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      Foo Fighters Made a Horror Film. Because Why Not?

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      Dave Grohl shares how the band went from filming funny music videos to making “Studio 666,” due Feb. 25, and discusses a coming album.In the three decades that Dave Grohl has been a rock star, he has recorded with the likes of Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney, directed documentaries, performed for presidents and been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, twice.But this month presents a first: On Feb. 25, Foo Fighters are releasing “Studio 666,” a horror-comedy directed by BJ McDonnell (“Hatchet III”) and starring, well, Foo Fighters.Why?“For fun,” Grohl said in a recent video interview. As he explained, “It was never our intention to enter the Hollywood game with this big horror film. It just happened.”In the film, which also features Whitney Cummings, Will Forte and Jeff Garlin, the band moves into a mansion, where Grohl himself once actually lived, to work on their 10th album. But songwriting proves challenging. Hoping to dig himself out of a creative rut, Grohl wanders around the house and discovers a secret that infuses him with creativity — and blood lust.The movie has been in the works since 2019, with production paused because of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s unlikely to rack up awards — “We’re not ordering tuxes for the Oscars,” Grohl said — but it does offer nuggets of hard rock and gore.Chatting from his home studio in Los Angeles over a cup of coffee, Grohl discussed the making of the film, his thoughts on rock ‘n’ roll and a new album. These are edited excerpts from the interview.Why did you decide to make a movie?Three years ago, a friend went to a meeting with a film studio, and our name came up. They said, “We’ve always wanted to make a horror with Foo Fighters.” He texts me, and I said, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” and thought nothing of it.We were writing music for our last record. Usually when we make a record, I’ll go into my home studio or a demo studio by myself and just write melodies and instrumentals. So I started looking for houses to rent where I could build a temporary studio. At the same time, my landlord from 10 years ago emailed me and said, “Do you want to buy some property?” I said, no, but if I could rent it, that would be great.I started writing and was sending demos to our producer, and he’s like, “This sounds great. Let’s record there.” So I started thinking, we could make a horror film in this creepy, old house. I came up with this concept, presented it to the band, and they just laughed. It snowballed from there. We never imagined we were going to make a feature.Clockwise from front left, Foo Fighters bandmates Nate Mendel, Pat Smear, Rami Jaffee, Chris Shiflett, Grohl and Taylor Hawkins in “Studio 666.”Open Road FilmsAre you a horror fan?I’m no aficionado. Although I did grow up loving a lot of the classics. I remember reading the “Amityville Horror” book in 1979 and then going to see the movie. And I grew up outside of Washington, D.C., where they filmed “The Exorcist.” I was obsessed with the house and those steps. That’s where all the punk rockers would hang out in the ’80s. We would sit at the bottom of those steps and drink beer.Foo Fighters: A Rock InstitutionFor 25 years, Dave Grohl and his bandmates have ruled rock, and they’re still finding new ways to grow. Latest Album: For “Medicine at Midnight,” the Foo Fighters experimented with dance and funk rhythms — a subtle but distinct pivot. ‘Studio 666’: In the horror-comedy they star in, the Foos try to record some new music, when evil takes over Mr. Grohl. Grohl’s Memoir: How does a musician become a best-selling author? For the band’s frontman, the evolution started in an unlikely place. Drum Battle: Here is what happened when the Foo Fighters leader struck up a competitive friendship with a 10-year-old prodigy.“Studio 666” is also a band movie, which there don’t seem to be that many of out there. Why do you think that is?I don’t know. I grew up watching rock ‘n’ roll movies. “Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park.” The Ramones in “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” It used to be something that went hand-in-hand with an ensemble cast.I think the band has to not only be willing to do it, but be capable of making fun of themselves. We’ve been doing that for 26 years, so this is just a long-form version of us poking fun at being a rock band.We’ve talked about a sequel and how [“Studio 666”] can be handed from band to band. Would Coldplay do a horror movie? Would Wu Tang? That would be amazing.Grohl grew up watching movies like “Rock ’n’ Roll High School,” with the Ramones and P.J. Soles.  