopi Goldberg, who plays Mamie’s mother and served as a producer of the film. “But she is also very silly.”Despite the film’s enthusiastic reception among both critics and audiences — it currently has a 99 percent fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes — it was a project that took more than two decades to reach the big screen, Goldberg said.“People would say, ‘You know, nobody wants to see that story,’” she said. “You’d say, ‘No, people do want to see it.’ I guess it was the reckoning that happened that finally got people interested in telling these stories.” (“Till” is the second project focused on Mamie and Emmett’s story to be released this year, after the ABC mini-series “Women of the Movement.”)“It has modern-day resonance,” Deadwyler said, adding that she has discussed the story with her son because “it would be neglectful for me to not talk to him about the possibilities.”AFTER THE PUBLICITY TOUR for “Till,” Deadwyler plans to take a moment — just a moment — to soak it all in. She can also be seen starring alongside Zoe Saldaña in the new Netflix limited series “From Scratch,” based on Tembi Locke’s memoir about an American student who falls in love with an Italian chef. And she has a few film projects in the works, among them Kourosh Ahari’s sci-fi thriller “Parallel” and Netflix’s star-studded airport Christmas thriller “Carry On.”“I want to collaborate with people,” she said. “And I’m looking forward to being approached for more projects, vs. doing 80, 100 auditions per year.”In the meantime, after being told that her face can be seen in ads atop New York taxis, she marveled at her change in fortune, though she hadn’t seen one yet. “I would like to go quietly into the dark,” she said, laughing.Deadwyler’s laugh is a curious thing, a sound you haven’t heard much onscreen: It’s a deep, rumbling, full-bodied “HA HA HA” that you can hear echoing down the hall long after the door closes. “Me, a serious person?” she says, eyes twinkling. “No.”I ask what else people get wrong about her.There’s that laugh again.“Everything.” More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The White Lotus’ and Lots of Spooky Movies

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      The HBO series begins its second season. And we rounded up some scary movies to get you prepped for Halloween.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, Oct. 24-30. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE SURREAL LIFE 9 p.m. on VH1. In a world where we have an abundance of reality shows that throw a handful of strangers together (see: “Big Brother,” “The Real World”), why not add one more? This one isn’t exactly new (the last season that aired was in 2006). This time, eight celebrities, including Frankie Muniz, Stormy Daniels and Dennis Rodman, move into a house together and moments of chaos certainly ensue.TuesdayMAKING BLACK AMERICA: THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This four-part series, hosted by Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., is wrapping up this week. Gates Jr. speaks to politicians and scholars about organizations and social networks that have been created by Black people, for Black people. The final episode discusses the media phenomenon of Black Twitter as a safe space for debate and celebration.WednesdayA still from “A Tree Of Life: The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting.”Courtesy of HBOA TREE OF LIFE: THE PITTSBURGH SYNAGOGUE SHOOTING 9 p.m. on HBO. On Oct. 27, 2018 a man armed with an assault riffle and several handguns killed 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, making it one of the deadliest attacks against the Jewish community in the U.S. This feature documentary tells the stories of victims, survivors and family members as the community works toward healing.VICE NEWS TONIGHT INVESTIGATES: WHEN MURDER ISN’T MURDER 11 p.m. on Vice. In 2015, LaKeith Smith was 15 years old, he and three of his friends burglarized a house in Alabama. When the police showed up, they shot and killed his friend A’Donte Washington, but because of a law in Alabama, Smith is now serving 30 years in prison for Washington’s murder. The accomplice liability law means that someone not involved in a murder can nevertheless be charged for it, if that person is committing a felony, like robbery, at the same time. This one-hour special tells the story through previously unreleased police interrogation tapes and body-camera footage while also spotlighting the movement to free Smith from prison.ThursdaySIESTA KEY 8 p.m. on MTV. The residents of “Siesta Key” are moving down to Miami this season. Most of the original cast is returning, including Juliette Porter, the de facto narrator and star, but Kelsey Owens and Garrett Miller said they were unceremoniously cut from the show. Though some familiar faces will be missing, we can be sure to expect gorgeous overhead shots of southern Florida, plenty of altercations and some romance sprinkled in.CRIBS 9 p.m. on MTV. Going on 22 years, this iconic reality show, where we get to have a sneak peak of celebrity homes, is back. This season we’ll be welcomed into the houses of Matt James of “The Bachelor” fame, the model Olivia Culpo and current “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Jessie James Decker.FridayHeather O’Rourke in “Poltergeist.”MGMPOLTERGEIST (1982) 8 p.m. on TCM. This film, directed by Tobe Hooper and written in part by Steven Spielberg, teaches us that friendly ghosts communicating through your television isn’t always as fun as it seems. For the Freelings family, the spirits quickly turn scary and menacing, and when their 5-year-old daughter (Heather O’Rourke) goes missing, a parapsychologist and exorcist are brought in to help. “‘Poltergeist’ is like a thoroughly enjoyable nightmare, one that you know that you can always wake up from, and one in which, at the end, no one has permanently been damaged,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The New York Times.SaturdayHOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) 7:20 p.m. on Freeform. In this animated movie, the titular hotel acts as a safe haven for all sorts of monsters. But things go awry when Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) throws a 118th birthday party for his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and a human (Andy Samberg) crashes the party and falls for Mavis. It’s that classic star-crossed, human-monster love story.Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia in “The Addams Family.”AP Photo/Paramount PicturesTHE ADDAMS FAMILY (1991) 7:30 p.m. on Paramount. Based on a cartoon and a 1964 TV show of the same name, this version stars Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia as Morticia and Gomez Addams. When a man claiming to be Fester (Christopher Lloyd), Gomez’s long lost brother, shows up, the family is thrilled — until suspicions arise that he isn’t who is he says and he aims to steal the family’s fortune. The film is a “funny revival that goes well beyond the limits of its original sources, thanks to ingenious casting, droll production design, spirited direction and dazzling camera tricks,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times.SundaySILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) 8 p.m. on BBC. If you’ve watched Netflix’s “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” you’ll find chilling similarities in Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter. In this film, Jodie Foster plays a student at the F.B.I.’s training academy who interviews Lecter as he is serving life in prison. Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The Times that “the gruesome details are vivid without being exploited.”THE WHITE LOTUS 9 p.m. on HBO. After a successful first season (and several Emmy wins), the anthology show is back with a whole new group of vacationers jetting off to another White Lotus resort in Sicily. The new cast includes Aubrey Plaza, Theo James and Tom Hollander with one familiar face: Jennifer Coolidge is reprising her Emmy Award-winning role as the daffy heiress Tanya McQuoid. More

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      in Movies

      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, an Iranian Exile, Channels Trauma in ‘Holy Spider’

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      Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who had to flee Iran after an intimate tape was leaked, has been transfixed by the protests erupting there as her film “Holy Spider” is released in the U.S.“I know that fear, I know that humiliation,” Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the winner of the best actress award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, said in a recent interview. “I know how men in Iran use their power to keep you quiet.”Ebrahimi is an Iranian exile who, in 2008, decided she had to flee after being subjected to a smear campaign based on her love life. Now, that experience and her role in the film “Holy Spider,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Oct. 28, have intersected with disarming intensity, as women in Iran burn their head scarves to protest the oppression of the Islamic Republic.The story of Rahimi, the fictional investigative journalist at the heart of “Holy Spider,” is one of female defiance in the face of male violence. Based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei, a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in the Iranian city of Mashhad, a religious center, the movie traces with unflinching, sometimes harrowing, intimacy Rahimi’s efforts to penetrate the world of men obfuscating Hanaei’s crimes.“We need to finish this story,” Ebrahimi said, her pale eyes burning, during the 75-minute interview in Paris. “This Islamic Republic has to end. Women today know their rights. They know what life and freedom of expression are. It will take time and blood, but there is no other way.”It took time and flexibility to make “Holy Spider,” which is directed by Ali Abbasi, an Iranian exile based in Copenhagen. Filming was impossible in Iran, given the government’s hostility to the project, and months of preparation in Turkey came to nothing when the Turkish authorities, apparently under pressure from Tehran, blocked the production. The young Iranian actress who was set to play Rahimi withdrew, abruptly overcome by fear of reprisal, just as filming was about to start in Jordan, according to Ebrahimi.“I got so angry with her,” said Ebrahimi, who was then the casting director for the movie. “And I think that night when I got so crazy, I’m pretty sure that Ali saw something in me.”So, in extremis, Ebrahimi, 41, who found fame in the early 2000s as a star of the Iranian TV soap opera “Narges,” took on the lead role. Given all of these obstacles, it is, Ebrahimi told me, “a miracle that we have it to screen.”In “Holy Spider,” Ebrahimi plays a journalist investigating a serial killer.UtopiaThe killer, played by Mehdi Bajestani, is based on the true story of Saeed Hanaei.UtopiaAbbasi, the film’s director, said he wanted to challenge the image of “the Islamic Republic and its leaders as some sort of theocratic, dry people who are very conservative.” At a deeper level, he suggested, “these people are obsessed with sexuality.” Iran is a country, he said, where the authorities “get some sort of pleasure out of humiliating women.”For the director, who visited Mashhad as part of his preparations for the movie, “there is a Lynchian undercurrent of fetishized suppressed sexuality in every aspect of the Islamic Republic.”His words brought to mind a meeting I had in the holy Iranian city of Qum in 2009. A mullah sat on a raised dais as he explained in measured terms the rationale of the Islamic Republic. Then the subject turned to women. How could any man not lose control, he suddenly frothed, if women’s hair and the curves of their bodies were allowed to be seen in public? This was the gateway to hell, he shouted.Ebrahimi’s life as an actor in Iran had fallen apart a few years before that meeting, when a video of lovemaking she said she had made with her boyfriend at the time was leaked by a friend, another actor, who somehow stole it when at their apartment. It became known as the “sex tape case,” and the hounding of Ebrahimi knew no bounds.