More stories

  • in

    ‘Laal Singh Chaddha’ Review: Forrest Gump in India

    This Indian adaptation of “Forrest Gump” doubles down on its Pollyanna hero, substituting different historical touchstones.“Forrest Gump” has been called many things: a feel-good crowd-pleaser, a maddening piece of pap, and America’s version of Voltaire’s “Candide” (per the film scholar Dave Kehr). “Laal Singh Chaddha” offers up a fresh look: a luxuriantly produced Indian adaptation that doubles down on the story’s simpleton hero, with new historical touchstones.In the film’s framing device, Laal (Aamir Khan, the star of the 2001 crossover hit “Lagaan”) recounts his life story to passengers on a train. He grows up bullied because of his leg braces, despite his protective mother (Mona Singh), but he befriends a classmate, Rupa (Kareena Kapoor Khan), and later pines for her.The Gumpian formula of comical serendipity plays out as Laal accidentally becomes a track-and-field star, inspires a signature dance, rescues friend and foe during a mountain skirmish, and earns millions manufacturing underwear. The famous box of chocolates is reimagined, sweetly so: life is now like a golgappa (a crisp fried treat).In Advait Chandan’s film, traumatic national history gets a therapeutic recap: the military conflict in which Laal shows the power of compassion is the Kargil war, while the assassination of Indira Gandhi and sectarian riots also figure into the plot. (Laal is Sikh but only barely grasps these violent events.)Though treated as noble, Laal’s naïve optimism doesn’t rise to much more than the notion of having a good attitude. Khan’s portrayal suggests a cross between a lesser Farrelly Brothers comedy and “Being There,” and seems ill-suited to Rupa’s grim later experiences married to an abusive producer. The movie’s charms are limited by what comes to feel like a coddling conceit.Laal Singh ChaddhaRated PG-13 for some violent content, thematic elements and suggestive material. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More

  • in

    ‘Mack & Rita’ Review: 70 Is the New 30

    An influencer emerges from a tanning bed 40 years older in this playful movie starring Diane Keaton.In the Diane Keaton comedy “Mack & Rita,” the 30-year-old Mack (Elizabeth Lail) has always felt like an old soul. Recently, tuckered out by the demands of being a social-media influencer and hurt by not making headway on her second novel, she just wants a rest. At her bestie Carla’s bachelorette jaunt to Palm Springs, Calif., Mack repairs to a retrofitted tanning bed advertised by a seeming charlatan named Luka (Simon Rex) as a life-regression pod.She emerges 40 years older, played by Keaton. (Wiser remains to be seen.) Keaton brings her affection for layered couture and gift for goofiness to the newly arrived Aunt Rita.Lessons will be learned, and there is plenty of slapstick. Although no relation to Buster, this Keaton has grown increasingly game for all manner of pratfall. Bring on the Pilates contraption! Pour the magic mushroom tea!Directed with some unexpected beats by Katie Aselton, the comedy captures a bit of the esprit de girlfriends of HBO’s “Insecure,” but borrows too giddily from the Nancy Meyers rom-com catalog of upscale homes.Keaton’s zaniness is balanced by Taylour Paige’s authenticity as Carla, whose friendship is nearly unflappable, and Dustin Milligan as Mack’s neighbor, dog-sitter and presumptive love interest, Jack. The comedy enjoys teasing Rita and Jack’s chemistry, as do the wine-tippling friends of Carla’s mother, Sharon (Loretta Devine, joined by Wendie Malick, Lois Smith and Amy Hill). The pleasure the klatch take in each other and the advice they offer Rita suggests that the best bridge between youth and growing gray — besides self-acceptance — might be lasting friendships.Mack & RitaRated PG-13 for some drug references, sexual friskiness and language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

  • in

    ‘We Are Living Things’ Review: The Truth Is Out There

    Two undocumented immigrants from opposite sides of the world connect in Brooklyn — and over their shared trauma relating to apparent alien abductions.Do you want to believe? Solomon (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) does — he already believes that his own mother was abducted by space aliens — which is probably easier than accepting what may be her truer and grizzlier fate.But such is the type of absurd proposition faced by many undocumented immigrants like Solomon, as Antonio Tibaldi’s cool and atmospheric “We Are Living Things” posits in original if not always fully formed ways: Refugee life is often a choice between competing probabilities, a state of permanent ambiguity.Solomon, who is Mexican, does odd jobs and lives on a recycling lot in Brooklyn, where at night he pursues his passions for magnetic rocks and listening to the stars. When he meets a beautiful Chinese woman, Chuyao (Xingchen Lyu), he senses he has found a fellow believer. He isn’t wrong; indeed, she says she was abducted by aliens herself.He also senses danger. Chuyao is undocumented, too — that’s to say, vulnerable — working days at a nail salon. By night, a charming hustler (Zao Wang) pimps her out in ways that may prompt some angsty Googling. (I’ll save you some awkwardness: It’s called a latex vacuum bed.) Solomon, often a more convincing stalker than hero, has a creepy van and an unexplained facility with chloroform and box cutters. His unsolicited rescue attempt sends the unlikely pair fleeing west.Tibaldi and his co-writer, Àlex Lora, do much with little, and one is likely to finish with more questions than resolutions — fitting for a film about various forms of alien life. If you’re also left wondering whether the central characters and their relationship feel sufficiently grounded, perhaps the answer is out there somewhere.We Are Living ThingsNot rated. In English, Spanish and Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

