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      Lisa Joy on ‘Reminiscence,’ ‘Westworld’ and the Lure of Techno-Noir

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      The writer-director says she is obsessed with time. One way to have more of it is “to create whole new timelines and dimensions.”In her first writers’ room, Lisa Joy was politely pulled aside and told she didn’t need to work so hard. After all, born in New Jersey to British-Taiwanese parents, she was just a diversity hire.The experience did little to stifle Joy’s ambitions or work ethic. In 2013, while expecting her first child, she wrote the screenplay for “Reminiscence,” a tech-noir thriller, and began developing the cerebral sci-fi “Westworld” for HBO with her husband, the “Memento” screenwriter Jonathan Nolan.After three seasons of the show — the fourth is on the way — Joy stepped up to direct “Reminiscence” herself. In the film, debuting Aug. 20 on HBO Max and in theaters, Hugh Jackman plays a private investigator who taps into clients’ memories but becomes torturously fixated on his own. It’s a story about the pull of the past set in the future, in a Miami that has succumbed to rising waters and is populated by people who have turned nocturnal to escape the searing heat of the day.In a recent video call, Joy spoke from her office in Los Angeles about being a perpetual outsider, current events imitating science fiction, and her partnership with Nolan. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.You wrote “Reminiscence” while pregnant. It does feel like the work of someone at a turning point — looking back while looking ahead.My main goal was to write something that entertained me while I was puking with morning sickness! Certainly it was a very dramatic moment. My husband was working a lot, I was at home with the dogs. I had a lot of time to contemplate my life. At the same time, my grandfather passed away. So there was loss as well as new beginnings. Sorting through his belongings was what really started my meditation on loss, and memory, and the way our memories start to fade.Rebecca Ferguson, left, and Hugh Jackman in “Reminiscence.”Warner Bros.Looking at the level of detail in your screenplay, I wonder if to some extent you had mentally directed it already?When I write, I imagine the characters talking, I design the room, I block the scene in my head. I kind of transcribe the movie I’m already looking at. So when other directors were pitching their ideas, I realized that none of the visions aligned with my own. I wanted it to have the spirit of an independent film, to take some more risks, tell a story that wasn’t in a clear genre.And Hugh Jackman in the lead role?The second I even contemplated directing it, I knew Hugh was the right leading man. I wanted to show a hero unraveling, questioning his own memories and coming to understand a more nuanced version of the world. Hugh has that soulfulness. And he can also kick a lot of ass.A lot of ass-kicking along with a lot of mind-bending.And romance. I wanted to have all those elements in the film. Because life is like that. The polarity of film is frustrating for me. “This is an art-house film. This is a popcorn film.” I think that underestimates audiences.You started out writing in comedy, on the series “Pushing Daisies.” When did you feel the gravitational pull toward science fiction?I’ve always liked stories that tackle great, big timeless themes. It’s just where my curiosity took me. When I first went around trying to pitch “Reminiscence” — I was heavily pregnant — people would look at me and think, what the hell is wrong with you? Why are you writing this mysterious, dark, violent, sexy thing? Do a rom-com! People didn’t expect me to do huge, ambitious, world-building things as a junior writer.Why set the film at some unspecified time in the future?Stories are more universal when you don’t stick a pin in it. And when I first started contemplating this world, it was nothing like the world we live in now. I didn’t think reality would catch up to science fiction so quickly. And then, right about when the trailer dropped, there were photos of the walls they’re building in Miami. I think it was the front page of The New York Times. They looked exactly like our set designs. There are also scenes of upheaval and rioting in the streets in the movie, and political and socioeconomic unrest. There was a moment when people were like, this is too far-fetched. And then the next week riots broke out.Joy said she’s obsessed with time:  “Maybe one way to have more of it is to live in multiple worlds every day, to create whole new timelines and dimensions.”Tracy Nguyen for The New York Times“Westworld” premiered around the time of #MeToo, and the treatment of the androids in the show seemed to speak to that movement. Were you conscious of drawing on your own experiences in the industry?None of my work is explicitly confessional, but at the same time, we are who we are. I had just come off a staff that was all-male [USA’s “Burn Notice”]. I wanted to take back my story in the only way I knew how. Which was to write.It’s not like I have some gift of prophecy. We live in this world. And we need to find a way to survive it. For me, acknowledging the cage you’re within is a way to break out of it. And it’s not just women — it’s anyone who’s felt trapped or been subjected to cruelty.You’ve said you’ve felt like an outsider for much of your life.I was born in America, but my mom is Asian, my dad is British. Hollywood was as far away as the moon when I was a kid. There’s always been a feeling of displacement. But almost everybody has that. That’s part of the human condition: to feel bereft from the currents rushing around us. And it’s one of the things that you can explore in fiction without being didactic or presumptuous about another person’s specific experience. And hopefully form a connection.You were working as a consultant in finance and tech before Hollywood called — in the middle of a presentation you were giving, is that right?It was kind of an abrupt change! I’ve always loved writing, but in the beginning, trying to be a writer was impossible. I had college debt, I had financial obligations. I worked in corporate jobs, but the whole time, I kept writing. Not because I had any expectation of being a working writer, but because it made me happy.But working in another field for 10 years before becoming a paid writer — that’s not wasted time. When you’re a producer, it helps to be able to know how money works. Everything is a language. Math is a language. Computer science is a language. I spend a lot of time trying to be conversational in as many as possible.Jackman plays a private investigator who taps into client’s memories.Warner Bros.There was even some Pythagorean problem-solving on your film set, wasn’t there?It was for this complicated scene where Hugh is looking at a hologram of a memory of Hugh looking at a hologram of a memory. I called it a Hugh turducken.Is it true a friend introduced you to Jonathan because you had a similar verbose email-writing style.[Laughs] It’s true. We met at the premiere of “Memento.” I didn’t expect to meet my future husband on the red carpet the second I stepped on it. I was skeptical of him. Hollywood has a reputation — not entirely unwarranted. But we became friends. We were pen pals for a long time.You ended up married and being collaborators. I’ve seen you describe creating a fictional world together as “romantic.”I remember when we wrapped the finale of the first season. We had built Sweetwater [the town in “Westworld”] in Santa Clarita. It was a magical thing — you could walk those streets. The world in our head had manifested. Along with a child. We took a golf cart, and the sun was rising in the distance. And we drove through the center of Sweetwater, with our baby on my lap.I am obsessed with time. There’s never enough of it, especially with the ones you love. And maybe one way to have more of it is to live in multiple worlds every day, to create whole new timelines and dimensions. More