“All these people were watching my naked body and just kept copying the video and selling it in the street,” she said. “And I had to lie every day and just say it was not me, and I can’t tell you how painful it all was. Not because I was ashamed of what I did, but because of the betrayal from my colleagues and this whole society.”The government set about finding every man with whom she had shaken hands, or been photographed, she said; every man she had ever kissed on the cheek. It was clear her career in Iran was over. She was about to confront her various accusers in court, facing a prison sentence and 97 lashes on the charge of having sexual relationships outside wedlock, when she decided to flee.Ebrahimi flew to Azerbaijan, she said, and later from there to Paris, where she has since built a life. She has not returned to Iran, where most of her family still lives, and became a French citizen in 2017.After fleeing Iran, Ebrahimi settled in Paris. She said she had not returned.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn recent weeks, as antigovernment protests have spread across Iran and more than 200 people have been killed, Ebrahimi has been transfixed. Watching a new generation resisting arrest and shouting, “I don’t want this hijab, what’s your problem with my hair?” has given her hope.“I saw these images of three actresses throwing away their hijabs, saying we don’t want to lie anymore, we don’t want to hide ourselves,” Ebrahimi said, “and I figure if they arrived at this point, the whole of society is kind of there.”At the same time, she says she knows that the guardians of the Islamic Republic will resist to the end. “The last foundation they have for the regime is women and imposing the hijab,” Ebrahimi said. “They believe if the hijab comes off, everything will be destroyed — the Islamic Republic will tumble down.”Ebrahimi said she felt a lot of emotion that her film was arriving in American theaters at the same time as the protests; it feels like “all these things are happening in the same direction,” she said.“We can’t be controlled by them anymore,” Ebrahimi said. “We can’t hide ourselves and play this game. We grew up learning how to lie. There are 84 million people in Iran, and they are 84 million actors. Lying, existing inside and outside. Lying inside to our parents that we didn’t meet someone outside, lying outside that we don’t party inside.”In making the film, Ebrahimi drew on these experiences of being humiliated by an oppressive government. Her trauma became a source of inspiration and resolve.Rahimi, determined to find the murderer who keeps dumping strangled women on the outskirts of town, and driven by the memory of how an overbearing male editor had abused her, encounters forms of male contempt and evasion.She meets a mullah who assures her that every effort is being made to solve the crimes, even as he hints that it may be God’s will that these female sinners be eliminated. She encounters various men who form a protective shield around the killer, admired in his community as a husband, father and war veteran. She confronts a police officer who comes to her hotel room and tries to seduce her, dangling the possibility of information for sex.“We worked on that scene with the policeman for two hours, and I saw that I could link my personal experience of life to this journalist,” Ebrahimi said. “She was living inside me, and you know, improvisation is an important part of Ali’s work. I came up with the idea of the memory of harassment by a colleague and editor as the motivating force for the journalist.”The film is about female defiance in the face of male violence. “Women today know their rights,” Ebrahimi said about Iran, where protests have erupted recently. “They know what life and freedom of expression are.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesEbrahimi, who received threats from the Islamic Republic soon after she won the award at Cannes, including an allusion by the culture ministry to the fate of the author Salman Rushdie, said that the impact of living in Iran “affects men, too. If they drink or not, if they read something or not — there is this continuous pressure to deceive.”Hanaei’s crimes were called the “spider killings” by local news media because of how he carried them out. He confessed to killing 16 women, and was executed in 2002. In “Holy Spider,” the character is played with psychological intricacy by Mehdi Bajestani. He is desperate to believe that he is doing God’s will, and that of the Islamic Republic, by killing prostitutes. The pressure on him grows. He snaps at his wife. He feels suspicion growing.“I think he’s kind of a victim of the whole society, of the whole mind-set,” Ebrahimi said.At one point, his wife surprises him at home after a murder. He hurriedly wraps the corpse in a carpet. His wife finds him tense and impenetrable; she coaxes him to have sex. On top of his wife, sweating, thrusting, he sees the foot of the strangled prostitute sticking out from the carpet.