  • in

    ‘Girl Picture’ Review: Teens on Thin Ice

    This Finnish comedy about three high school girls grants them a judgment-free sanctuary.“Girl Picture,” directed by Alli Haapasalo, is a giddy, high-strung comedy about three Finnish high schoolers anxious to capitalize on that sliver of teenagedom when life is all possibilities — a period that races by so fast that the film, written by Ilona Ahti and Daniela Hakulinen, is able to cram a smorgasbord of joy and humiliation into just three weekends.Every Friday, the best friends Ronkko (Eleonoora Kauhanen) and Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) finish their job at a smoothie shop and set out to sample a tasting menu of experiences; from true love to emotionless hookups. They’re in a rush to decide who they are — or aren’t. Ronkko, a curly-headed flirt, is anxious that sex has been, so far, disappointing. Mimmi, a sensitive punk with a sharp tongue, is doubtful she has the maturity to woo an ice skater named Emma (Linnea Leino) who comes with — yuck! — grown-up-size responsibilities, like perfecting her triple Lutz so not to blow her chance at the European Championships. Leino’s physical carriage — from her convincing athleticism to the way the actress plays her fretful wallflower with her eyebrows knitted together like a pair of mittens — captures her character’s determination. When her mother (Cécile Orblin) presses Emma to attend a party, she groans, “Fine, but I’ll be home by 10.”The characters are all much harder on themselves than is the film itself, which grants them a judgment-free sanctuary (even as they make mistakes that may have the audience yelping like at a horror flick). Instead, Haapasalo blesses her trio with a pop soundtrack that crescendos at the peak of a kiss, and climactic crises that are a mite too readily resolved, adamantly gracing this awkward stage of girlhood with forgiveness — not hectoring lessons.Girl PictureNot rated. In Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

  • in

    ‘Secret Headquarters’ Review: You Know, for Kids

    A group of plucky tweens get in on some superhero action in this kid-friendly action comedy.“Secret Headquarters,” from the directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, is in essence a superhero movie designed for children — a lighthearted, low-stakes action blockbuster in which a coterie of plucky tweens must defend the earth by wielding an array of otherworldly powers. The story is very similar to “Spy Kids” (2001), Robert Rodriguez’s whimsical espionage thriller about preteen siblings who discover that their parents are world-class secret agents. In this film, a boy named Charlie (Walker Scobell, “The Adam Project”) deduces that his absent father (Owen Wilson) has been living a double life as the Iron Man-like hero named the Guard. Charlie discovers this after he and his friends stumble upon an underground lair beneath his home; as in “Spy Kids,” the veteran parent soon finds need for junior backup, which the intrepid little kids are all too eager to provide.A movie like “Secret Headquarters” seems to want to give children an opportunity to see themselves saving the day with superpowers, letting young actors take part in the kinds of C.G.I.-laden fate-of-the-universe battles usually reserved for adults. The effort strikes me as somewhat redundant. When the kids are just doing kid stuff — playing softball, fretting about who to ask to the school dance — “Secret Headquarters” has the playful, mischievous air of something like “The Goonies.” When the kids acquire some of the Guard’s superpowers and start flying around and fighting baddies, it has the air of … well, of just another superhero movie. The similarities offer a credible reminder of an important distinction “Secret Headquarters” missed: most superhero movies are already aimed at children, even if they don’t star any.Secret HeadquartersRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Paramount +. More