Shout! Factory and New Horizons PicturesYou wrote in your memoir that you once lived in a house that you believed was haunted. Did you have that in mind while making the movie?I don’t think it crossed over into this idea. But that house was definitely haunted. Before then, I never had any fascination with paranormal activity. After then, I do believe this type of thing can happen. But I also remember thinking, so I shared a house with a ghost. Is it going to kill me? No. Do the lights go on every once in a while and you hear footsteps? Yeah. I’ve had worse roommates.Like most groups, Foo Fighters have had tensions in the past. Did that inspire the plot?No, it didn’t. But the screenwriter came to hang out with us while we were recording [“Medicine at Midnight,” the band’s 10th album,] to get a feel for the dynamic. She just overplayed it.Like any band, we’re like a family. It’s a relationship that teeters on disaster in every creative situation, because there’s vulnerability and insecurity. It’s not easy staying a band for 26 years. Of all that we’ve been through, I don’t think anyone would want to kill another member. We love each other too much.The movie makes fun of rock in general, but it also pokes fun at you: you can’t write new songs; Lionel Richie yells at you. Was that fun?There are so many clichés in this movie. It’s part “The Amityville Horror.” It’s part “The Shining.” It’s part “The Evil Dead.” On the musical side, there’s the controlling lead singer that’s torturing the band, the struggle of writer’s block.The funniest cliché, I think, is the clapping in the living room. Whenever an engineer or producer walks into a room before you record, they always clap to listen to the acoustics. I’m here to say it’s [expletive]. That makes no difference.Whitney Cummings, with Jaffee, is among the guest stars. Open Road FilmsDo you have a favorite scene?I did like the round table scene with Jeff Garlin. Doing improv take after take, you felt like you were in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”There have been allegations that Jeff Garlin behaved inappropriately on the set of “The Goldbergs.” What was it like working with him?Jeff’s really into music. So most of our interaction off-camera was just talking about the bands we love. I didn’t know about any of that stuff. We just sat around talking about Wilco all day.There’s a scene where your manager says that rock hasn’t been relevant for a long time and it needs an infusion. Do you think that’s true? If so, what could revitalize it?I believe it’s partially true. I don’t think rock needs more Satan, but I do think it needs another youth-driven revolution. My oldest [daughter] is almost 16. I watch her discover music and write songs, and this is where [the action is].I think that the next rock revolution will look nothing like the one that we’ve seen before. And I’m not entirely sure what that is. But it’s coming. There’s so much to appreciate. I find a new favorite artist once a week, so it’s not like the well’s run dry.In 2021 alone, you released two albums, a documentary, a documentary series, a memoir, a few singles and you went on tour. What drives you to do so much?Coffee. [Smiles.]No — I just appreciate all the opportunity I have. I appreciate the people that help facilitate these ridiculous ideas, and I surround myself with people that have the same energy. And I hate vacations. I’m just restless. I feel this strange sense of guilt when I do nothing. I’m like a shark. If I stop swimming, I’ll die.You know what I’m doing now? I’m making the lost album by the band Dream Widow, from [the movie], like the “Blair Witch” tapes.Is the main song from the movie going to be on it?It is. It’s this crazy opus instrumental. I grew up listening to metal, so I started taking from my favorite bands as influences. For a metal record, it’s really good.So you’ve gone from covering the Bee Gees to metal.Listen, what do you get the guy that has everything?Right. Is there anything else coming?Yeah … you’ll see. More

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      Why Is ‘Cyrano’ Still So Potent? Ask Anyone Who’s Loved at All.