“He has something of what I call Travis Bickle syndrome,” Abbasi said, a reference to the hero of “Taxi Driver.” “Back from a war, in an existential black hole, missing the violence. And in that scene, sexual pleasure and violence juxtapose each other.”“It’s a movie about a serial killer,” Ebrahimi said, “but also about a serial-killer society. I know, because at some point, I got killed actually by each person in that society, except perhaps 10 percent who still had my back.”She continued: “I sometimes think, for an actress, I’m happy to have this much pain in my life, to have experienced this sex tape story. I put everything into the movie, all my life.”When at last Rahimi finds the killer by impersonating a prostitute, he asks her name.“Zahra,” she says, falsely.“This was pure improvisation,” Ebrahimi said. “It was not in the script. I said ‘Zahra,’ which is my real name, even if I don’t use it anymore.” More

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      ‘The African Desperate’ Expands the Movies’ Narrow View of the Art World

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      Most films set adjacent to studios and galleries lampoon unfathomable pretension, but Martine Syms takes a more nuanced approached in her look at art schools.Martine Syms’s “The African Desperate” begins on the last day of art school for a Master of Fine Arts student named Palace. She’s facing the final critique from a committee of four instructors who sit in her studio, lobbing comments about her work — some earnest, some passive-aggressive, altogether a bit bewildering.“It’s been interesting having you in the sculpture department.” “Where are you going to go with this?” “You’re afraid of your own appetite. It’s all a bit polite, isn’t it?” “Where’d you grow up? West Side Chicago?”Palace — played by the artist Diamond Stingily, with bright orange hair and a deadly deadpan — holds her own. She calls out problematic questions, quoting Saidiya Hartman and others. Then, at a seemingly arbitrary moment, it’s all over: She passed.“That’s it?” Palace asks quietly. “You’re free,” one examiner says, meaning well. But the comment also implies that art school wasn’t always liberating.“The African Desperate” stakes out new terrain in the rarefied niche of movies featuring art schools. Unlike many films set adjacent to the art world, it focuses on a Black protagonist and avoids the cliché of “making it big” amid unfathomable pretension — a satirical staple of movies like “Velvet Buzzsaw,” “Pecker” and “The Square.”Stingily, right, opposite Erin Leland in “The African Desperate,” which draws on the director’s time as a Bard College student.Dominica, Inc.Syms, a thriving artist who currently has multiple shows on, drew upon her time as an M.F.A. student at Bard College and years of teaching in universities and other settings. Syms remembers both feeling invisible and sticking out in white-dominated professional spaces at the upstate institution.“It’s not even impostor syndrome, because you’re doing the stuff and you’re there,” she said in an interview. “But even now I get people I went to school with who were like, ‘You weren’t even making art when we were in school.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I was literally in film class with you!’ So I wanted to capture this feeling of not being seen sometimes,” Syms said last month, in advance of the film’s streaming release Friday on Mubi.Her portrayal of art school pulses with the energy and humor of Palace and her friends, but it’s also a story of emotional survival.“It’s a brilliant lampooning of art schools, but it also felt like a catharsis in a way,” David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, told me. “Some of the greatest art is someone who’s working through something they experienced that they have contradictory feelings about it.”Syms, who co-wrote “The African Desperate” with Rocket Caleshu, created the part with Stingily in mind. The two connected at a Chicago bookstore and arts space Syms was running called Golden Age, and the director has cast the performer in other works. Syms, Stingily and Caleshu all drew on their experiences navigating professional spaces, and Palace, like Stingily at the time, also has the family responsibility of an ailing mother.Syms and Stingily would talk and laugh about how they would respond to situations.“She was like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I would have done in that program!’ Because some of the things that I experienced were really out of pocket,” Syms said.Instead of a traditional dramatic arc, “The African Desperate” exists in the moment with Palace. She’s ready to leave, but people keep coaxing her into hanging out. Her closest friend drives her to a lake to decompress; another friend buzzes with anticipation for the big graduation party; and there are last-chance flirtations with a guy who hasn’t made a move all summer.The film’s style zigs and zags with Palace’s conversations. It captures her very funny shorthand with friends and colleagues, using pop-up memes and head-on shots for phone dialogues. Syms said she had wanted to show “how talkie talkie talkie everything is” in art school. Max Minghella in “Art School Confidential” (2006), which leans into satire.Suzanne Hanover/United Artists and Sony Pictures ClassicsIt’s a sharp contrast with the style of “Art School Confidential,” the 2006 feature directed by Terry Zwigoff and written by Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”). Clowes adapted the story of a starry-eyed art student, Jerome (Max Minghella), from a 1991 comic, loosely based on experiences at the Pratt Institute. The film is set on a cruddy, crime-ridden urban campus where a killer is on the loose.Zwigoff and Clowes’s acerbic satire leans into caricature: a horn-dog roommate, a pretentious instructor (John Malkovich) who draws only triangles (“I was one of the first”), an overbearing wannabe director with a “Film Threat” T-shirt. There’s a simmering skepticism about idolizing anyone, from a once-great alcoholic recluse (Jim Broadbent) to an arrogant art-star (Adam Scott).