  • in

    The Russian Filmmaker Trapped Between Hollywood and Moscow

    Last December, a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, Kirill Serebrennikov, the film and theater director, applied for parole on the basis of good behavior. Serebrennikov was arrested in 2017 on embezzlement charges, though it was widely understood that his real offense was producing work that irritated the Kremlin. He spent 20 months on house arrest and another year standing trial, before being sentenced to three years’ probation. In late March, a Russian court suspended his remaining sentence, and the very next day, he fled to Germany. By May, he was at the Cannes Film Festival, in the south of France, for the premiere of his new film, “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.” When Serebrennikov emerged in a small room at the Palais des Festivals for a news conference, the moderator introduced him as “someone who we’ve eagerly awaited for three years.” Serebrennikov had missed the premieres of his last two films at the festival: “Summer,” in 2018, when he was confined to his Moscow apartment under the surveillance of an ankle monitor, and last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.” Cannes is among a handful of European festivals where Hollywood executives go shopping for talent. A strong showing there can catapult an art-house director to the helm of a Hollywood movie or the sale of their next feature. Were it not for the war, Serebrennikov’s attendance this year would have marked the triumphant return of a dissident. But after Ukrainian filmmakers called for a boycott of Russian culture, Serebrennikov was mostly addressed as a representative of his hostile country. The day got off to a rough start pretty much right away when a journalist from Moldova, which borders Ukraine, stood up and said that if the war didn’t end soon, Odesa would soon be besieged by bombs. Serebrennikov sat at the front of the room in tinted glasses and a black cap, against a backdrop that featured a still from “The Truman Show.” The director reminded everyone that his film was made before the war, but said he understood those who wanted to boycott him. “It’s so hurtful what’s happening to their country,” he said in response to another question, “so unbearable, so difficult.” But, he added, “calling for a ban based on nationality, we’ve been here before. It’s not possible and it can’t be done.” Several international film festivals had excluded films by Russian directors. When Cannes said that it would ban Russians with government ties while signaling that it would still allow those who opposed the country’s regime, it further ignited tensions. Serebrennikov had been hearing rumors that Ukrainians would stage a protest to disrupt the premiere. A few days earlier, the director, who is 52, called his father, who still lives in Rostov-on-Don, the Southern Russian city where Serebrennikov grew up, and asked him to wish him luck. “Hopefully,” he said, “the Ukrainians don’t pelt us with tomatoes.” ‘You don’t have to cancel Russians, because Russians are already very good at canceling themselves.’Cannes made efforts to mitigate the controversy, devoting a special program to Ukrainian film and opening the festival with a live address from President Volodymyr Zelensky. But other theatrics felt tone deaf, such as the French fighter jets that thundered low overhead in honor of the “Top Gun: Maverick” premiere — which directly followed Serebrennikov’s — and sent a group of Ukrainian filmmakers ducking for cover. Serebrennikov’s assistant, Anna Shalashova, joked that at least the red, white and blue trails painted by the jets across the sky were in the right order, and not that of the Russian flag. “Can you imagine?” she said. At the news conference, Serebrennikov acknowledged the difficulty of being a Russian artist. But the questions kept coming: about the war, about the boycott, about Serebrennikov’s connections to the state. A Ukrainian journalist asked why the director was allowed to leave Russia, a question that seemed to suggest suspicious timing. At one point, the moderator tried to steer the conversation back to the film by addressing the actors, who had yet to be asked anything. But Serebrennikov looked pained. He stroked his lower lip with his index finger and stared into the middle distance. When the very next question returned to the boycott, he dropped his head dramatically, like someone in the midst of a losing game. If there was a final blow, it came via a reporter from Deadline Hollywood, who asked about Roman Abramovich, the sanctioned oligarch who had contributed funding to the film. Serebrennikov spoke for some time about how he hadn’t accepted state funding since 2016 and how much Abramovich has helped Russia’s independent filmmakers and him personally. (Serebrennikov says the billionaire helped pay off his $1.9 million in state fines and legal fees.) But it didn’t matter. The only part that would resound in the press for days was when he quoted Zelensky, who had asked the United States not to sanction Abramovich because of his role in the peace negotiations. “And I agree,” Serebrennikov said. By the afternoon, a version of the headline was everywhere: “ ‘Tchaikovsky’s Wife’ Director Calls for Sanctions Against Russian Oligarch Roman Abramovich to Be Lifted.” The reaction among Serebrennikov’s supporters was swift, too. Some thought it was tasteless. Others went so far as to call Serebrennikov a traitor. Russian authorities had silenced the country’s free press, but its leading journalists were now dispersed across Europe and broadcasting on YouTube. Among them was Denis Kataev from TV Rain, Russia’s last independent news channel, which abruptly switched to showing Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” when it was forced off Russian airwaves in March. In a video posted shortly after the news conference, Kataev speculated that Serebrennikov had jeopardized his film’s distribution. “I don’t want to bad-mouth Kirill like a lot of our