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      The 19th-century French play is quite adaptable, as numerous stage and film versions have shown, including the latest musical starring Peter Dinklage.When the French playwright Edmond Rostand penned “Cyrano de Bergerac” in the late 19th century, he couldn’t have imagined its durability — translations into countless languages, stage productions across the world and several high-profile film adaptations. The newest of those, “Cyrano” (opening in theaters Feb. 25), supplements Rostand’s beloved story with musical numbers by members of the rock band the National — a decidedly contemporary touch. But this is nothing new; Rostand’s has proved a malleable text, and its film adaptations tell us much about the kind of stories audiences were responding to when they were made.The 1950 “Cyrano de Bergerac” (streaming on Paramount+) starred José Ferrer, who had played the title role on Broadway in the mid-1940s, winning a Tony for his turn. It’s a classical approach, presentational (the proscenium arch of the stage isn’t visible, but it may as well be), with little attempt at realism in its playing or setting.Though greatly abridged, the script is quite faithful to the story beats of the original play. Cyrano de Bergerac is, we are told, a “soldier, poet, philosopher, magician, playwright … and the best swordsman in Paris.” He is also blessed (or, he believes, cursed) with an enormous, lengthy nose. He’s boisterously self-confident, except in matters of love. Self-conscious of his appearance (“Me, whom the plainest woman would despise”), he keeps his affections hidden from his beloved cousin, Roxane (Mala Powers), and his fears are confirmed when she asks him to set her up with the handsome Christian (William Prince), “because you have always been my friend.”But when Cyrano discovers that Christian is clueless in the ways of romance and hopelessly tongue-tied in the company of the fairer sex, Cyrano comes up with a solution: He’ll write love letters for Christian, providing an outlet for his own affection while giving Roxane the perfect man she desires. “Together we could make one mighty hero of romance,” Cyrano assures Christian, writing a flurry of letters and even standing in for him (vocally, that is) when Christian stands under Roxane’s balcony late one night, barely out of her sight, to woo her.The film and the original play end in tragedy. Christian and Roxane are wed just before he and Cyrano are sent to war, and when Christian dies in battle, his secret dies with him; Roxane enters a convent in mourning, and Cyrano only confesses to authoring the letters just before his own death years later.The 1950 “Cyrano de Bergerac” was mainly a showcase for the performance of José Ferrer (opposite Mala Powers as Roxane). John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesThe film won Ferrer an Oscar for best actor but scored no other nominations, which sounds about right: Michael Gordon’s direction is competent and Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is inspired, but this “Cyrano” serves mostly as a record of a masterful performance. (A 1990 film version, starring Gérard Depardieu, is a more satisfying “traditional” take.)Yet the film was striking enough to make an impression on Steve Martin, who saw it on television at the age of 12 and never forgot it, spending the next several decades quietly harboring a desire to play the role.“I had no intention of writing the script myself,” he told The Times in 1987; at that point, he had only penned “The Jerk” and other broad comedies. “I was afraid of it. You’re playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, and anyone I would give it to would make it his own. It’s hard to ask Neil Simon to write your idea.”So Martin spent four years writing it himself, soliciting suggestions for updates and modifications from everyone from former collaborators Carl Reiner and Herbert Ross to the author Gore Vidal. In “Roxanne,” released in 1987 (and streaming on Hulu), Cyrano de Bergerac has become C.D. Bales (Martin), a firefighter, a wit, an “encyclopedia,” an acrobat, a chef and (obviously) a writer. The movie is filled with markers of the era: a saxophone-heavy jazz score, copious casual drug references, a gender flip for our hero’s best friend. Roxanne (Daryl Hannah), now spelled with another “n,” is a brainy astronomer; Christian is now “Chris” (Rick Rossovich), a hunky firefighter.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘No Exit’ Review: Who’s Bluffing?

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      In this diverting thriller, a young woman discovers a kidnapping in progress while snowed in at a rest stopIn “No Exit,” the director Damien Power gets straight to business: Darby (Havana Rose Liu) is stuck in rehab and groaning her way through another group therapy session when she gets a call about her mother, who has suffered a brain aneurysm. Darby — edgy and impetuous — hot-wires a nurse’s car and zooms off toward the hospital where her mother is. Unfortunately, Darby is foiled by a massive snowstorm, which keeps her stranded at a remote rest stop with four strangers and no cellphone service.Then, Darby discovers a little girl chained up in the back seat of someone’s van.Adapted from a 2017 novel by Taylor Adams — the kind of fast-burning read you might find in an airport newsstand — “No Exit” mostly comes across as a diverting boilerplate thriller. Imagine a compressed, significantly downgraded, true-crime-adjacent version of “The Hateful Eight,” another snowy chamber drama that devolves into gunplay and brutal bloodshed.Early on, the five marooned characters sit down to play B.S., a card game built around bluffing that clumsily mirrors Darby’s big question: Who among her new companions is responsible for the kidnapping?Most seemingly trustworthy is an older couple: Sandi (Dale Dickey), who is a retired nurse, and Ed (Dennis Haysbert), a former Marine. Lars (David Rysdahl), a twitchy Gollum-esque weirdo, would seem to fit the bill, but there’s also Ash (Danny Ramirez), a dashing jock, to consider.