“Art School Confidential” was partly shot at Pasadena City College, which Syms attended. She liked the comic — and remembers getting caught in middle school reading Clowes’s books — but the movie “is not my favorite.”“I think it’s in the canon,” Syms said. “But it’s also about a white guy, which almost every art movie is about.” In her own time at art school, Syms said she saw precious little work by Black artists and filmmakers, like Edward Owens. “I remember really leaving school feeling — and not in any dejected way, just as a fact — I just don’t think I’m an artist,” Syms said.“The African Desperate” centers on Palace’s experience and subjectivity. The title comes from a verbal slip in conversation with Syms when Stingily meant to say “the African diaspora.” Syms remembered the accidental phrase and found it “evocative of the mood and what it feels like sometimes to be part of the diaspora in those spaces.”Palace does go to the party everyone’s talking about. It’s a happily spacey affair in a cavernous half-empty studio space. It might not look like much, but that’s also part of Syms’s realism. (“That was one scene I really didn’t want to be movie-fied, because it’s not a cool party! You’re upstate and there’s maybe 10 people you hang out with.”) Palace’s studio in the opening scene, for example, is a collage of life and art in progress, populated with books and Tarot cards and art materials (including long locks of hair she works with).Perhaps because it’s Diamond’s last day on campus, we see fewer artists at work than in another film featuring an art school: Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” which recently screened at the New York Film Festival.Michelle Williams as a ceramist who works at an arts college in “Showing Up.”A24Michelle Williams plays a Portland ceramist, Lizzy, who is finishing a collection for her imminent show at a gallery in town. The camera traces her gaze as she considers the pieces in her home studio. We also see the hive of student activity at the arts college, where she works as an administrator.“I was watching next to a friend of mine I went to RISD with, and we talked about how authentic the scenes felt to us,” Cynthia Lahti, the Portland artist who made Lizzy’s works, said, referring to the Rhode Island School of Design. “The way studio work flowed into the hallway. The painting class, the person throwing on the wheel, the fabric people wringing out cloth and hanging it up.”Syms’s film shares this embrace of the many creative energies in flux at an art school. The “African Desperate” cast includes a number of practicing artists, and the effect is effervescent without feeling gratuitously eccentric.“It’s not portraying this already joke-fied version of the art world,” Velasco said. “‘The African Desperate’ is portraying art school, but it’s doing it as an artwork itself.”Syms’s film doesn’t pretend that Palace emerges unscathed from her experience. “I mean, people out here really want me to get mad,” the character says early on, evoking a whole history of aggravation before the film’s 24 hours. “And it’s like, I don’t want to fight you.”But if the movie doesn’t offer a blandly happy ending, it affirms that a story has begun that only Palace can truly tell. More

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      ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Barrels Into Awards Season

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      At a screening filled with Oscar voters, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and the directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.LOS ANGELES — You make a movie because you hope people will respond to it, but no one involved with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” expected all of this, the cast and crew kept telling me in the reception area of a luxe Westwood theater on Tuesday night. The “this” in question was a tastemaker party with Oscar voters and industry veterans meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender. But the bigger “this,” the one that really boggled them, was the fact that they were embarking on a monthslong awards campaign to begin with.“We did press all through the summer, and then took a break and thought, ‘This will all die down. The feelings will die down, the excitement will die down,’” said Daniel Kwan, who co-directed the film with Daniel Scheinert. “And then we came back and somehow it’s gotten even stronger. At one of the screenings, someone came up to me and said, ‘This is my 14th time watching the movie!’”Passion counts for a lot during awards season, and “Everything Everywhere” has plenty of it: This sci-fi comedy about a Chinese immigrant and laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) who becomes the multiverse’s last hope earned stellar reviews in its March release, played for several months in theaters, and made more than $100 million worldwide on a $14.3 million budget. In doing so, it became A24’s highest-grossing title and reinvigorated a specialty-film market that has been ailing since the pandemic began.When the film was released and an awards campaign was suggested, Scheinert said, “I full-on thought it was a joke.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesFrom right, Yeoh, Kwan and Quan. The director said one fan had told him about seeing the movie 14 times.