colleagues are doing,” Kataev said, “but when there is a war going on you have to choose words carefully.” It has been almost six months since the war began. Weapons and resources have poured into Ukraine from all over the world, as Western governments have moved to isolate Russia economically. But as the war grinds on, some of the other efforts to punish the country now seem absurd. Dumping bottles of Stoli vodka, a product of Latvia, did not stop the war. Nor did canceling reservations at Russian restaurants, many owned by refugees who left the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Tchaikovsky died in 1893, but after Russia attacked Ukraine, performances of his music were canceled in Wales, Ireland, Greece, the Czech Republic and Japan. The cultural boycott had begun with Russian artists who supported Putin, but soon even those who had denounced the war — a pianist in Canada, a cellist in Switzerland, two filmmakers at the Glasgow Film Festival — were disinvited from their engagements. Maybe it was because of politics or because Western audiences just weren’t in the mood to engage with Russian art. But by the time a university in Milan suspended a lecture series on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and then had to backtrack after it was pointed out that the author had been exiled to Siberia, the exact purpose of the boycott had become a bit muddled. Eventually, the issue migrated to its next logical staging ground: Hollywood. Netflix, which had doubled down on international programming after the success of “Squid Game,” halted production on four Russian-language shows, including “Anna K,” a modern-day adaptation of “Anna Karenina,” which had already been filmed. Apple TV+ considered rewriting the characters on a show still in development, at one point known as “The Untitled Russian Billionaires Project,” to be from Belarus or Serbia, and scrapped plans for “Container,” its first Russian-language series, acquired as part of a now-dead coproduction deal with a streaming service partly owned by Alisher Usmanov, a sanctioned Russian oligarch.Executives understandably panicked about whom they had been meeting with and where exactly their money was flowing. Some wondered if an indiscriminate ban could put pressure on companies or oligarchs, who may or may not have a direct line of communication to Putin. Perhaps that was worth trying, even if it didn’t work, which it probably wouldn’t. Sure, some artists would lose work, but the larger issue was that civilians were being killed. It made sense to pull out of deals with sanctioned entities, but how to sort through all the rest?Our Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine WarOn the Ground: After a summer of few conclusive battles, Ukraine and Russia are now facing a quandary over how to concentrate their forces, leaving commanders in a guessing game about each other’s next moves.Nuclear Shelter: The Russian military is using а nuclear power station in southern Ukraine as a fortress, stymying Ukrainian forces and unnerving locals, faced with intensifying fighting and the threat of a radiation leak.Refugees in Europe: The flow of people fleeing Ukraine has increased pressure across the region. Some cоuntries are paying shipping firms to offer new arrivals safe but tight quarters.Prison Camp Explosion: After a blast at a Russian detention camp killed at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war, Ukrainian officials said that they were building a case of a war crime committed by Russian forces.When the war began, Anastasia Palchikova, a Russian filmmaker, was finalizing a deal for a series at a major American network. Palchikova signed open letters against the war and attended protests in Moscow, where her husband was arrested. Soon she began receiving threatening phone calls, calling her a traitor. In April, she left for Istanbul. By then she had heard that her deal was now in limbo. (She asked me not to name the network in case the show was later revived.) Palchikova’s U.S. agent, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because of company policy, told me that the network’s executives are aware of Palchikova’s activism. “But then they take it up the chain,” the agent said, “and these are all giant corporations that can’t be seen, like, funneling money to Russians.” Serebrennikov, at a court hearing in Moscow in 2017.Vasily Maximov/Agence France-Press, via Getty ImagesOther projects were investigated and cleared. Alex Reznik, an Odesa-born actor and producer in Los Angeles, had a show briefly paused at one of the streaming platforms. “They just said we need to do some due diligence,” he told me. Reznik previously produced the Emmy-winning Netflix series “Seven Seconds,” which was inspired by a Russian film; his new show is also based on Russian material. He wasn’t sure why it was ultimately allowed to proceed. “I don’t think people in the industry know what the rules are right now,” Reznik said. “Some companies in Russia are sanctioned, you can’t do business. But to what extent?” Russia’s film industry can be hard to sort through. Unlike Hollywood, which is self-sufficient and funded by a hundred-year-old studio system, Russian culture, like that of France or Germany, largely relies on state funding. If one were to define a filmmaker who has accepted those funds as having ties to the state — as the Glasgow Film Festival did — that’s going to cast a wide net. Russian filmmakers seeking private financing often end up dealing with companies with unsavory backers or patrons like Abramovich. In other words, you can reject these channels or you can make a movie; it is difficult to do both. Navigating this system requires some dexterity. Ilya Stewart, who produced the last four of Serebrennikov’s films, told me that he implicitly understood which projects were too overtly political to ask the government to finance. “Because I’d rather not put them in an uncomfortable position,” he said. “And that’s how a lot of people operated who understood how the