“No Exit” drops an arsenal of twists and rug-pulls at a machine gun’s pace, though Power, the director, doesn’t quite know how to milk the tension, and the perfunctory script (written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari) tries and fails to give the events a greater resonance. For her part, Liu makes an unusually complex final girl when she’s the only one left standing in a closing act showdown that makes crafty use of Darby’s drug addiction. And at least Power knows how to end things — that is, in ridiculous, flame-swept fashion.No ExitRated R for bloody violence, drugs, kidnapping, strong language and forced intimacy. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘The 2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films’ Review: Small Tales, Big Ideas

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      From near-future nightmares to inspirational sports narratives, this year’s shorts are an eclectic bunch.This year, the Oscar-nominated short films are being presented in three programs: live action, animation and documentary. Each program is reviewed below by a separate critic.Live ActionRarely is it the case that every nominee in a particular Oscar category feels equally deserving of attention, but this year’s program of live action shorts is particularly strong. All show situations range from mildly uncomfortable to downright terrifying, yet the quality of the filmmaking takes center stage.Anchored by a wise and wonderful lead performance from Anna Dzieduszycka, the Polish film “The Dress” follows Julia, a motel maid with dwarfism, as she tries to ease her loneliness and lose her virginity. A date with a handsome truck driver promises to do both, with troubling consequences. Filmed in beautifully soft light and directed by Tadeusz Lysiak in artful close-ups, this affecting and upsetting look at sex and disability reminds us that tall, dark strangers aren’t always a romantic prize.“On My Mind,” the sad-sweet entry from the Danish director Martin Strange-Hansen, doesn’t at first seem at all romantic, but just wait. When a strange, mournful man (Rasmus Hammerich) walks into a bar and begs to sing one special song on the karaoke machine, his deceptively simple request will soon be revealed as, quite literally, a matter of life or death.In the darkly humorous dystopia of “Please Hold,” a 19-minute nightmare set in a near-future world almost completely controlled by artificial intelligence, a young man (Erick Lopez) is arrested by a police drone and pressured to take a plea deal for an unknown crime. While he fumes in a hellscape of touch screens and disembodied voices — “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that!” — the Mexican American director KD Dávila delivers a shockingly clever satire of the privatized prison system and the elusiveness of justice.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.The Hosts: The comic actresses Wanda Sykes, Amy Schumer and Regina Hall are in final talks to take on the highly scrutinized role as a trio.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.Dreams of an education are dashed when Sezim (a terrific Alina Turdumamatova), the young Kyrgyz woman at the center of “Ala Kachuu (Take and Run),” is kidnapped and forced into marriage with a stranger. With empathy and energy, the German-Swiss director Maria Brendle uses Sezim’s youthful resilience as a cudgel against the repressive customs of rural Kyrgyzstan, a region where so-called bride kidnapping is believed to be a common practice.Preparations for a more joyful wedding open “The Long Goodbye,” Aneil Karia’s visceral film accompaniment to the actor and musician Riz Ahmed’s 2020 concept album of the same name. In a slight 12 minutes, Karia whisks us from scenes of happy chaos to abject horror, finally settling on fury as Ahmed, playing a brother of the bride, weaponizes his words and music to attack British racism. Powerful and tensely edited, this tiny movie says more in those few minutes than some movies manage in hours. JEANNETTE CATSOULISAnimationA scene from “Bestia,” a stop-motion chiller directed by Hugo Covarrubias.ShortsTV“Animation is not just for children,” Paul McCartney once said on an awards stage. “It is also for adults who take drugs.” The caution is apropos for the 2022 animated program of Oscar Nominated Shorts, although the “Yellow Submarine” star probably imagined more fun than what a doctor would prescribe for these anxiety-inducing films about heartbreak, resentment, torture and despair.