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesThough I expect the film will be nominated in several categories at the Oscars, including best picture, it hasn’t taken a traditional path toward that goal. Instead of debuting at a prestigious fall film festival, “Everything Everywhere” chose a raucous spring premiere at South by Southwest, and it was released in theaters on March 25, a time when awards attention was trained exclusively on the Oscar ceremony held that weekend.The film will also have to win over older voters, who may prove more resistant to its wacky charms, since “Everything Everywhere” is laden with sight gags and traffics heavily in down-market genres like sci-fi, action and gross-out comedy. Could it surmount all of those hurdles and become the first significant Oscar contender to feature a dildo fight scene? (If “Frost/Nixon” happened to have one, please write in to remind me.)“I full-on thought it was a joke when this was coming out and they said, ‘What if it’s awards-y?’” Scheinert said. “It was an ode to ‘Jackass’ and Stephen Chow movies!”Still, there is a potent emotional core to the film that has moved audiences: As Yeoh’s Evelyn explores the multiverse, she comes to better understand the people who used to get on her nerves, including her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and even her tax auditor, Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis). And that empathy extends off the screen, to the movie’s stars: Quan, the first actor to show up at the party, was mobbed by well-wishers eager to praise his sensitive performance. “I was so famished for a role like this,” the 51-year-old Quan told me. “Famished!”After breakout child-star parts in the 1980s as Short Round in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and Data in “The Goonies,” Quan’s good fortune quickly evaporated. “I was faced with a horrible reality and I had to step away because the phone stopped ringing,” he said. “Hollywood didn’t write roles for Asian actors.”In 2000, a disillusioned Quan moved behind the camera to work in stunt choreography, though he continued to pay his Screen Actors Guild dues every month without question: “Maybe subconsciously, I was thinking, just be patient.”“How often does a man in his 50s get a chance like this?” Quan asked.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesAfter watching “Crazy Rich Asians” in 2018, he was inspired to return to acting and called an agent friend to represent him; two weeks later, that agent sent him “Everything Everywhere,” which let him play a character who was underestimated, sweet-natured, fierce and romantic all at once.“To have this as my comeback movie and to get this recognition and warm embrace? I’ve cried so much in the last six months from reading the comments or from people coming up to me,” Quan said.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Aiming for the Oscars: At a screening meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender, actors and directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.The most meaningful interaction came in September at Disney’s starry D23 convention, where Quan went to promote his role in the coming season of the Marvel series “Loki.” Harrison Ford was there touting the fifth “Indiana Jones” film, due next year, and though Quan worried his old co-star wouldn’t recognize him, the actor turned, pointed and said, “Are you Short Round?”“Yes, Indy,” Quan replied. And as they embraced, memories came flooding back from the beginning of Quan’s career, which has now regained its initial promise.“How often does a man in his 50s get a chance like this? How often do actors get a second act?” Quan asked. “I really hope that if people are reading my story, it gives them hope, it gives them courage to give voice to that dream they once had. It’s so difficult to be an actor in this business, and I want those people who are doubting themselves or have dreams fading away because they think it’s not going to happen …”Quan grew too emotional to finish his thought and swallowed, collecting himself. “Anyway,” he said.Recent awards-season events for the film have often ended in tears, according to Scheinert: “In a weird way, we’re finally getting to debrief with our cast and crew about what this really meant to us.” It all began with a viral GQ video when Yeoh cried as she discussed reading the “Everything Everywhere” script, which asked her to play so many more modes than she was used to. “To be funny, to be real, to be sad — finally, somebody understood that I could do those things,” she said in the clip.That touched her directors and also took them by surprise, since on set Yeoh was more likely to affectionately razz them than to confess her innermost feelings. “Some of the stuff she said in interviews, she had never said to us,” Kwan said. “Michelle’s a very guarded woman, and she has to be.”The costume designer Shirley Kurata was among the crew members at the screening.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesOne academy voter paid tribute to the film’s hot dog fingers.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRight on cue, Yeoh finally arrived, a vision in yellow Gucci. “I’m the canary, nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. The very busy actress, who will soon be seen in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and the Disney+ series “American Born Chinese,” had hotfooted it to the party from the nearby premiere of “The School for Good and Evil,” a Netflix fantasy film where she plays one of the teachers at an enchanted boarding school. That red carpet had been packed with ingénues and TikTok stars, and Yeoh was surprised when a young girl recognized her and passed her an appreciative note.“I thought, ‘I’m out of my league here, nobody’s going to know who you are,’” Yeoh said.