system worked.” (Full disclosure: My brother has worked as a producer and talent manager in Russia’s film industry.) Russia’s Ministry of Culture has backed plenty of films that glorify Russia, such as “Going Vertical,” a sports drama about the time the Soviet Union defeated the United States Olympic basketball team, and “Stalingrad,” a celebration of Russia’s stamina against the infamous Nazi siege. But it has also financed films that appear to challenge the regime. The Venice Film Festival last year spotlighted “Captain Volkonogov Escaped,” a thriller about Stalin’s purges that was seen as a veiled critique of Putin’s Russia. That film received state financing. As did “Leviathan,” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 Oscar-nominated film, which portrayed contemporary Russian life in such an unflattering light that it has never been shown on TV in Russia. The search for heroes and villains in Russia’s film industry can be a bit unsatisfying. Later, I found out that Palchikova’s show was based on a film she made about her childhood. But the rights were still controlled by a Russian production company backed by Gazprom, the state-owned gas monopoly. Palchikova offered to write a different version of the story, so that no Russian company could profit from an adaptation. But the network hasn’t budged. Palchikova stressed that the tragedy was the war, not the suspended projects. But she wondered if suppressing Russia’s oppositional voices was counterproductive. “When the Western world bans Russian people,” Palchikova said, “they are kind of doing the work for the Russian government.” In March, Russia passed a new law punishing the spread of misinformation, which includes calling the war a war, with up to 15 years in prison. By June, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Dmitry Glukhovsky, a popular sci-fi author who protested the war on social media. The director Michael Lockshin heard that the government also had screenshots from his Instagram, where he reposted Western coverage of the war. Furthermore, the fate of “Woland,” Lockshin’s forthcoming $15 million film based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” which is itself about censorship, was now uncertain. The state was withholding the film’s postproduction budget, which involves pricey special effects (there’s a talking cat); its distributor, Universal, had pulled out of Russia, and it has yet to be picked up by anyone else. “So now we’re censored in a way in Russia,” Lockshin said, “and also can’t take it abroad because it’s a Russian movie. It’s kind of a crazy situation.” Lockshin was glad to see that Cannes had accepted Serebrennikov’s film. He thought it sent a clear message that art shouldn’t be purely associated with its country of origin. “The whole industry is watching how it’s perceived there,” Lockshin said, “because it’s going to tell us what comes next.” A few days before his Cannes premiere, I met Serebrennikov in Amsterdam, where he was directing the opera “Der Freischütz.” Serebrennikov’s stage work, like his films, is often provocative and rebellious. At the Dutch National Opera, Serebrennikov had rewritten the 200-year-old German opus to be an opera about the opera, and added music by Tom Waits. When I arrived, a classically trained tenor was arguing over a line that the director wrote for him about the tenor’s wife’s request that he talk dirty like a baritone. “It doesn’t make any sense!” the tenor shouted. After rehearsals, Serebrennikov threw a green bomber jacket over a Thrasher T-shirt and black track pants. On his wrist was a faceless Margiela watch, which he said was “for people who don’t care about the time.” Outside, it had started to rain, which Serebrennikov, who is a Buddhist, observed more as a curiosity than a hindrance. “No one was predicting rain, but the rain still came,” he remarked. I’d heard that unlike other directors, Serebrennikov rarely raises his voice at actors, and I asked if that was true. “I don’t see the point,” he said. “Aggression and violence always happen from weakness.” There was a time when Serebrennikov benefited from the system that ultimately turned on him. He moved to Moscow from Rostov-on-Don in 2001, when the state — and this is hard to remember now — was eager to support the arts. For a decade, Serebrennikov staged performances at Moscow’s largest theaters and eventually caught the attention of Vladislav Surkov, a top Putin adviser who coined “sovereign democracy,” an unusual term for a system free of Western meddling and only democratic to the extent its leaders allowed. Surkov saw artists as a necessary tool in that arrangement: as both evidence of Russia’s modernity and its tentative patience toward free expression. In 2011, Serebrennikov was put in charge of Platform, a new federally funded arts festival, and, a year later, the Gogol Center, a sleepy theater that he turned into a hub for avant-garde performance. Simultaneously, he attended anti-Putin protests and staged an opera that parodied Kremlin politics. He even adapted a novel that Surkov wrote under a pseudonym, but made it into a commentary on corruption. As Putin muscled his way back into power in 2012, mass protests broke out across Russia. Putin demoted Surkov and gave the job of Minister of Culture to Vladimir Medinsky, a nationalist who warned against art that was at odds with “traditional values.” The same year, members of the feminist punk group Pussy Riot were arrested and tried. Around this time, Serebrennikov made his first attempt at a Tchaikovsky biopic and was denied state funds because of the script’s homosexual themes. (Serebrennikov has spoken out in support of Russia’s beleaguered L.G.B.T. community, and his film deals with the composer’s closeted sexuality.) Instead, he got financing from Abramovich and in 2016 released “The Student,” which mocked the country’s increasing conservatism and religious hypocrisy. The next year, Serebrennikov was accused of fraud involving a state subsidy of $1.9 million for Platform. More

