Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Jon Bernthal’s Guide to Making It as a Supporting Actor

      by

      For Jon Bernthal, the purest kind of acting happens as part of an ensemble.“It’s such a collaborative art,” he said. “The best thing you can do as an actor, whether you’re the lead of the show or you’re just coming in for a day, is to lift everybody up and try to be a great teammate.”That attitude served Bernthal well on the sports drama “King Richard,” in which he plays Rick Macci, the upbeat, mustachioed tennis coach who took the fledgling superstars Venus and Serena Williams under his wing while sometimes butting heads with their father, Richard (Will Smith). Though he comes into the film late, Bernthal proves so charming that he helped power “King Richard” to a recent Screen Actors Guild nomination for outstanding cast in a motion picture, and has even been the beneficiary of awards buzz himself.With his rough-hewed looks and eagerness to plunge deeply into character, Bernthal has become one of Hollywood’s busiest actors. In the last few months alone, the 45-year-old Bernthal has popped up in the Sandra Bullock drama “The Unforgivable,” the “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” and the Angelina Jolie firefighting film “Those Who Wish Me Dead”; he’ll next be seen in Lena Dunham’s Sundance movie “Sharp Stick,” and the series “We Own This City” on HBO and “American Gigolo” on Showtime.From left, Bernthal with Will Smith, Demi Singleton and Saniyya Sidney in “King Richard.” Bernthal auditioned for the part.Chiabella James/Warner Bros. Part of the reason Bernthal works so much is that he has no ego about whether he is No. 1 on the call sheet. Whether it’s a brief cameo in “Wind River,” a flashy supporting role in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “The Walking Dead,” or the lead in a series like “The Punisher,” Bernthal will still give his all, and he has a lot of hard-won wisdom about how to succeed as an ensemble player.“With a lot of the decisions I make, it’s never about the size of the role,” Bernthal told me recently over Zoom. “Does the script move me? Does it scare me? The people involved, are they people that have affected me?”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When you show up on a movie and they’ve already been shooting for weeks, what is it like to find your place there as a supporting actor?Every set has its own culture and has its own methodology. If you’re there from the beginning, you get to be a real part of welcoming others in when those people come in on their first day. When I showed up on “Sicario,” Emily Blunt made me feel like she had been waiting for me to get there: “Oh my God, Jon Bernthal! I just saw you in ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’ I’m so glad you’re here.” Whether it was real or not, she made me feel 100 feet tall. DiCaprio does the same thing.On the other hand, I also love it when I come in and don’t know a soul and I don’t have to be a part of their culture at all. My friend James Badge Dale and I talk about it like we get to be hired assassins: We go in, throw down and walk away. There’s something unbelievably liberating in that. My favorite thing in movies is when you see a character come and go, and you’re so curious where they go next.How can you be sure that when you get on set with the lead actor — whether it’s Sandra Bullock in “The Unforgivable” or Will Smith in “King Richard” — you’re going to be able to find some chemistry?With Sandy, she could find chemistry with anyone. Again, she’s one of those people where you walk onto set and she’s so unbelievably welcoming and present — we just immediately started talking about our kids and connecting and laughing. But look, I’ve been with movie stars who are absolutely intent on letting you know that they’re movie stars, and when the scene cuts, everybody goes back to their trailers and it’s completely ridiculous. That’s when I know it’s all about those precious moments between “action” and “cut,” and I’ve got to get myself ready on my own.I assume you’re at the point now where you don’t always have to audition …But I did audition for “King Richard.” The director, Reinaldo Marcus Green, hadn’t seen me do anything like that and I really welcomed the opportunity. Man, for me, there’s nothing better than an audition. It’s the only time you get to put something down that’s totally yours and nobody gets to influence it. If I’m asked to be on set after I’ve auditioned, I know I’ve earned my way there.Jon Bernthal likes to remind himself how lucky he is now to be working: “I remember casting directors looking at my big nose and my giant ears and just being like, ‘What are you doing here?’”Pat Martin for The New York TimesSo how do you deal with it when those auditions don’t pay off?When you look at the entertainment industry, it’s amazing how doors are slammed in your face. I remember casting directors looking at my big nose and my giant ears and just being like, “What are you doing here?” Feeling like you don’t belong, agents never returning your phone calls. You get so much rejection and people make you feel so small, and the second that things start to change for you, those same people all want something.But you’ve got to remind yourself how lucky you are to be doing this, even when it’s not working out. Look, when I was starting out and I was going through really hard times, my wife was an I.C.U. trauma nurse, so there’d be plenty of times I would get home and I would have tears in my eyes of frustration and then my wife would talk about her day. The things she was encountering — holding somebody’s hand as they were passing, or letting somebody know that they weren’t going to ever see a family member again — just put it all in such clear perspective for me.Your first screen roles were guest-star spots on TV procedurals like “CSI,” “Without a Trace” and two different “Law and Order” spinoffs. What do you remember about that time?I remember being so wide-eyed and so naïve. One of the first TV sets I walked into, they told me to go to hair and makeup, and I didn’t know what hair and makeup was. So I just went into a trailer, and the lead of the show was changing in that trailer and she yelled, “Get out,” and threw a shoe right at my head. I had to do a scene with her that day!It took a real long time for me to feel comfortable on-set. I remember Vincent D’Onofrio talked to me after a take when I did his show [“Law and Order: Criminal Intent”], and he said, “Hey, what you did there was pretty good.” Something like that can carry you through months of rejection. I always try to remember that with young actors, because the littlest thing can keep you going.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Jon Stewart to Receive Mark Twain Prize for American Humor