“Michelle, you are huge,” Kwan replied. He recalled a San Francisco screening of “Everything Everywhere” where the heavily Asian crowd, which had revered Yeoh since her start in Hong Kong action movies, cheered so loudly that the actress was afraid to go onstage, lest she become too emotional in public.“For a long time, they would say, ‘You have to tell everybody about your experiences,’ and I couldn’t, because it would overwhelm me,” Yeoh said, turning to Kwan and Scheinert. “And the one time I listened to you — the one time — I did an interview and I was blubbering! Oh, I was so embarrassed.”Was she referring to that GQ clip? “Yes,” said a mortified Yeoh, burying her face in Kwan’s shoulder. “See, everyone knows!”Yeoh told me the reason she has trouble articulating what “Everything Everywhere” means to her “is because when you really talk about it, suddenly it comes crashing in that you have waited for so many years for something like this. And as the years go by, you see it slipping away from your fingers, and you can’t get it back because you are aging. But even though I’m 60, I can still do a lot! Don’t put me in a box.”Yeoh seen through a chandelier at the theater. She said she had a hard time talking about the film’s success because each time she is reminded that she “waited for so many years for something like this.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesRecent supporting roles in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “Crazy Rich Asians” were meaningful, Yeoh said, but on “Everything Everywhere,” being listed first on the call sheet gave her a sense of ownership she’d never really felt before. She hopes that Hollywood will continue to consider her for lead roles, though she’s well-aware of whom those parts are traditionally written for.“I read scripts and it’s the guy who goes off on some big adventure — and he’s going off with my daughter!” she said. “I’m like, no, no.”Yeoh excused herself to greet Roger Spottiswoode, who directed “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the 1997 James Bond film that help introduced her to American audiences; meanwhile, the “Star Trek Into Darkness” screenwriter Roberto Orci greeted Quan with a deferential bow. Later, as the cast and directors gathered in a theater to introduce the film — alongside a huge cohort that included its fight choreographers, composers, visual effects artists and costumers — a man from the audience yelled, “You rock!”This sort of unalloyed success is a new sensation for Kwan and Scheinert, who recently signed a lucrative five-year pact with Universal but got their start making odder fare like face-melting music videos and a debut feature, “Swiss Army Man” (2016), that involved Paul Dano riding a dead Daniel Radcliffe like a jet ski powered by flatulence. How does it feel when their avowedly left-of-center sensibility happens to score a cultural bull’s-eye?“It’s unsettling,” Scheinert said.“It makes us feel like we messed up somewhere,” Kwan joked. “The whole world likes it? What did we do wrong?” More

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      Guillermo del Toro Opens His ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’

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      For the first season of his horror anthology for Netflix, the filmmaker handpicked eight directors to tell a series of strange and macabre tales.When Guillermo del Toro was a child in Guadalajara, Mexico, he used to stay up late watching TV with his older brother. One night they happened upon an episode of the 1960s science fiction anthology series “The Outer Limits” called “The Mutant.” In it, Warren Oates plays an astronaut who gets caught in radioactive rain on another planet.“There’s a moment where he removes his goggles and his eyes are as big as the goggles,” del Toro recalled in a recent video interview. “And I started screaming. My brother put me to bed. You could say the rest of my life has been a counterphobic reaction to the fear I felt seeing that episode.”Today, del Toro, 58, elicits screams from others, with movies like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and TV series like “The Strain.” And now he has his own anthology series, “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.” The first season, which debuts Tuesday on Netflix, is a collection of eight hourlong horror tales, each from a different director. Del Toro handpicked the eight directors featured in the first season: some of the world’s brightest horror minds, including Ana Lily Amirpour (“The Bad Batch”), Panos Cosmatos (“Mandy”) and Jennifer Kent (“The Babadook”).Two episodes are based on original stories written by del Toro, who created the series. Another two are based on classic tales from the macabre master H.P. Lovecraft. All have sky-high production value.“I got to spend all that Netflix money,” Amirpour said in a recent video interview; her wickedly funny chapter, “The Outside,” tells the story of a woman (Kate Micucci) who develops an unhealthy relationship with a new beauty product.“With Guillermo, when you work with someone who has that level of power, you can really thrive and make something cool,” she added.Del Toro entered the project as a curator and a fan, with the goal of highlighting stories, storytellers and filmmakers he loves.“I was hoping to select some stories that I like, that have not been adapted, or have not been adapted with a very protected production environment,” he said. “And I wanted to find directors that I was curious about. I wanted to almost collect and curate a group of directors and stories and then give them all the support and freedom, final cut, the chance to feel that the resources were there.”Kate Micucci’s character develops an unhealthy relationship with a beauty product in “The Outside.”Ken Woroner/NetflixPeter Weller (“Robocop”) plays an eccentric wealthy recluse in “The Viewing.”Ken Woroner/Netflix There were major challenges. In practical terms, the “Cabinet” really contains eight one-hour films, with settings including rustic 1909 Massachusetts (“Pickman’s Model,” directed by Keith Thomas) and a late-1970s version of future shock (“The Viewing,” Cosmatos). The directors were essentially their own showrunners.