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      ‘Sweet Girl’ Review: Violence as an Insurance Policy

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      A health care company is the bad guy in this revenge thriller starring Jason Momoa.Grieving husbands, fathers and even dog owners are a cornerstone of the revenge thriller, a genre that uses violence to reflect the anxieties of their audiences. At their best, revenge thrillers deliver the catharsis of the wronged hero triumphing over society’s ills — corrupt political systems, terrorist groups and human traffickers. The innovation in the otherwise nondescript action film “Sweet Girl” is that here, the shadowy organization employing contract killers and evading justice is a health care company.Ray (Jason Momoa) is a father lost in grief for his beloved wife, who died of cancer. He is haunted by the idea that her death was preventable, if only Bioprime, a powerful medical research company, hadn’t blocked a generic version of a patented cancer medication from reaching the market. Ray is contacted by a journalist looking to write an exposé on the company, but the reporter is murdered during their conversation. Ray and his teenage daughter Rachel (Isabela Merced) are witnesses.Years pass, yet Ray’s obsession with the Bioprime conspiracy never subsides. He seeks out insurance executives, but his attempts to get answers result in fatal encounters with private security. Ray’s investigation becomes a rampage, and through it all, Rachel remains by his side.For this action film, the director Brian Andrew Mendoza favors a utilitarian style. His color palette leans toward grays, blues and browns. His fight scenes are not flashy, or even particularly memorable, but they are clear, effectively conveying the necessary information about whose fist has connected with whose face. The simplicity of the visuals means there is little to distract from how characters have been cast in the movie’s morality play — a family faces down the organized crime syndicate of modern medicine.Sweet GirlRated R for strong violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Protégé’ Review: Ladykiller