“Bestia,” by Hugo Covarrubias, is a brutal and beautifully executed bit of payback against Chile’s Íngrid Olderöck, a paramilitary major who, according to survivors, trained dogs to sexually violate opponents of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Made of deceptively cuddly felt, Covarrubias’s stop-motion chiller follows Olderöck and her German Shepard into her nightmares, revealing her as a husk of a human hiding under a tight-lipped ceramic mask. Note the hairline crack at the temple of Olderöck’s near-expressionless face — a nod to a 1981 assassination attempt.The Russian illustrator Anton Dyakov clearly admires “Rocky.” A poster of the Sylvester Stallone Oscar-winner pokes into the frame of Dyakov’s “Boxballet,” a simple, bittersweet tale about a declining boxer with a crush on a Swan Lake dancer under the thumb of a predatory male director. In this expressionistic fable, creeps have claws, limbs stretch like linguine noodles, and the would-be lovebirds must settle for much less than seven glitzy sequels.The chain-smoker at the start of Alberto Mielgo’s restless stunner “The Windshield Wiper” resembles the artist himself, a visual consultant on “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” whose streaks of color and startling use of light position him as one of the foremost artists designing digital animation’s future. “What is love?” the man asks. In response, the film races through cynical vignettes scattered across the globe, and in one case, on a satellite above it.For nearly 35 years, Joanna Quinn has pencil-sketched the adventures of Beryl, a raucous British factory worker who here reveals she always fancied herself an artist. “Affairs of the Art” finds Beryl stark nude and painting herself blue. But the spotlight is on Beryl’s macabre childhood and a string of dead pets. Yes, McCartney — even kids can be creeps. As a balm, Aardman Animations offers “Robin Robin,” the one cartoon suitable for families. This musical trifle celebrates an orphaned baby bird who must learn to use her wings. It’s saccharine fluff — and Oscar prognosticators have it as their front-runner. AMY NICHOLSONDocumentaryThe high school football player Amaree McKenstry in “Audible.” His senior year is eventful beyond the gridiron.ShortsTVWith three out of five nominees, Netflix is almost bigfooting this year’s documentary short category, but one of those three is a standout. “Audible,” directed by Matt Ogens, observes the high school football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf, zeroing in on one player, Amaree McKenstry. His senior year is eventful beyond the gridiron, as he navigates a tentative relationship and reconnects with the father who left him.McKenstry says that while he cannot hear cheers, he is able to feel vibrations from running. The players approach football with a different perspective. (“A lot of the hearing teams don’t want to play us,” the coach says. “And most coaches don’t like to lose to deaf coaches.”) Ogens, without overdoing it, finds ways to appeal to viewers’ other senses, looking for tactile moments, like teenagers dancing to booming bass lines or team members slamming locker doors and flicking a light switch as they rev themselves to return to the field.School memories also suffuse “When We Were Bullies.” In the early 1990s, the filmmaker, Jay Rosenblatt, had a random encounter with a former fifth-grade classmate from the 1965-6 school year. Both had remembered an incident when they and others had ganged up on an ostracized student. Years later, haunted that he had been a bully, Rosenblatt seeks out other classmates and their 92-year-old teacher. Not all remember the dust up, and Rosenblatt consciously leads the movie into a dead end. Still, “When We Were Bullies” plays with structure and animation in ways that leaven it.Less successfully empathetic is “Lead Me Home,” a documentary on homelessness shot in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle from 2017 to 2020. It is simply too diffuse at this length; few of its 15 featured subjects emerge with clarity, although it has heart-rending moments, like when a mother explains why she shops for groceries and makes dinner for her children instead of accepting meals. The many aerial shots of encampments inadvertently call attention to the distant perspective of the filmmakers, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, whose overuse of time-lapse photography and unfortunate deployment of Coldplay’s “Midnight” suggest it’s easier to lyricize poverty than explore it.“Three Songs for Benazir,” from the directors Gulistan and Elizabeth Mirzaei, follows a father-to-be in a displaced-persons camp in Kabul who yearns to join the Afghan National Army, but others are convinced his place is in the poppy fields. A poignant epilogue set four years later confirms a downbeat fate, while also hinting at a great unrealized feature that might have been.Finally, the New York Times Op-Doc “The Queen of Basketball,” directed by Ben Proudfoot, puts a spotlight on Lusia Harris, who died in January. In close-up, she recalls her career as a pathbreaking basketball player, the first woman to be officially drafted by an N.B.A. team. Released before Harris’s death, the movie now makes for a simple but moving memorial, interspersing Harris’s recollections with clips of key games and headlines. BEN KENIGSBERGThe 2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Live ActionNot rated. In English and several other languages, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.The 2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films: AnimatedNot rated. In English and several other languages, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.The 2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films: DocumentaryNot rated. In English and several other languages, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Shelf Life: Our Collections and the Passage of Time