“This really does feel like a movie of mine,” Amirpour said. “It was a whole and total creation, from having my hand on the script to completion. It felt so completely and totally mine.”Multiple cinematographers and editors worked on the series, but there was only one industrious production designer, the del Toro regular Tamara Deverell (“Nightmare Alley,” “The Strain”), who embraced the task of designing everything, such as a giant animatronic rat (for “The Graveyard Rats,” Vincenzo Natali) and a sketchy storage facility (for “Lot 36,” Guillermo Navarro).In a video interview, Deverell recalled that “Cabinet” had reused a set from del Toro’s 2021 film “Nightmare Alley” for both “Lot 36” and “Graveyard Rats.” She also noted the complexities of carrying out the vision of eight different filmmakers. But she’s not complaining. She sees del Toro as the perfect collaborator, an artist who knows that storytelling is visual as well as verbal.“He understands space and things like ceiling heights and square footage and the shapes of things in a way that a lot of directors don’t,” Deverell said. “He makes it so easy. The set is of equal importance as the actors or the story. It’s part of the same world that he’s trying to create.”Describing an episode of “The Outer Limits” he watched as a child, del Toro said, “You could say the rest of my life has been a counterphobic reaction to the fear I felt.”Austin Hargrave/NetflixDel Toro is an avid collector of books and comics; as he spoke from his office in Santa Monica, Calif., stacks and stacks of volumes loomed in the background. He’s a particular fan of anthologies, those that come between two covers — the first book he ever bought with his own money was a horror anthology edited by the science fiction writer Forrest J. Ackerman — and onscreen. When he wasn’t screaming at “The Outer Limits,” he was watching “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “One Step Beyond,” “Night Gallery” and “Ghost Story,” among others.“They were my favorite things to watch,” he said. “It’s the same way I loved reading short stories, more than any other form. I just find them immersive and self-contained and incredibly attractive. If you come to the library of my horror wing, most of what I collect is anthologies.”He worships the material and its history, a fact that isn’t lost on the actor Tim Blake Nelson. Nelson, also featured in del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” and the coming “Pinocchio” movie, is the star of “Lot 36,” the story of a racist scavenger who swoops in on delinquent customers’ storage containers and sells their belongings. Yes, he receives a ghoulish — and many tentacled — comeuppance.To Nelson, del Toro’s passion for the macabre pushes his work beyond the realm of genre.“I believe that Guillermo’s reverence for horror is so deep that it’s no longer horror,” he said in a video interview. “You’re dealing with someone who’s able to see the macabre as reality, not fear-driven fantasy. You no longer think of it as occult or genre; you think of it as reality, and that makes it all the more terrifying.”Tim Blake Nelson (left, with Sebastian Roché) plays a racist scavenger in “Lot 36.”Ken Woroner/Netflix“Pickman’s Model,” starring Ben Barnes, is set in 1909 Massachusetts.Ken Woroner/NetflixDel Toro was originally supposed to direct an episode, but the pandemic delayed production of both “Nightmare Alley” and “Pinocchio.” So, instead, he offered to host. At the beginning of each installment, he saunters out of the darkness up to what appears to be an elaborate model mansion with drawers.He pulls out a miniature ivory figurine of each director and offers an introduction. (Originally, cabinets of curiosities contained anatomical specimens, talismans and the like, all reflecting the curator’s tastes and instinct for showmanship.) These introductions play like the classic openings of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”But if “Cabinet of Curiosities” has a spiritual forbear, it is someone more sinister. The writer H.P. Lovecraft, who lived from 1890 to 1937, has inspired memorable movies (“Re-Animator”) and television (“Lovecraft Country”). The episodes of “Cabinet” his stories inspired are “Dreams in the Witch House,” directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and “Pickman’s Model,” about a painter (Crispin Glover) with dark and devilish muses. (“Pickman’s Model” was also the basis of a 1971 “Night Gallery” episode that gave this reporter childhood nightmares.)Known for what del Toro called “overwrought prose and arcane adjectives,” Lovecraft is also terrifying in his dark view of humanity.“He was cosmically misanthropic,” del Toro said. “He was the outsider of the outsiders. It’s very hard to imagine anyone overtaken by more fear. His idea was that the cosmos is malevolent by the mere notion of how large it is. You cannot encompass it, and that alone is madness. That resonates through the ages.”Del Toro, by all accounts, is no Lovecraft. He is a jovial guy and supportive colleague who is nonetheless drawn to the darkness. He is on the side of the artists, and the monsters. He’s the happy frightener.“He’s never imposing his will on anybody,” Amirpour said. “He’s just trying to help you find the best way to do what you’re trying to do. What truly sets him apart is his generosity of spirit. I’m ruined now. It’s like having courtside seats and then having to go sit somewhere else.” More