      by

      The comedian and former host of “The Daily Show” will receive the Kennedy Center’s annual comedy honor at a ceremony in April.Jon Stewart may no longer be a nightly presence in Americans’ living rooms, but he’s stayed busy directing a film, joining Twitter, making cameos on his friend Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” debuting his own, and now, winning a comedy prize.The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced on Tuesday that it will recognize the 59-year-old former “Daily Show” host’s political satire and activism when it presents him with its 23rd annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, given to individuals who have “had an impact on American society in ways similar to” Twain, at a ceremony on April 24.Stewart, who was host of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central for 16 years, stepped away in 2015 to pursue other passions including filmmaking and social activism on behalf of 9/11 first responders. Last fall, he debuted a new biweekly issues-comedy show on Apple TV+, “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” which brings together people affected by different parts of a global problem, like war and the economic issues, to discuss the way forward.Deborah F. Rutter, the president of the Kennedy Center, said in a statement: “For more than three decades, Jon Stewart has brightened our lives and challenged our minds as he delivers current events and social satire with his trademark wit and wisdom. For me, tuning into his television programs over the years has always been equal parts entertainment and truth.”Previous winners of the Mark Twain Prize include Bill Murray, Dave Chappelle, David Letterman, Eddie Murphy, Jay Leno, Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres. The award has been presented annually since 1998, excepting the pandemic years 2020 and 2021. The prize was also given to Bill Cosby, in 2009, but the Kennedy Center rescinded it in 2018 after he was convicted of sexual assault. His conviction was overturned by a Pennsylvania court last year. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Philippe Gaulier on the Art of Clowning and Sacha Baron Cohen