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      Set off by a scene in a movie, a critic reflects on cultural baggage: “The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again.”The physical objects that represent pop-culture obsessions: A.O. Scott’s books and DVDs at home.Like a lot of other people, I enjoyed Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World,” a young woman’s coming-of-age story that’s also a spiky romantic comedy of sorts. But the reason I can’t stop thinking about this movie (which I can’t discuss further without risking spoilers, so be warned) has to do with its status as a Gen X midlife cri de coeur.The full cry — appropriately laced with self-mockery, self-pity and highly specific pop-cultural references — arrives in a single devastating scene near the end of the film. Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a graphic novelist who like the director is in his mid-40s, is dying of pancreatic cancer. Julie (Renate Reinsve), the film’s official protagonist, who had earlier broken his heart, comes to visit him in the hospital. She finds him playing furious air drums as “Back to Dungaree High” by the Norwegian death-punk band Turbonegro blasts in his headphones.“It’s such a trip just to survive,” the singer howls, and Aksel is preoccupied with matters of life, death and popular culture. He tells Julie that he spends most of his time listening to familiar music and rewatching his favorite movies, including “The Godfather,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and the films of David Lynch. “The world I knew has disappeared,” he laments.What was that world? It was “all about going to stores.”Scott writes, “I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away.”Or in at least one case, destroyed by something else precious to him.That description isn’t meant to trivialize his youthful pastimes and passions, but rather to convey their magic and meaning to a millennial whose primary experience of shopping is likely to consist of clicking on an icon rather than rifling through bins. Aksel goes on to rhapsodize about the record, comic-book and video emporiums he used to frequent.His pilgrimage stops may be particular to Oslo, but they have counterparts in every city. Julie, who works in a bookstore and dabbles in writing, is hardly oblivious to the utility and charm of physical media. But she doesn’t quite understand the intense emotion — the longing, the meaning, the sense of identity — that Aksel attaches to memories of an earlier style of consumption. This isn’t necessarily a difference of taste or sensibility. It’s more a contrasting relationship with the material aspects of culture, a different way of living in a world of things, and it defines the generational schism between them.I know which side I’m on. I don’t think of myself as a shopper, but the truth is that in my time on this earth I’ve rarely been able to walk past a book or record store without going in, or to walk out empty-handed. I’ve surrounded myself with things, the most precious of which have been scratched, scribbled in, lent out or given away. As Aksel says, “I’ve spent my life doing that — collecting all that stuff,” but not because of its monetary or even its sentimental value. Those objects begin as vessels of meaning and tokens of taste, but their acquisition becomes a kind of compulsion, emptied of its original passion. “I kept doing it when it stopped giving me the powerful emotions,” Aksel reflects. “Now it’s all that I have left: memories of useless things.”The comic books, action figures and artwork collected by George Gene Gustines, a senior operations manager for The Times and our comics correspondent.I don’t completely identify with Aksel. He is kinder, cooler (it took me some Googling to identify that Turbonegro song), a few years younger and a lot better looking than I am. But it isn’t enough for me to say, as people do these days, that watching him made me feel seen. The effect was more intimate, more shocking, more shameful, as if Trier had dumped out a laundry bag full of my favorite vintage band T-shirts on Aksel’s hospital bed for the whole movie-loving world to rummage through. Seen? I felt smelled.Not that this is all about me. What Aksel says to Julie confirms him as an especially sympathetic and self-aware specimen of a recognizable, not always beloved type: not a fan, exactly, but a highly opinionated hybrid of connoisseur, collector and critic. You might know a version of this guy from the novels of Nick Hornby (or the films adapted from them), notably “High Fidelity” and “Juliet, Naked.” Or maybe from movies by Kevin Smith, Noah Baumbach, Judd Apatow and other Gen X auteurs. He could be your older brother, your ex- or current partner, your best friend or the long-lost buddy you’re sort of in touch with on Facebook. Your