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      Maggie Q and Michael Keaton play characters that get turned on by termination in this monumentally silly action movie.“The Protégé,” — a lady-assassin movie whose heroine is as indestructible as the genre clichés surrounding her — might profit from the unexpected presence of Michael Keaton, but not by much.An ultraflexible Maggie Q plays Anna, rescued as a child from Vietnam by Moody (an underused Samuel L. Jackson) and trained to follow in his contract-killer footsteps. When it appears that Moody has been offed, Anna embarks on a vengeance spree that will unearth a seductive villain named Rembrandt (Keaton) and a ragtag biker gang led by Robert Patrick, who seems understandably uncertain of his character’s motivation.The silliness in Richard Wenk’s script is epic. Anna is no everyday executioner, but a cat-loving, cupcake-making bookstore worker who knows her way around a first edition. She’s the kind of gal who can go from torture chamber to dinner table with nary a blemish, and she does, flirting with Rembrandt over the size and capabilities of their respective firearms. Who knew waterboarding could give you such a glow?Plot credibility, of course, is the least important aspect of movies like this, which are all about attitude, lethal accessories and generic, smart-mouth dialogue. (When someone says, “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” you know it will occur almost immediately.) Shot mainly in and around Bucharest, Romania, “The Protégé” has little to distinguish it except a director, Martin Campbell, with competent action chops and a penchant for pairing violence with make-out music.Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her. If there’s a sequel following her and Keaton’s characters in couples therapy, I might be forced to buy a ticket.The ProtégéRated R for risible romance and creative slaughtering. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sonny Chiba, Japanese Star With a ‘Kill Bill’ Connection, Dies at 82

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      His martial arts movies appalled some with their extreme violence, but the director Quentin Tarantino was a fan and gave him a late-career boost.Sonny Chiba, a Japanese action star who was known for ultraviolent martial arts movies and then, in 2003, was elevated to a whole new level of cinematic trendiness when one of his superfans, the director Quentin Tarantino, gave him a role in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1,” died on Wednesday. He was 82.His manager and friend, Timothy Beal, said the cause was Covid-19. Oricon, the Japanese news service, said he died at a hospital in Kimitsu, Japan.Mr. Chiba, who was trained in karate and other martial arts, began turning up on Japanese television in his early 20s. He was soon making movies as well, amassing more than 50 TV and film credits in Japan before the end of the 1960s. In the ’70s, with martial arts movies enjoying broad popularity thanks to the American-born Chinese star Bruce Lee, Mr. Chiba became widely known in Japan and beyond, especially because of “The Street Fighter” (1974) and its sequels.“The Street Fighter,” in which his character battled gangsters, was so violent that when it was released in the United States it was said to have been the first movie given an X rating for violence alone.“If nothing else,” A.H. Weiler wrote in a brief review in The New York Times in 1975, when the movie played in New York, “this Japanese-made, English-dubbed import illustrates that its inane violence deserves the X rating with which it has been labeled.” In 1996, when a DVD of the film was released, The Los Angeles Times said it was being “presented complete and uncut in all its eye-gouging, testicle-ripping, skull-pounding glory.”“The Street Fighter” and other Chiba movies made an impression on Mr. Tarantino. In the homage-filled “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” he cast Mr. Chiba as the sword maker Hattori Hanzo, who provides Uma Thurman’s vengeful character with her weapon. A.O. Scott, reviewing the movie in The New York Times, got the reference but wasn’t enamored of it.“Check it out, Mr. Tarantino seems to be saying, Sonny Chiba’s in my movie,” he wrote. “How cool is that? Way too cool? Not cool enough? As I said, it depends. The movie-geek in-jokes are sometimes amusing and sometimes annoying.”In any case, Mr. Tarantino brought Mr. Chiba back the next year for “Kill Bill: Vol. 2,” and he enjoyed a late-career resurgence.He was a Yakuza boss in “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” in 2006 and a sushi chef in the noir thriller “Sushi Girl” in 2012, among other roles. Mr. Beal said that before the pandemic, Mr. Chiba had been lined up for a role in a zombie movie called “Outbreak Z.”Mr. Chiba, who also acted under the name Shinichi Chiba, was born Sadaho Maeda on Jan. 23, 1939, in Fukuoka, Japan. His acting career received a boost when he was signed by Japan’s Toei studio in the early 1960s.Mr. Chiba made numerous movies, mostly samurai dramas, with the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku, who gave him some of his earliest roles. He came to distance himself from the violence-drenched “Street Fighter” films — “That sort of performance is not the performance I am particularly proud of as an actor,” he told The Times in 2003 — but he looked more kindly on his work with Mr. Fukasaku.“Mr. Fukasaku was very sensitive to violence,” Mr. Chiba said. “His constant question was, ‘What is violence? What is authority? What is power?’ Ultimately, he denied violence, and always sided with the weak.”Martial arts, Mr. Chiba said, was not that different from acting.“Martial arts is part of the drama — it’s performance,” he said, “It’s a way of expressing emotions.”Information on Mr. Chiba’s survivors was not immediately available. More

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      ‘Flag Day’ Review: Daddy Dearest