      by

      The French master teacher Philippe Gaulier has worked with stars like Sacha Baron Cohen. But at 78, are his methods, which include insults, outdated?ÉTAMPES, France — It’s unlikely anyone alive has made more clowns cry than Philippe Gaulier.In a supposedly more sensitive era, hundreds of people regularly travel from all around the world to a small town an hour outside of Paris to study clowning with Gaulier, a gruff 78-year-old éminence grise known for his blunt, flamboyantly negative feedback. Wearing a pink tie, beret and stern look over a bushy white beard on a recent tour of the school, he looked the part of the guru — a mischievous one. He pointed at a large photo of himself teaching in China and joked he was “Clown Chairman Mao.”In his office, sitting across from his wife, Michiko Miyazaki Gaulier, a former student who is now a colleague, he made no apologies for his pugnacious style, saying students who are not funny have a choice: “You have to change or leave the school. You are boring. If you want to stay boring all your life, you will never be a clown.”Gaulier has been teaching clowns for about half a century, but his stature has grown in recent years, becoming an influential and divisive figure of considerable mystique, the Dumbledore of round red noses. The primary reason for his raised profile is the success of Sacha Baron Cohen, a former student who praised Gaulier on Marc Maron’s podcast in 2016 and described receiving bad reviews from him in a 2021 appearance on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”“I was always interested in comedy, but it was Gaulier who helped me understand how to be funny,” Baron Cohen wrote in the preface to Gaulier’s book “The Tormentor.”Clowns remain a staple of the circus, but the reach of the ancient art is much wider these days, with a growing theatrical scene as well as performers crossing over into other forms. The alumni network at Gaulier’s school, where many make lifelong connections, is expansive — spanning film and theater (Emma Thompson, Kathryn Hunter), circus and live comedy, with students like the Los Angeles comedian Dr. Brown becoming gurus themselves. Another protégé, Zach Zucker, is the host of Stamptown, a popular showcase of cutting-edge comics in Brooklyn, its name inspired by the town of Gaulier’s school. “He has become the name to drop,” Geoff Sobelle, an acclaimed performer and former student, said about Gaulier’s reputation among clowns.In a two-hour interview last month, Gaulier, speaking in English, came off less like a teacher than a very funny insult comic, teasing and trash-talking, tossing jabs at everyone from Slava Polunin, the Tony-nominated Russian clown (“For children who has problem to sleep, can be good”) to the legendary mime Marcel Marceau (“He’s a maniac with his gestures”). Asked if someone can be funny who didn’t make him laugh, he said it was possible, before turning back to me, gesturing at my clothes: “It’s possible that you with your glasses, your hair, that you are funny,” he said, before the punchline. “And someone really well-dressed is, too. The opposite of you.”He’s allergic to anything that smacks of pretension, which inevitably inspires one of his favorite expressions: “of my balls,” as in Slava is a “poetic clown of my balls.”Compared with other clowning teachers, Gaulier said he does not emphasize technique or physical virtuosity. His pedagogy aims for something more intangible, nurturing a childlike spirit, a sense of play onstage. The most important quality in a clown is keeping things light and present, and, as he said with the utmost respect, stupid. Finding “your idiot,” as he calls it, is the essence of clowning, which, unlike comic acting, requires a performer to stick with the same character. “A clown is a special kind of idiot, absolutely different and innocent,” he said. “A marvelous idiot.”Gaulier “helped me understand how to be funny,” Sacha Baron Cohen has written.Cedrine Scheidig for The New York TimesGaulier said he could put a red nose on anyone and tell how they played as a 7-year-old. Students, who do in fact do exercises in red noses, describe this in gushing terms.“He liberated me,” said René Bazinet, a highly respected German-Canadian clown who has worked for years with Cirque du Soleil. “In my first year, I had to read a poem, and he kept stopping me, saying, ‘Why are you clearing your throat? Say the poem. Why are you doing this? Why that?’ And one moment, my brain just opened up. His way of attacking the falseness was a relief to me. I was becoming an idiot.”This process can sometimes sound like a masochistic cleansing ritual. “He just insults his students all day long until they start laughing and their ego gets out of the way,” Bazinet said. “You are taking your ego to the slaughterhouse.”Former students inevitably have stories of bruising feedback, usually told with the affection of grizzled war veterans. Kendall Cornell, who leads an all-female clown troupe, Clowns Ex Machina, recalled a lot of tears, but also a “mind-blowing” experience that taught her things she didn’t learn in other classes. There’s even a Facebook group that collects insults called “Philippe Gaulier Hit Me With a Stick.”The criticisms include “You sound like overcooked spaghetti in a pressure cooker” and “You are a very good clown for my grandmother.” He frequently focuses on the eyes. “If you are funny,” he told me, “you have funny eyes.”Gaulier is even stingy with compliments for his most successful alumni. Asked about Baron Cohen as a student, he said: “Nice boy. Tall.” Pressed for more, he added, “He’s a guy who when he understands something, he’s going to sell it. That’s enough.”When he was 8, Gaulier, who grew up in Paris near a circus, was kicked out of school for punching his gymnastics teacher. Seven decades later, he has no regrets. “He was a bastard,” he said, explaining that the instructor made students march like in the army. “I hate the military. Teachers, too.”His ambition was to be a tragic actor, but every time he tried to do serious work in drama school, he said with resignation, everyone laughed. This led him to a class with the renowned mime and master teacher Jacques Lecoq, whose pioneering training was rooted in clowning, improvisation and mask work. Gaulier became a performer who, with his partner, Pierre Byland, had a hit clown show, during which he broke 200 plates every night.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Nocturna’ Review: A Dark Night of the Soul