dad, even. But then again, if you’re like me, the teen spirit you smell may be your ownIn real life, this kind of person isn’t always a guy. Popular culture often assumes as much, and assumes his whiteness, too, which is partly a failure of collective imagination, and partly a matter of whose cultural obsessions are taken as representative. Chuck Klosterman, perhaps the emblematic white male cultural critic of his (which is to say my) generation, somewhat inadvertently makes this point in his new book, “The Nineties,” when he implies that the release of Nirvana’s album “Nevermind” was a more significant world-historical event than the fall of the Berlin Wall.The bootleg concert T-shirts, vintage Macs and VHS tapes collected by Caryn Ganz, The Times’s pop music editor, and Richard the cat.In typical ’90s fashion, the claim is hedged with knowingness and booby-trapped with irony. Klosterman understands that there were plenty of people in the ’90s — and not only in Berlin — who never cared much about “Nevermind.” The appeal and the annoyance value of his book arise from the same source, namely his unapologetic, extravagant commitment to generalizing from his own experience. “The Nineties,” with the modest, generic subtitle “A Book,” is neither history nor memoir, but rather uses each genre as an alibi for the shortcomings of the other. Of course this is just one guy’s recollection of the stuff he saw, thought about, listened to and bought in the last decade of the 20th century. But it’s also, Klosterman periodically insists, an account of what that decade was really like, a catalog of what mattered at the time and in hindsight. You can argue with the second version — how can you write a cultural history of the American 1990s without so much as an index entry for “Angels in America”? — but not so much with the first. What the ’90s meant is open for debate. What the decade felt like, maybe less so.This is what makes Klosterman, who was born in 1972, a cheerful, mainstream American counterpart to Aksel’s gloomy, alternative-minded Nordic intellectual. They are both ’90s guys, driven to explain something that seems in danger of being forgotten or misunderstood to people who weren’t there. To a degree it’s the same something, but not quite the something either one thinks it is. Klosterman seeks to illuminate the reality of a unique and crucial period; Aksel tries to share with Julie the sources of his own sensibility. But the cultural reference points are red herrings. The deep motive is a longing to arrest and reverse the movement of time, to recover some of the ardor and bewilderment of youth.The art at the home of Roberta Smith, The Times’s co-chief art critic, and Jerry Saltz, New York magazine’s senior art critic.The things you loved when you were young will never be able to make you young again. The reluctant acceptance of this fact is the source of nostalgia, a disorder that afflicts every modern generation in its own special way. Members of Generation X grew up under the heavy, sanctimonious shadow of the baby boom’s long adolescence, among crates of LPs and shelves of paperbacks to remind us of what we had missed. Just as baby boomers’ rebellion against their Depression- and war-formed parents defined their styles and poses, so did our impatience with the boomers set ours in motion. But I’m not talking so much about a grand narrative of history as about what Aksel might call the useless stuff — the objects and gadgets that form the infrastructure of memory.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Creation Stories’ Review: The Man Behind a Raucous Record Label

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      A rock ’n’ roll biopic about Creation Records, which gave us Oasis, My Bloody Valentine and more.There’s a poem in which the British writer and musician Martin Newell turns the name of a superstar 1960s guitarist into a verb. Like so:I Hank Marvinnedwe all didwith badminton racketsin front of our mirrors.No matter what country, if you grew up when rock ’n’ roll was king, you knew what he was talking about. Alan McGee knew. In the early scenes of Nick Moran’s “Creation Stories,” a fiction movie based on the real man’s autobiography, we see him, a nerdy Glasgow teenager in the ’70s, whacking a racket while his stereo makes one. Dad doesn’t approve.This bouncy, time-hopping biopic recounts McGee’s journey to rock legend — not as a performer but as a manager and the owner of a label that championed trailblazing artists like My Bloody Valentine. “I didn’t have any talent,” an older but not yet wiser McGee, played by Ewen Bremner, admits. The story of how McGee managed to conjure up the phenomenally successful label Creation — and, with its supernova band Oasis, shape the British pop zeitgeist — while conducting himself in a manner highly contrary to that embraced by highly effective businesspeople is hardly without interest.But for much of its running time the movie’s reverb knob is set high, and what’s echoing are the movies “Trainspotting” (in which Bremner co-starred; its director Danny Boyle is a producer here) and “24 Hour Party People” (about another gonzo entrepreneur and his record label).“Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair. The interesting times in which, as McGee puts it here, “corporate disguised itself as hipster,” could make a righteous stand-alone movie. Alas, “Creation Stories” only spends about 20 minutes on them.Creation StoriesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Available to watch on AMC+, and to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Desperate Hour’ Review: An Exercise in Panic