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      Sean Penn directs and stars with his daughter, Dylan Penn, in this intimate yet bumpy family drama.As a director, Sean Penn seems drawn to stories featuring lost children of one sort or another, a proclivity that has resulted in some of his strongest work. His latest film, “Flag Day,” tills similar soil: the awakening of a daughter whose adored father is not the demigod she believes him to be.Set mainly in Minnesota and adapted from Jennifer Vogel’s 2004 memoir, “Flim-Flam Man,” Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth’s screenplay constructs a broken-family melodrama mired in sentimentality. The flowery narration that Jennifer (played as a teen and adult by Penn’s daughter, Dylan Penn) uses to describe her father’s electrically disruptive comings and goings in her life doesn’t help; though it does enable a gauzy, ethereal mood that the cinematographer Danny Moder runs with, lending his picturesque prairie landscapes the softly blurred quality of old photographs.The film opens in 1992 with Jennifer finally learning that her father, John (Penn, directing himself for the first time), has been concealing a violent and colorful criminal past. Flashbacks reveal him to be a complex, charismatic scoundrel whose reckless schemes leave his wife (Katheryn Winnick) and children — a brother, played by Penn’s son, Hopper Jack Penn, is barely seen — to fend for themselves.Heavy-handed and more than a little pretentious, “Flag Day” seems to view John’s volatile fortunes as a metaphor for those of his country. (Close-ups of worn, anonymous faces drift across the screen, symbols of heartland struggle.) Yet Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness of her mother, Robin Wright. Maybe that’s why “Flag Day” feels as much a love letter from Penn to his own daughter as the story of someone else’s.Flag DayRated R for drinking, thieving and a bloody reckoning. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Reminiscence’ Review: Out of the Past, Into the Future (and Back)

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      In her feature debut, the co-creator of HBO’s “Westworld” toys with time, space, clichés and conventions in a narrative hall of mirrors.Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, “Reminiscence” is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts. It’s shiny and pricey and looks good on the big screen; it is also the newest addition to what now plays like the Nolan Family Extended Universe.The writer-director of “Reminiscence” is Lisa Joy who, with her husband, Jonathan Nolan, created the HBO series “Westworld.” Jonathan Nolan has helped write some of his brother Christopher’s films, notably “Memento” and “Interstellar,” and served as a producer on “Reminiscence.” Although these entertainments have their obvious differences, including in quality, the family DNA is evident in their embrace of narrative elasticity and interest in the labyrinths of the mind (also: gunplay and hot women). With degrees of success, they play with time and space, storytelling conventions and human consciousness. “It’s all a construct,” a character says in “Westworld.” “None of it is real.”That character is played by Thandiwe Newton, one of the stars of “Reminiscence,” a kinked tale in which the divide between reality and its facsimiles is blurred. Here, Newton plays Watts, a crusty, no-nonsense veteran with a booze problem and an obvious thing for her boss, an old war buddy, Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman in squinty tough-guy mode). Set in a fairly benign-looking dystopia — Miami is partly underwater but jumping — they run a business where customers can recover favorite and forgotten memories. After clients strip and lie semi-immersed in a tub, Nick plugs them into a machine that renders their memories into lifelike or, rather, movielike 3-D projections.Trouble arrives in the form of a slinky redhead, Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), who can’t find her keys. Struck dumb, seriously dumb by her mere and unremarkable presence, Nick falls fast and hard, and soon tumbles into the kind of complicated trouble that inevitably bedevils noir heroes with granite jaws and bleeding hearts. A great deal ensues, some of it nonsensical, some of it diverting. For a short while, the movie drifts along agreeably as Nick and Mae’s gauzy romance heats up, and then Joy shifts gears, flexing her action-genre muscles with violence and rampaging villains. And, much as in “Westworld,” the movie uses memory to explore its characters’ humanity or lack thereof.Like Nick’s clients, “Reminiscence” oscillates between the past and the present, which fits a thriller nestled at the intersection of film noir and science fiction. Yet while Joy has handsomely kitted out her future world with ominous cascades of water and other apocalyptic flourishes — the rich live on dry land while the poor struggle to keep from drowning, literally and figuratively — the past exerts a stronger pull on her. She treads a lot of familiar genre ground, which is expected (and fine!), but she also stuffs “Reminiscence” with so many cinematic allusions that the movie itself soon feels like a very thin copy. Pastiche comes with the neo-noir territory but can also inundate it.When Nick walks down a mean street, the dark city gleaming, the image sets the scene. For some viewers, it will likely unleash a chain of associations: Raymond Chandler, Humphrey Bogart, Harrison Ford. Certainly the vision of another lonely man of honor piques your interest as you wait for Joy to clarify her intentions, revealing whether she’s having fun, rethinking golden Hollywood oldies or both. One problem with citing favorites is that the imitations often wither when set against their dazzling influences, which is what happens when Mae sings a Rodgers-and-Hart standard in a strapless, side-slit gown clearly modeled on the one that Rita Hayworth immortalized in “Gilda.”Ferguson is an attractive if regrettably wan presence in “Reminiscence,” though it’s hard to imagine who, other than a cartoon femme fatale à la Jessica Rabbit, could even approach the devastating charms of Hayworth’s Gilda. It’s equally difficult to think of many actors who could handle Joy’s cliché-ridden, melodramatically engorged dialogue, which consistently trips up her actors. Joy has a feel for spectacle and can handle bodies and bullets flying through space. When she’s not narrowing her focus on big heads, she fills the frame with strong, clear images — a bed on a roof, a city in water — that have a solidity that helps anchor the movie, which is generally better seen than heard.ReminiscenceRated PG-13 for action-movie violence, including gunplay and immolation. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Last Man Standing’ Review: Revisiting a Murder (and a Murder Doc)