      by

      A seemingly haunted apartment building terrorizes a bewildered old man in this psychological thriller.Divided into two distinct features — the first of which can stand alone, while the second may work best as a dialogue with the first — “Nocturna” weaves memory and nightmare into a haunting tale of loneliness and regret.In “Side A — The Great Old Man’s Night,” we meet Ulysses (Pepe Soriano), a confused nonagenarian who lives with his infirm wife, Dalia (Marilú Marini), in a run-down apartment whose soaring ceilings and clouded windows enclose a spacious prison. When Ulysses tries to go shopping, he is gently deterred by the building’s super; yet their food supplies are dwindling, and Ulysses wonders why he can never leave, why their son never visits, and why he can’t recall their estranged daughter’s name. Maybe Dalia is right, and the homeowners’ association will evict them if they see how the couple is living. Or maybe his confinement is just the latest in a lifetime of Dalia’s cruelties.Like Ulysses, we search for answers, but the Argentine writer and director, Gonzalo Calzada, is interested only in dropping clues. As the clock creeps into the wee hours, the couple is awakened by their upstairs neighbor, Elena (Desirée Salgueiro), pounding on their door and screaming for help. A surging atmosphere of dread and danger envelops the film as a terrified Ulysses retreats into golden memories of a childhood game of hide-and-seek. The ghosts in the building, however — and the body in his courtyard — will not let him be.Sad and strange and deeply upsetting, “Side A” profits from Claudio Beiza’s velvety, gray-green images and a soundtrack pulsing with heartbeats and the distressing whine of Ulysses’s hearing aid. Our assumptions about his life and marriage may harden; but not until “Side B — Where the Elephants Go to Die,” are they enriched and interrogated. Here, Calzado uses more experimental techniques to expand his narrative, paralleling the flickering impermanence of filmed images with physical and psychological decay. Together, these unusual films do more than contemplate loss and longing: They warn us that the time to make amends might be briefer than we think.Nocturna: Side A — The Great Old Man’s NightNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.Nocturna: Side B — Where the Elephants Go to DieNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: Michelle Obama and ‘Billions’

      by

      A conversation with Michelle Obama airs on BET. And Showtime’s “Billions” begins a new season.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, Jan. 17-23. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBET HER PRESENTS … BECOMING: MICHELLE OBAMA IN CONVERSATION 7 p.m. on BET. Michelle Obama joins the stage to discuss some themes from her acclaimed 2018 memoir, “Becoming,” with students from about 20 colleges. Obama will speak on topical issues such as diversity and inclusion on college campuses and students’ mental wellness. The program will be moderated by Yara Shahidi.TuesdaySTORAGE WARS 9:30 p.m. on A&E. To bid, buy or sell? That is the question. The unbridled auction battles of “Storage Wars” return in the show’s 300th episode. The married auctioneer hosts, Dan and Laura Dotson, lead buyers through unpredictable storage units in hopes of hitting the jackpot rather than uncovering abandoned junk.PHILADELPHIA (1993) 8 p.m. on Showtime. If you’re looking for a quality classic, look no further. Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks), a gay man with AIDS, is fired from his Philadelphia law firm because of his illness. He struggles to find a lawyer who will represent him in court. Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) is the only attorney willing to take on his case; the two team up to fight his wrongful dismissal. “Philadelphia” was one of the first Hollywood movies to take the AIDS epidemic seriously. The film “mostly succeeds in being forceful, impassioned and moving, sometimes even rising to the full range of emotion that its subject warrants,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The New York Times.WednesdaySandra Bullock and Quinton Aaron in “The Blind Side.”Ralph Nelson/Warner Bros.THE BLIND SIDE (2009) 7 p.m. on FX. This film, adapted from the nonfiction book “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game,” by Michael Lewis, is likely to pull at heartstrings. It’s an atypical Cinderella story that follows a young African American man named Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron) who transcends a poverty-stricken childhood and becomes a N.F.L. lineman with the help of a wealthy, white evangelical couple (Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw). Bullock won her only Academy Award for best actress for her performance, as well as a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe. The movie “plays this story straight down the middle, shedding nuance and complication in favor of maximum uplift,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times.THE PRICE IS RIGHT AT NIGHT 8 p.m. on CBS. Drew Carey hosts CBS’s one-hour spinoff special of the extremely long-running game show “The Price Is Right.” The hosts of “The Talk” play alongside contestants for the hunger-relief charity Feeding America.ThursdayCommon in “Let the World See.”ABC NewsLET THE WORLD SEE: SAY HIS NAME 10:30 p.m. on ABC. This limited docuseries will follow the powerful quest for justice that Mamie Till Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, embarked on after her son’s vicious 1955 murder. Till Mobley’s activism, which included the decision to give her son an open-casket funeral, helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The series includes interviews with Till Mobley and Emmett Till’s cousins, along with the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., Michelle Obama, the former F.B.I. agent Lent Rice, the activist and recording artist Common and more. Jay-Z and Will Smith are among the series’s executive producers.FridaySTARS ON STAGE FROM WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE: BRANDON VICTOR DIXON 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-nominated Broadway star Brandon Victor Dixon is the performer for this final installment of a three-part PBS concert special, filmed at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut. Dixon sings both classic and contemporary songs. Previous installments of this series, including episodes with the singer-songwriter Shoshana Bean and the Tony-winning performer Gavin Creel, are available on the PBS website.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Alec Baldwin Turns Over His Phone in ‘Rust’ Investigation