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      Naomi Watts plays a mother whose morning jog becomes a nightmare in this thriller from Phillip Noyce.If your 84-minute movie about family trauma turns into a school-shooting thriller but that thriller is also about the family’s mother having the worst jog of her life and that jog includes dozens of phone calls to and from 9-1-1, it doesn’t need a director. It needs a life coach and a personal trainer. The audience, meanwhile, needs a hostage negotiator. That mom? She basically becomes one, too. And because Naomi Watts plays her, it seemed fair to assume that Amy’s helplessness would achieve more than this single note. But nope.Not much time is required to explain what’s happening here. A recently widowed mother of two named Amy (Watts) leaves her teenage son languishing in bed while she gets some morning exercise in the nearby woods of a generic mid-Atlantic town. While she’s out, Amy discovers that someone heavily armed has invaded her son’s school and opened fire. Is he a victim? Is he the shooter?For answers, Amy races toward danger on the ankle she twists, making frantic calls the whole way: to the mechanic not far from the siege, to a friend with a kid at the school, to a Black police dispatcher (repeatedly) named Dedra, who, in the middle of all the chaos, makes time to comfort Amy with lines like, “You did what any other mom would do.”The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone. Watts has to conjure anguish from dropped calls and dying batteries, from deceitful ride-share arrival times and unknown callers, from calls that go straight to voice mail. She has to find a way to play the sort of person who’s already taken and made half a dozen mid-run calls before there’s any crisis, someone whom we don’t mind saying something like, “Siri: Directions to Lakewood Community Center. Fastest route” or “You got other people’s kids out. Why can’t you get mine out?”Few screen actors are better at externalizing parental anguish than Watts. The physical beating she took in “The Impossible” felt proportional to her performance of a mother’s determination to reconvene her family. The movie turned the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 into an action-melodrama, but Watts’s mastery of bodily suffering transcended the film’s racial turpitude. Her privileged mommy persuasively stood in for maternity itself.“The Desperate Hour” becomes its own kind of impossible. There’s no way for Watts to make this person more than the most exasperating character I’ve experienced in a work of fiction in a long time. Until Amy, I couldn’t truly have appreciated the difference between courage and effrontery. She guilts that mechanic into some probably illegal sleuthing. And when she makes her urgent limp to the scene holding two phones, it was my turn to call the cops. Amy, come on. That’s your Lyft driver’s phone!Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Burning Sea’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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      An oil-rig accident in the North Sea kicks off this well-acted, pleasantly predictable survival thriller.Even allowing for the elastic credibility standards of the average survival movie, “The Burning Sea” is a stretch. (A favorite moment is when the unconscious half of the central couple pops awake at an especially critical juncture.) Yet if the machinations of the plot are a tad rickety, its geologic premise is inarguably stable.Tucking a simple romance inside a disaster thriller, the director John Andreas Andersen uses an oil-rig collapse off the coast of Norway to deliver a dire warning of environmental disruption. When Sofia (a charming Kristine Kujath Thorp), an underwater robotics expert, joins the team seeking survivors and an explanation for the accident, she’s horrified to learn that a larger catastrophe could be imminent. Unfortunately, mitigation efforts will prove too late to prevent Sofia’s boyfriend (Henrik Bjelland), a sweet-natured rig worker, from requiring the kind of extreme rescue effort only a woman in love would undertake.Nodding to the cataclysmic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the screenwriters Lars Gudmestad and Harald Rosenlow-Eeg underscore the possibly calamitous oceanic consequences of decades of drilling. Opportunities for a more fraught political drama, however, are basically ignored: When an oil-company executive instructs Sofia to sign a nondisclosure agreement, we expect at least some cover-up shenanigans. Instead, we get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.A more tantalizing tale is teased in segments that bookend the movie and, based on interviews with retired oil workers, explain the cowboy nature of the industry’s early days, when training consisted of an instruction to “just follow the Americans.” Maybe not always the best advice.The Burning SeaRated PG-13 for language appropriate to the expectation of a fiery, watery death. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More