  • in

    Olivia Newton-John, Pop Singer and ‘Grease’ Star, Dies at 73

    She amassed No. 1 hits, chart-topping albums and four records that sold more than two million copies each. More than anything else, she was likable, even beloved.Olivia Newton-John, who sang some of the biggest hits of the 1970s and ’80s while recasting her image as the virginal girl next door into a spandex-clad vixen — a transformation reflected in miniature by her starring role in “Grease,” one of the most popular movie musicals of its era — died on Monday at her ranch in Southern California. She was 73.The death was announced by her husband, John Easterling, who did not give a specific cause in his statement, though he cited the breast cancer diagnosis she had lived with since 1992. In 2017, she announced that the cancer had returned and spread. For years she was a prominent advocate for cancer research, starting a foundation in her name to support it and opening a research and wellness center in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia. English-born, she grew up in Australia.Ms. Newton-John amassed No. 1 hits, chart-topping albums and four records that sold more than two million copies each. More than anything else, she was likable, even beloved.Ms. Newton-John and John Travolta in a scene from “Grease.” It became one of the highest grossing movie musicals ever, besting even “The Sound of Music.”Paramount/Library of Congress, via Associated PressIn the earlier phase of her career, Ms. Newton-John beguiled listeners with a high, supple, vibrato-warmed voice that paired amiably with the kind of swooning middle-of-the-road pop that, in the mid-1970s, often passed for country music.Her performance on the charts made that blurring clear. She scored seven Top 10 hits on Billboard’s country chart, two of which became back-to-back overall No. 1 hits in 1974 and ’75. First came “I Honestly Love You,” an earnest declaration co-written by Peter Allen and Jeff Barry, followed by “Have You Never Been Mellow,” a feather of a song written by the producer of many of her biggest albums, John Farrar.“I Honestly Love You” also won two of the singer’s four Grammys, for record of the year and best female pop vocal performance.The combination of Ms. Newton-John’s consistently benign music — she was never a favorite of critics — and comely but squeaky-clean image caused many writers to compare her to earlier blond ingénues like Doris Day and Sandra Dee. “Innocent, I’m not,” Ms. Newton-John told Rolling Stone in 1978. “People still seem to see me as the girl next door. Doris Day had four husbands,” she said, yet she was still viewed as “the virgin.”An entry into movies in 1978 aimed to put the singer’s chaste image behind her, starting with “Grease.” Her character, Sandy, transformed from a pigtailed square smitten with John Travolta’s bad-boy Danny to a gum-smacking bad girl. “Grease” became one of the highest grossing movie musicals ever, besting even “The Sound of Music.” Its soundtrack was the second best-selling album of the year, beaten only by the soundtrack for “Saturday Night Fever,” which also starred Mr. Travolta.The “Grease” soundtrack spawned two No. 1 hits, including the manically lusty “You’re the One That I Want,” sung by the co-stars. The doo-wop romp “Summer Nights,” which they also sang, reached No. 5. (The other No. 1 single from the “Grease” soundtrack was the title song, sung by Frankie Valli.) A ballad Ms. Newton-John sang alone, “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” earned the film’s lone Oscar nomination, for best song.Applying the evolution of her “Grease” character to her singing career, Ms. Newton-John titled her next album “Totally Hot,” and presented herself on the cover in shoulder-to-toe leather. The album, released at the end of 1978, went platinum, yielding the rock-oriented “A Little More Love” with the line, “Where did my innocence go?”Ms. Newton-John in an undated photo. In the 1980s she sought to shed her innocent image, emerging with “Physical,” which spent 10 weeks at No. 1 in Billboard’s rankings.The album featured Ms. Newton-John singing in a somewhat more forceful voice. Though her sales dipped as the 1970s turned into the ’80s, by early in the decade she began the most commercially potent period in her career, peaking with the single “Physical,” which spent 10 weeks on Billboard’s top perch. Later, the magazine declared it to be the biggest song of the 1980s.Olivia Newton-John was born on Sept. 26, 1948, in Cambridge, England, the youngest of three children of Brinley and Irene (Born) Newton-John. Her mother was the daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born. Her Welsh-born father had been an MI5 intelligence officer during World War II and afterward served as headmaster at Cambridgeshire High School for Boys. When Ms. Newton-John was 6, her family immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, where her father worked as a college professor and administrator. At 14, she formed her first group, Sol Four, with three girls from school. Her beauty and confidence