      by

      Detectives investigating the actor’s fatal shooting of a cinematographer on a film set in New Mexico had gotten a search warrant for the phone nearly a month ago.The actor Alec Baldwin turned his phone in to the police in Suffolk County, N.Y., on Friday morning, his lawyer said, starting a process that will allow investigators to collect data related to his fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” last year in New Mexico.Mr. Baldwin agreed to a process in which he would hand over his iPhone and its password, and the phone’s data would be reviewed by officials from the Suffolk County police department and district attorney’s office before the relevant data would be passed to the authorities in New Mexico, according to a search agreement provided by Mr. Baldwin’s lawyer. Mr. Baldwin, who has a home in Suffolk County, handed the phone over to the police himself, his lawyer, Aaron Dyer, said. Juan Rios, a spokesman for the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, said his office had been notified that the phone was handed over to the authorities in Suffolk County, N.Y.According to the terms of the search agreement, officials in Suffolk County will review the phone’s communications — including texts, emails, call records, voice mail messages, digital images and internet browser history — between June 1 and Dec. 5 last year, and will exclude any communications with his lawyers or his wife, Hilaria, which are protected by privilege.“Mr. Baldwin has a right to privacy regarding the contents of the iPhone, as well as regarding communications with his attorneys and with his spouse, which communications are protected by the attorney-client privilege and the marital communications privilege respectively,” the agreement states..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The police in Suffolk County are to create a “forensic download” of the iPhone “in its entirety,” according to the agreement, before the device is returned to Mr. Baldwin.The fatal shooting occurred on Oct. 21, while Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver from a shoulder holster. He had been told that the gun did not contain any live rounds, but it did, and it discharged a bullet that killed the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded the movie’s director, Joel Souza. Investigators looking into the shooting, and seeking to determine how a live round got into the gun, secured a search warrant for Mr. Baldwin’s phone on Dec. 16.The agreement to turn over Mr. Baldwin’s phone states that the search warrant is not enforceable in New York — where he lives — and that without Mr. Baldwin’s consent to search the phone, the authorities would be required to seek a separate warrant in the state. To avoid that, the agreement says, Mr. Baldwin has agreed to proceed “as if the NM Warrant had been obtained in New York.”“Alec voluntarily provided his phone to the authorities this morning so they can finish their investigation,” Mr. Dyer said in a statement. “But this matter isn’t about his phone, and there are no answers on his phone. Alec did nothing wrong.”The set of the movie “Rust,” where Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot in October.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressWhile generally limiting their search to communications between June 1 and Dec. 5, officers will be able to access communications with Matthew Hutchins, Ms. Hutchins’s widower, and Santa Fe law enforcement officials from any date, according to the search agreement. It said that Mr. Baldwin had agreed to provide a list of telephone numbers for “individuals and entities connected with the production of the film.” The officials “may only extract call records for calls to or from those numbers during the relevant time period,” according to the agreement.After media outlets reported last week that the Santa Fe authorities did not have Mr. Baldwin’s phone three weeks after the warrant was granted, Mr. Baldwin posted a video on his Instagram account saying that any suggestion that he was not cooperating with investigators was “a lie.” He said that the process would take time and that the authorities “have to specify what exactly they want.”“They can’t just go through your phone and take, you know, your photos or your love letters to your wife or what have you,” Mr. Baldwin said in the video.In a television interview last month, Mr. Baldwin denied responsibility for Ms. Hutchins’s death, saying that he did not know how live rounds got onto the film set and that he did not pull the trigger before the gun went off.Before handing Mr. Baldwin the gun on set, the movie’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, called out “cold gun,” an industry term meaning that a firearm does not have live rounds and is safe to use. Mr. Baldwin said in the interview that Ms. Hutchins had been instructing him on where to point the gun when it discharged.“It is clear that he was told it was a cold gun, and was following instructions when this tragic accident occurred,” Mr. Dyer said in the statement. “The real question that needs to be answered is how live rounds got on the set in the first place.” More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      One Indelible Scene: When the Show Must Go on in ‘Drive My Car’