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      The British documentarian Nick Broomfield tries, again, to solve the killing of Biggie Smalls.In “Last Man Standing,” subtitled “Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac,” the British documentarian Nick Broomfield tries to tie up loose ends from his “Biggie and Tupac” (2002). That movie presented an unproven conspiracy theory that the rap mogul Marion Knight, widely known as Suge, was involved, along with corrupt police officers, in the 1997 shooting death of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, in Los Angeles, and the 1996 killing of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas. (Broomfield appears to tacitly roll back that claim in the new film, which gives a different emphasis to the events surrounding Shakur’s death.)The first doc’s dubious evidence was questioned, and Knight has long denied any involvement in the killings. But the idea behind “Last Man Standing,” Broomfield explains, is that with Knight now serving a 28-year prison sentence, people are more open to talking. Much of “Last Man Standing” plays like outtakes. There’s some kick in hearing that Knight apparently kept piranhas and fed them bloodworms, or in seeing footage of a pre-stardom, 17-year-old Shakur, the son of a Black Panther, discussing how the rich and the poor should change places every week.But the new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects. His trademark is appearing on camera and demanding answers with an obnoxious Fleet Street persistence. By contrast, the talking heads and blank backgrounds here are pretty dull, although it is amusing when Pam Brooks (returning from Broomfield’s “Tales of the Grim Sleeper”) insists to a wary party on the phone that the director can’t be an ex-cop because he’s English. “Last Man Standing” is backloaded; its efforts to counter an alternative theory of the case come mainly toward the end.Last Man StandingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Wildland’ Review: Loyalty Makes You Family

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      A teenage girl is roped into her estranged aunt’s criminal activities in this psychodrama by the Danish filmmaker Jeanette Nordahl.In “Wildland,” by the Danish filmmaker Jeanette Nordahl, the 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp) is roped into her mysterious aunt Bodil’s family business after a car accident kills Ida’s mother. Still in mourning, our soft-spoken yet observant protagonist is eased into the family circle, coming-of-age, so to speak, as the violent reality of their criminal affairs come into view.This intentionally restrained debut feature is just shy of an intriguing study about the power dynamics of a disturbed family. So committed to maintaining an enigmatically sinister atmosphere, the film fails to build out the many compelling issues it raises about toxic masculinity and familial gaslighting.Nevertheless, some inspired confrontations, and a commanding performance by Sidse Babett Knudsen, who plays the hot-and-cold matriarch, Bodil, makes “Wildland” an absorbing and highly watchable psychodrama.When Ida arrives at her aunt’s abode, she’s suddenly surrounded by her male cousins, two temperamental, maladjusted dudes and an eerily composed third. Eventually, the guys accept their shy cousin into their ranks, allowing her to tag along on their boozy, late-night outings to the club. Ida, for better or worse, comes to love her new family, even as she witnesses some questionable exchanges, as when the eldest brother gives a ride to a nervous schoolgirl under the guise of being friends with her father.Ingeborg Topsoe’s mostly unremarkable script does, however, hint at a more compelling angle: the sidelined role of women in these criminal enterprises. It’s not often in films about thugs that we get the female perspective, yet through Ida’s gaze a more expansive portrait is achieved, bringing to the fore the tragic fates of those who bear the burden in such macho proceedings.WildlandNot rated. In Danish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More