soon earned her solo performances on local radio and TV shows under the name “Lovely Livvy.” On “The Go!! Show” she met the singer Pat Carroll, with whom she would form a duet, as well as her eventual producer, Mr. Farrar, who later married Ms. Carroll.Ms. Newton-John won a local TV talent contest whose prize was a trip to Britain. While tarrying there, she recorded her first single, “’Til You Say You’ll Be Mine,” which Decca Records released in 1966.After Ms. Carroll moved to London, she and Ms. Newton-John formed the duet Pat and Olivia, which toured Europe. When Ms. Carroll’s visa expired, forcing her to go back to Australia, Ms. Newton-John stayed in London to work solo.In 1970, she was asked to join a crudely manufactured group named Toomorrow, formed by the American producer Don Kirshner in an attempt to repeat his earlier success with the Monkees. Following his grand design, the group starred in a science-fiction film written for them and recorded its soundtrack. Both projects tanked.Ms. Newton-John tried to expand her acting career with the 1980 musical “Xanadu,” here in a scene with the actor Michael Beck. Its soundtrack went double platinum.Universal/Kobal, via Shutterstock“It was terrible, and I was terrible in it,” she later told The New York Times.Her debut solo album, “If Not for You,” was released in 1971, its title track a cover of a Bob Dylan song.After some duds in the United States, Ms. Newton-John released the album “Let Me Be There” (1973), which led to a Grammy win for best female country vocal performance.Two key changes in pop music boosted her career that decade: the rise of “soft rock” in reaction to the harder genres of the late 1960s, and the mainstreaming — some would say the neutering — of country music, also epitomized by stars like John Denver and Anne Murray.The latter trend became an issue in 1974, after Ms. Newton-John was chosen female vocalist of the year by the Country Music Association over more traditional stars like Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. Protests led to the formation of the fleeting Association of Country Entertainers. Yet, after Ms. Newton-John recorded her “Don’t Stop Believin’,” album in Nashville in 1976, the friction eased.The second phase of her career, which began with “Grease,” found further success through a duet with Andy Gibb, “I Can’t Help It,” followed by an attempt to expand her acting career with the 1980 musical film “Xanadu,” with Gene Kelly. While the movie floundered, its soundtrack went double-platinum, boasting hits like “Magic” (which commanded Billboard’s No. 1 spot for four weeks) and the title song, recorded with the Electric Light Orchestra.A campy Broadway show based on the film opened in 2007 to some success.Ms. Newton-John performing in Chile in 2017, the year she said her cancer had returned and had metastasized.Mario Ruiz/EPA, via ShutterstockMs. Newton-John’s smash “Physical” also yielded the first video album to hit the market, with clips for all the album’s tracks. “Olivia Physical” won the Grammy in 1982 for video of the year.She was paired again with Mr. Travolta in the 1983 movie “Two of a Kind,” an attempt to repeat the success of “Grease.” But the film disappointed even as its soundtrack proved popular, especially the song “Twist of Fate.”Ms. Newton-John was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.By the mid-80s, her career had cooled. For several years she cut back on work to care for her daughter, Chloe Rose, whom she had with her husband at the time, the actor Matt Lattanzi. They had met on the set of “Xanadu” and married in 1984; they divorced in 1995.That same year, she met Patrick McDermott, a cameraman whom she dated, on and off, for the next nine years. In 2005, Mr. McDermott disappeared while fishing off the California coast. Three years later, a U.S. Coast Guard investigation said that the evidence suggested that Mr. McDermott had been lost at sea.In 2008, Ms. Newton-John married Mr. Easterling, the founder of the Amazon Herb Company.In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Chloe Rose Lattanzi; her sister, Sarah Newton-John; and her brother, Toby.After learning she had breast cancer in 1992, Ms. Newton-John became an ardent advocate for research into the disease. Her Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund is dedicated to researching plant-based treatments for cancer, and she opened a cancer research and wellness facility under her name at Austin Hospital, outside Melbourne.Despite her own treatments, she continued to release albums and tour but failed to make headway on the charts. And she continued to act in movies and on television.In May 2017, she disclosed that her cancer had returned and that it had metastasized to her lower back. She published a memoir, “Don’t Stop Believin,’” in 2018.To the end Ms. Newton-John firmly believed in her audience-friendly approach to music. “It annoys me when people think because it’s commercial, it’s bad,” she told Rolling Stone. “It’s completely opposite. If people like it, that’s what it’s supposed to be.” More