      by

      Through a staging of “Uncle Vanya,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi creates an intimacy for his characters that lets the artifice of cinema fall away.I’m going to talk about how the movie ends, but I’m not going to spoil it.The plot of “Drive My Car” doesn’t really work that way in any case. Adapted by Ryusuke Hamaguchi (working with Takamasa Oe) from a novella by Haruki Murakami, the film is an adventure of gentle turns and an occasional swerve, with big surprises and small revelations scattered like scenery on a long road trip. You may be startled at how quickly it all goes by; the movie lasts almost three hours, but the time passes easily.A brief, tactful summary may be in order, a kind of Google Maps précis of the route. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a Tokyo theater director and actor, is married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), an actress, who is having an affair with a younger colleague. The couple had a young daughter who died some years before, and when Oto dies suddenly, she leaves Yusuke paralyzed with grief. Or so we surmise. He has a tendency to camouflage his feelings behind a facade of calm, punctuating his habitual reticence with an occasional flash of irritation or sardonic humor.He keeps working, taking up a residency at a Hiroshima arts center, where he will direct an experimental production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” I don’t think I can spoil that one either. The great works are like that, and one of the marvels of “Drive My Car” is the way it illuminates and refreshes a sturdy old classic, deriving some of its own power, novelty and mystery from Chekhov’s well-thumbed text.A little bit more about “Drive My Car,” though. In Hiroshima, Yusuke is assigned a chauffeur, Misaki (Toko Miura), who shuttles him to rehearsals, errands and social engagements in his beloved red Saab. Like Yusuke, she has suffered a terrible loss, and their shared grief — or rather, their common state of raw, lonely, unacknowledged anguish — becomes the foundation of a delicate and improbable friendship.Unacknowledged anguish underlies the relationship between the characters played by Nishijima and Toko Miura.Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe story of that bond culminates in an intensely emotional scene in a snowy field — tears are shed, and Yusuke at last gives voice to his hitherto unarticulated pain — that would surely be an Oscar-night showstopper. (And if the academy has the good sense to nominate “Drive My Car” for best picture and Nishijima and Miura for acting, maybe it will be). But what I want to talk about is what happens next.Which is that the show goes on. As the “Uncle Vanya” opening night approaches, we have been privy to some backstage intrigue and immersed in Yusuke’s unusual approach to the play. The cast includes actors from various countries, all of them speaking Chekhov’s dialogue in their native languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Tagalog and Korean Sign Language. Once an audience is present, supertitles are projected on a screen behind the stage. The English-language viewer, already reading subtitles, learns to listen for the tones and rhythms of the different languages, including the swish and tap of signing hands.That may sound forbiddingly cerebral, like the kind of high-concept aesthetic undertaking that tends to be more interesting in theory than in practice. It turns out to be the opposite. “Uncle Vanya,” a play about how hard it is to hold onto a sense of what matters in life, has rarely felt more vital or immediate, as if it had not been written in the 1890s but rather lived in front of our eyes.Yusuke, white powder sprinkled in his hair and a mustache pasted to his lip, is playing the title role, a 47-year-old man driven almost to madness — almost to murder — by unrequited yearning and existential disappointment. His appearance onstage is an unexpected development, the payoff of a subplot that I will leave to you to discover.“Uncle Vanya” being performed in a scene from “Drive My Car.” Sideshow and Janus FilmsYusuke has stayed away from acting since Oto’s death, and as “Uncle Vanya” unfolds, the shock to his system seems apparent. After Vanya’s Act III rant about his squandered prospects and bitter regrets — “If I’d lived normally, I might have been another Schopenhauer or Dostoyevsky!” — he steadies himself against a table in the wings, seeming to struggle for breath and composure.Perhaps Vanya’s plight reminds him of his own, or perhaps the demands of acting are too much to bear. The first Russian production of “Uncle Vanya” was directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky, the progenitor of Method acting, in which the actor plumbs his own experience to locate the emotional truth of the character. Knowing what we know about Yusuke — having seen him weeping in the snow in the previous scene — it’s easy to grasp why he would be overcome by Vanya’s torment.But he’s also a professional, and the scene proceeds briskly through a montage of the performance. We see the onstage action from the side, then on a video monitor in the green room, observing the movement of props and bodies rather than absorbing the movement of Chekhov’s drama. The film seems to be settling into a muted denouement.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Mommy Is Going Away for Awhile

      by

      The antiheroine of the moment, in movies like “The Lost Daughter” and novels like “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” commits the mother’s ultimate sin: abandoning her children.There are so many ways to do motherhood wrong, or so a mother is told. She can be overbearing or remote. She can smother or neglect. She can mother in such a specifically bad way that she is assigned a bad-mom archetype: stage mother, refrigerator mother, “cool mom.” She can hover like a helicopter mom or bully like a bulldozer mom. But the thing she cannot do — the thing that is so taboo it rivals actually murdering her offspring — is leave.The mother who abandons her children haunts our family narratives. She is made into a lurid tabloid figure, an exotic exception to the common deadbeat father. Or she is sketched into the background of a plot, her absence lending a protagonist a propulsive origin story. This figure arouses our ridicule (consider Meryl Streep’s daffy American president in “Don’t Look Up,” who forgets to save her son as she flees the apocalypse) or our pity (see “Parallel Mothers,” where an actress has ditched her daughter for lousy television parts). But lately the vanishing mother has provoked a fresh response: respect.In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film “The Lost Daughter,” she is Leda (played, across two decades, by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman), a promising translator who deserts her young daughters for several years to pursue her career (and a dalliance with an Auden scholar). In HBO’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” a gender-scrambled remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 mini-series, she is Mira (Jessica Chastain), a Boston tech executive who jets to Tel Aviv for an affair disguised as a work project. And in Claire Vaye Watkins’s autofictional novel “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” she is also Claire Vaye Watkins, a novelist who leaves her infant to smoke a ton of weed, sleep with a guy who lives in a van and confront her own troubled upbringing.In each case, her children are not abandoned outright; they are left in the care of fathers and other relatives. When a man leaves in this way, he is unexceptional. When a woman does it, she becomes a monster, or perhaps an antiheroine riding out a dark maternal fantasy. Feminism has supplied women with options, but a choice also represents a foreclosure, and women, because they are people, do not always know what they want. As these protagonists thrash against their own decisions, they also bump up against the limits of that freedom, revealing how women’s choices are rarely socially supported but always thoroughly judged.A mother losing her children is a nightmare. The title of “The Lost Daughter” refers in part to such an incident, when a child disappears at the beach. But a mother leaving her children — that’s a daydream, an imagined but repressed alternate life. In the “Sex and the City” reboot “And Just Like That…,” Miranda — now the mother to a teenager — counsels a professor who is considering having children. “There are so many nights when I would love to be a judge and go home to an empty house,” she says. And on Instagram, the airbrushed mirage of mothering is being challenged by displays of raw desperation. The Not Safe for Mom Group, which surfaces confessions of anonymous mothers, pulses with idle threats of role refusal, like: “I want to be alone!!! I don’t want to make your lunch!!”Being alone: that is the mother’s reasonable and functionally impossible dream. Especially recently, when avenues of escape have been sealed off: schools closed, day care centers suspended, offices shuttered, jobs lost or abandoned in crisis. Now the house is never empty, and also you can never leave. During a pandemic, a plucky middle-class gal can still “have it all,” as long as she can manage job and children simultaneously, from the floor of a lawless living room.The ‘Sex and the City’ UniverseThe sprawling franchise revolutionized how women were portrayed on the screen. And the show isn’t over yet. A New Series: Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte return for another strut down the premium cable runway in “And Just Like That,” streaming on HBO. Off Broadway: Candace Bushnell, whose writing gave birth to the “Sex and the City” universe, stars in her one-woman show based on her life. In Carrie’s Footsteps: “Sex and the City” painted a seductive vision of Manhattan, inspiring many young women to move to the city. The Origins: For the show’s 20th anniversary in 2018, Bushnell shared how a collection of essays turned into a pathbreaking series.Cards on the table: I am struggling to draft this essay on my phone as my pantsless toddler — banished from day care for 10 days because someone got Covid — wages a tireless campaign to commandeer my device, hold it to his ear and say hewwo. I feel charmed, annoyed and implicated, as I wonder whether his neediness is attributable to some parental defect, perhaps related to my own constant phone use.Do I want to abandon