  • in

    Olivia Newton-John’s Transformation Into Pop Royalty

    When the singer smudged her classy image, she “unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus,” our critic writes: “The vestal vamp.”We would’ve just called her ONJ now. But part of the appeal, I think, was all of that name, the possible royalty of it. Nobody wanted to waste a syllable. Olivia Newton-John. Just saying it might bestow a crown. The rest of her allure sprang from that classiness: She was neither queen nor first lady of anything, yet she seemed, ultimately, like … a lady. And that was something she could have some fun with, a category she could smudge. Eventually. I mean, this was a person who, at the heights of funk, disco and glam rock, recorded six country-esque albums, throw pillows for your ears. And most of their singles topped what was once known as Billboard’s easy listening chart. (So maybe she was the queen of that.)By the end of the 1970s, though, she had figured out the whole “lady” thing and spent 90 percent of her first Hollywood movie disguised that way, as a princess. There’s a lot going on in “Grease.” Most of it’s bizarre and has to do with sex and a sort of pure whiteness, particularly how, in both cases, Newton-John, who died on Monday at 73, was holding onto hers. Not for John Travolta, per se, but for “You’re the One That I Want,” the duet with Travolta (and a triple-X bass line) that ends the movie. The virginal bobby-soxer Newton-John had been playing was now in pumps and skintight black pants. Her hair had expanded from Sandra Dee to Sophia Loren. You could see her shoulders.That transformation unlocked something new that shot her to the top of pop’s Olympus: the vestal vamp. Nothing about the presentation of a four-minute pop song would be the same. Neither would anybody who sat through a dozen showings of “Grease.” The only reason my 5- and 6- and 10-year-old selves put up with it at all was the knowledge that we’d soon get to the part at the amusement park where Olivia Newton-John turns into an ONJ.In the movie “Grease,” Sandy (Newton-John, left) transforms into a sexpot to get back together with Danny, played by John Travolta.Paramount PicturesI didn’t learn much from Newton-John about sex. Only that its existence was there to be implied and winked at. It’s true that her pelvis was, at last, affixed to Travolta’s near the end of “Grease” but on a redundant ride called the Shake Shack. And, yeah, she does spend that zany video for “Physical” in a disco spa studded with Adonic gym rats, but when the tanned, fatless men walk off hand-in-hand, she gleefully locks arms with one of the spa’s tubbier clients. They’re the ones she wants — and, consequently, the ones I wanted, too.The videos, the hit songs, her lip-syncing them on “Solid Gold”: I also wanted Olivia Newton-John. And one of my parents must have known this because there was a copy of her second greatest hits LP, from 1982, at our house. And knowing what my parents weren’t listening to, the only reason it would’ve been there is for me; I wasn’t even 7. The thing about that album — more than any I’d ever studied up to then, except for Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July” (you could see his shoulders) — is the gatefold, a good album’s second strongest intoxicant. And this one was just Newton-John in a horizontal display, head to thigh, hair shortish and characteristically a-feather. White knit top, tight white pants, some gold jewelry. Was she truly on her back or simply shot to look that way? I’d have to wait a whole two months, for the gatefold of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (not a dissimilar pose but with a tiger cub), to see anything as mesmerizingly erotic.Newton-John revamped herself at the dawn of the music-video era. She knew the power of the art form — her Grammy-winning 1982 video album, “Olivia Physical,” was the “Lemonade” of its day, inspiring a prime-time network TV event. She only had to toy with going too far. Her real thing was limitations. She seemed to know what hers were — as a vocalist, as a dancer, as an actor. And she luxuriated in them. There was nothing inherently subversive about her. Yet she was an ironist — the person you’d least expect to see, say, mounting a fat dude on a massage table and riding him like a mechanical bull. Even when she was straining for eros — the way she was in the video for “Tied Up,” in a red leather vest, her mouth seemingly in want of irrigation — you were watching an angel pursue a dirty face.That’s the reason she survived “Xanadu” — the musical belch, from 1980, with her as a Greek muse on roller skates: an imperviousness to the surrounding absurdity. It’s the reason she came to embody the sleek fantasies of pleasure, painlessness and profit of the 1980s. Nothing disturbed her. She disturbed no one. Even that gatefold: She’s fully clothed! The skates and spandex were a prop and a metaphor. And “Physical” remained the decade’s longest-running No. 1 song.Gene Kelly, left, and Newton-John in the movie “Xanadu,” from 1980.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesBut at some point, she stopped perking us up. Well, we stopped letting her. Madonna had come along and threatened to put her out of business. I swore she was a parody of Newton-John’s flirty, jolly, heaven-sent persona; of her being staunchly white while adjacent to a wealth of Black and Latin music. What would it mean to mean it, not just to get dirty but to be dirty, to mix in some of that Blackness and brownness? “Like a Virgin,” for instance, is Newton-John but more ornately ironic, authentically, imaginatively lewd. Even though Newton-John’s hit machine was still going by 1985, she was already becoming a memory of a kind of innocence. Which is to say that she was never, ever forgotten. She’s a place pop music has been trying to get back to: the Stacey Q’s and Cathy Dennises, the Carly Rae Jepsens and Dua Lipas; the one and only Kylie Minogue.What I like to go back to with Olivia Newton-John isn’t her body at all. It’s her singing. There’s always more to it than I remember. I was putting it in sundresses and leotards. But, boy, that voice could work a singlet, too: She learned to flex her soprano so that it bent, barked, yipped and squealed. “Totally Hot,” from 1978, occasionally features sounds more typical for Sea World. Yet any deficiencies in soulfulness were repaid in spirit.She also perfected a great trick: layering. Instead of just one of her, suddenly, in a pre-chorus or a chorus-chorus, there was a fleet, of lilting, undulating, rainbowing, billowing, Bee Gee-ing selves, on “Have You Never Been Mellow,” on “A Little More Love,” on “Magic.” She had but one body, but on a record, she could become a multitude. The warmth of that sound; the glorious blue-sky of it still warrants exclamation — like “oh my lord” but alternatively divine. I like “ONJ.” More