my child? No, but I am newly attuned to the psychological head space of a woman who does. The Auden scholar of “The Lost Daughter” (played, in an inspired bit of casting, by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard), entices Leda by quoting Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Attention is a loaded word: It can mean caring for another person, but also a powerful mental focus, and a parent can seldom execute both definitions at once.Leda wants to attend to her translation work, but she also wants someone to pay attention to her. To be blunt, she wants to work and to have sex. Often in these stories, the two are bound together in a hyper-individualistic fusion of romantic careerism. In “Scenes from a Marriage,” Mira plans to tell her daughter, “I have to go away for work, which is true” — only because she has arranged a professional obligation to facilitate her affair with an Israeli start-up bro. Her gateway drug to abandonment is, as is often the case, a business trip. Mira first strays at a company boat party; Leda tastes freedom at a translation conference; Claire embarks on a reading tour from which she never returns.The work trip is the Rumspringa of motherhood. Like the mama bird in “Are You My Mother?,” a woman is allowed to leave the nest to retrieve a worm, though someone, somewhere may be noting her absence with schoolmarmish disapproval. In Caitlin Flanagan’s 2012 indictment of Joan Didion, recirculated after Didion’s death, Flanagan dings Didion for taking a film job across the country, leaving her 3-year-old daughter over Christmas.Still, there is something absurd about the fashioning of work as the ultimate escape. It is only remotely plausible if our desperate mother enjoys a high-status creative position (translator, novelist, thought leader.) When other mothers of fiction leave, their fantasies are quickly revealed as delusions. In Nicole Dennis-Benn’s novel “Patsy,” a Jamaican secretary abandons her daughter to pursue an American dream in New York, only to become a nanny caring for someone else’s children. And in Jessamine Chan’s dystopian novel “The School for Good Mothers,” Frida is sleep deprived and drowning in work when she leaves her toddler at home alone for two hours. Though Frida feels “a sudden pleasure” when she shuts the door behind her, her fantasy life is short and bleak: She escapes as far as her office, where she sends emails. For that, she is conscripted into a re-education camp for bad moms.Each of our absent mothers has her reasons. Leda’s academic husband has prioritized his career over hers, and this makes her decisions legible, even sympathetic. But in “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness,” Watkins lends her doppelgänger no exculpatory circumstances. Claire has a doula, day care, Obamacare breast pump, tenure-track job, several therapists and the world’s most understanding husband. When she starts sleeping in a hammock on campus, her husband says: “I think it’s cool you’re following your … heart, or … whatever … is happening … out there.” Nothing obvious impedes her from capable mothering, but ​​like Bartleby, the Child-bearer, she would simply prefer not to.In heaping privileges upon Claire, Watkins suggests that there are burdens of motherhood that cannot be solved with money, lifted by a co-parent or cured by a mental health professional. The trouble is motherhood itself, and its ideal of total selfless devotion. Motherhood had turned Claire into a “blank,” a figure who “didn’t seem to think much” and “had trouble completing her sentences.” As these women discover, their menu of life choices is not so expansive after all. They long to be offered a different position: dad. Claire wants to “behave like a man, a slightly bad one.” As Mira abruptly exits, she assures her husband, “Men do it all the time.”These women may leave, but they don’t quite get away with it. Mira eventually loses both job and boyfriend and begs for her old life back. Leda’s abandonment becomes a dark secret in a thriller that builds to a violent end. Only Claire is curiously impervious to consequence. She follows her selfish impulses all the way to the desert, where she spends her days crying and masturbating alone in a tent. Then she calls her husband, who flies out to her, happy tot in tow; eventually Claire claims a life where she can “read and write and nap and teach and soak and smoke” and see her daughter on breaks. By exacting no cosmic punishment on Claire, Watkins refuses to facilitate the reader’s judgment. But she also makes it harder to care.When I was pregnant, I had a fantasy, too. In it I was single, childless, still very young somehow and living out an alternate life in a van in Wyoming. Reading “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” broke the spell. As Claire ripped bongs and circled new sexual partners, she struck me not as a monster or a hero but something perhaps worse — boring. Even as these stories work to uncover motherhood’s complex emotional truths, they indulge their own little fiction: that a mother only becomes interesting when she stops being one. More