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      A New Must-Have for TV and Movie Shoots: Therapists

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      Working on set can be challenging. In Britain, many productions are hiring trained counselors to help casts and crew cope.LONDON — When Lou Platt talks about her increasingly in-demand TV and movie production job, she has to make one thing clear: She can’t discuss 99 percent of the work itself.Platt, 41, is a British therapist who has worked on high-profile productions like “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Coel’s TV series inspired by her own experience of sexual assault.Client confidentiality means Platt can’t say exactly what happens in her sessions, and nondisclosure agreements mean she can’t even reveal most of her productions’ names. People often misconstrue what her work is about, she said in an interview, thinking she’s there to spot — and put a stop to — story lines or scenes that might upset actors and technicians.“My role is to actually help the art take greater risks,” she said, adding that no one makes their best work if they’re stressed or anxious.Sometimes, Platt — a former actor — is involved before filming begins, helping writers turn harrowing autobiographical material into scripts. Other times, she introduces herself to the cast and crew at the start of filming, and lets them know they can call her. She’s also there for film editors who have to watch harrowing scenes over and over while finishing off a show.The presence of on-set and on-call therapists is particularly notable in British film and TV, which has been involved in an industrywide discussion about mental health since 2017, when Michael Harm, a location manager who had worked on numerous movies including the Harry Potter franchise, killed himself.The day he died, Harm sent a letter to a colleague, Sue Quinn, saying he had nowhere to turn for help with struggles at work, and urging her to change that for others in the industry.“You’re pushed, pushed, pushed and pushed to the limit, all the time,” said Quinn, also a location manager, about the experience of working on a typical set. That’s especially true, she said, when producers prioritize remaining on budget over mental health. Actors and crew work exhausting hours and many experience bullying, she added.After receiving the letter, Quinn approached a British nonprofit that supports movie and TV workers experiencing financial troubles, and asked it to develop a help line for workers experiencing issues including depression, anxiety and bullying as well as financial stress. The following year, that organization, the Film and TV Charity, started a 24-hour phone line: It received around 7,000 calls in 2020, said Valeria Bullo, a member of the charity’s mental health team.The charity also conducted a survey to assess the extent of mental health problems in the industry. Of 9,000 respondents, over half said they’d considered taking their own life.Before filming started on “I May Destroy You,” Coel and her team knew they wanted a therapist involved, the writer and actress said in an email exchange. Initially, the expectation was that Platt would just work with Coel if “shooting some of the darker scenes that reflected my own life became emotionally taxing,” Coel said. But then a producer decided to make the therapist available to everyone.“The Underground Railroad” employed a therapist on set.Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon StudiosFor “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Coel initially brought mental health support on for herself.HBO, via Associated Press“She is very clearly on the side of the person who is in need,” Coel said of Platt. She puts that person “before producers, directors and money, and television itself. And actually she may have been the only person on set able to do that,” she added.Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, a writer and producer, said she first worked with Platt while writing a short film about her experience of seeking asylum in Britain. She found their sessions so useful that she decided to bring Platt onto the sets for several other productions she was working on, including an upbeat Christmas movie.“It should be part of how we all work, as we don’t know what anyone’s working through,” Gharoro-Akpojotor said.When TV companies came back to work last year after lockdowns across Britain lifted, casts and crew found themselves under pressure to make up for lost time, cramming a year’s work into a few months, according to Sarah McCaffrey, another therapist whose company, Solas Mind, provides counseling in the industry.These compressed timelines were “almost unsustainable,” McCaffrey said. On top of that, crew were often split up into in small “bubbles,” isolated from each other for coronavirus safety, which meant fewer social interactions. On some productions, up to 30 people had booked sessions with her company, she said.The pandemic also seems to have encouraged American companies to offer more on-set support. Last April, Netflix hired Jake Knapik, a clinical psychologist, to help develop mental health courses for its British and United States productions. Knapik said that “Covid has been the catalyst,” noting that lockdowns helped everyone realize just how debilitating loneliness and anxiety could be.Kim Whyte was on hand to offer support to the cast and crew of Amazon’s “The Underground Railroad,” whether they wanted to talk about the production or their home lives.Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York TimesWhen Amazon was filming “The Underground Railroad,” a series about enslaved workers fleeing a cotton plantation, the therapist Kim Whyte was on set for much of the shoot. Some therapists prefer working off-site so people avoid the possible stigma of being seen receiving mental health support, but Whyte said she walked around chatting with everyone between takes: that way nobody knew when she was discussing something serious, or something trivial.When someone needed to talk something through, it was sometimes about issues raised by the show, she said. “Some of the cast and crew were disturbed by the content — just the institution of slavery,” she added. But just as often, they wanted to talk about issues they were dealing with at home, and how those were having an impact on their mood, like in any workplace.Platt said she felt therapists should also be available after productions end, in case problems emerge later. “You wouldn’t have therapy for the effect of a car crash while you’re still in hospital,” she said. Actors and writers should even have access to counseling when promoting films, she added, since journalists often ask them to relive traumatic experiences over and over again.“At the moment, all this is radical,” Platt said. But she hoped the stigma would disappear, and that soon on-set mental health support would be considered normal: She imagined a therapist’s trailer, with a line of people happy to be seen waiting outside. More

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      ‘Respect’ Review: Giving Aretha Franklin Her Propers

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      Jennifer Hudson plays Aretha Franklin in a movie that follows many of the usual biographical beats but finds its own groove.Ray Charles said that Aretha Franklin “sang from her inners.” For her father, C.L. Franklin, she was “a stone singer.” That’s a good description for a great singer whose voice did something that even some brilliant, technically virtuosic vocalists can’t do. When Franklin was at her most sublime, her voice seemed to give shape to the entirety of human feeling — to the joy and the despair — so much so that it seemed as if she were birthing a twinned version of herself with each breath and soul-stirring note.The new drama “Respect” is a march-of-time fictionalization of Franklin’s life. Attractively cast and handsomely mounted — Jennifer Hudson plays the queen — it is a solid, sanitized, unfailingly polite portrait. It conforms to the familiar biopic arc: the artist begins humbly; reaches towering heights (artistic, commercial, maybe both); suffers a setback (bad lovers, addiction); only to rise higher still. In album titles, the movie flows to the beat of Franklin’s discography from “The Electrifying Aretha Franklin” to “Laughing on the Outside,” “Spirit in the Dark” and “Get It Right.”Taken as a whole, the movie — directed by Liesl Tommy from a script by Tracey Scott Wilson — doesn’t hold you firmly, though it has its moments. First, it has to dispatch with the standard preliminaries, including Aretha’s childhood, with its crackling tensions and cautiously muted torments. It’s a story that’s been told before, including by the Franklin biographer David Ritz. Here that life is often in soft focus, and generally sprinkled with tears rather than drenched. Even so, it is catnip to watch the young Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) wander her family’s house late at night, smiling and hailing partygoers she calls out to as “Uncle Duke” (as in Ellington) and “Aunt Ella” (Ms. Fitzgerald to we mortals).Tommy, a theater director making her feature film debut, handles the material and its many moving parts with assurance. “Respect” opens in Detroit in 1952, where the young Aretha is living with her siblings under the stern eye of their father, C.L. (Forest Whitaker). A legendary Baptist minister and friend to Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown), C.L. lords over his house with imposing hauteur and an unpredictable temper. Also sternly minding the brood is his mother (Kimberly Scott), who’s helping raise the children. Their mother, Barbara (Audra McDonald), a saintly figure in amber, has split from her husband and lives elsewhere, and clearly has Aretha’s heart.Everyone and everything in “Respect” looks good if not too movie-perfect. The rooms seem lived in and the people feel real, none more so than Mary J. Blige, who, as Dinah Washington, briefly sets the movie ablaze. Oddly, a showdown between Aretha and Dinah is borrowed from a confrontation Washington had with Etta James. Perhaps that was to give the movie juice, because otherwise the first chunk slides into the sluggish and dutiful. A distinct exception is a shocking, dimly lit image of the young Aretha that made me gasp. It’s a simple, devastating vision of trauma that lingers even as the story motors on and continues to hit the biographical markers: Hello, Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron).“Respect” succeeds in doing exactly what is expected of it. You may argue with this or that filmmaking choice and regret its overly smooth edges, but it does give you a sense of Franklin as a historical figure, a crossover success story and a full-throttle, fur-draped diva. (As a mother, she remains M.I.A.) Mostly, it gives you her music, with its passion and power, lyricism and schmaltz. Long after they fell off the charts, these are songs that light you up — with feelings, memories — when you hear them. You sing along with them in your head and, after the credits roll, you keep on singing (and murdering) them.A line in one of Ritz’s books on Franklin sheds light on the challenges of transposing her complicated life to the screen. “The pain stayed silent in all areas except music, where, magnificently,” Ritz wrote, “it formed a voice that said it all.” The movie has a tough time handling this quiet, and even when Hudson takes over, the character remains frustratingly vague. She’s misty rather than mysterious, maybe because for too long she is drifting along rather than steering her own course. When she walks into Columbia Records, escorted by her father, she is an unanswered question; the puzzlement only deepens when C.L. orders Aretha to stand up and twirl for a surprised record executive.Things vastly improve once the adult Aretha sits down with some session players and starts pulling apart the songs she will rebuild, discovering “her true voice,” as Franklin’s sister Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore) once put it. Hudson is a deeply appealing screen presence, and it’s a pleasure to watch her just walk into a room. She doesn’t look or sound like Franklin, but she manages the role confidently and with a pure singing voice that more than holds its own. She never feels possessed by Aretha, even when she’s making you rhythmically sway in your seat. Yet Hudson also manages what memorable singers do: she transports you, pulling you alongside her as she takes you up, up and away.Hudson with Marc Maron, who plays the record producer Jerry Wexler.Quantrell D. Colbert/Metro Goldwyn MayerThat’s a nice place to be (and to feel), even intermittently, because it’s then that Aretha Franklin flickers before you. She died in 2018 at 76 and her life was filled with agonies that the movie seems anxious to attenuate or ignore, as if the depth of her pain and its rawness might tarnish her legacy. That’s too bad but it doesn’t damage this movie, which finds an enjoyable groove as Aretha falters and triumphs anew. In the end, it is the music and your love for her that keeps you going and watching. With their hooks and oceans of feeling, Franklin’s songs worked on you and worked you over. They entered our bodies and souls, our cultural and personal DNA, becoming part of the soundtrack for our lives.RespectRated PG-13 for language, violence and child pregnancy. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘CODA’ Review: A Voice of Her Own

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      An openhearted embrace of deaf culture elevates this otherwise conventional tale of a talented teenager caught between ambition and loyalty.The template of “CODA” — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.Ruby (Emilia Jones, delightful), a shy 17-year-old in Gloucester, Mass., is the lone hearing member of her rambunctious family. Between interpreting for her parents (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur), and helping run the family’s fishing boat with her father and older brother (Daniel Durant) each morning before school, Ruby is exhausted. Since childhood, she has been her family’s bridge to the hearing world; now, her newly awakened desire to sing is perhaps the one thing they will struggle most to understand.Weighed down by a groaningly predictable plot — which includes a cute-boy crush, a colorful music teacher (Eugenio Derbez) and a climactic singing audition — “CODA” relishes the opportunity to showcase the expressiveness of sign language. (The film is extensively subtitled.) The actors work together seamlessly, the blue-collar coastal setting is richly realized and the family’s cohesiveness solidly established. And if some interactions move to the clichéd beats of a sitcom, Ruby’s efforts to share her musical talent (notably in one lovely scene with her father) are remarkably affecting.More than once, Heder effectively flips the film’s viewpoint to that of her deaf characters (who are all played by deaf actors). At a school concert, the camera watches Ruby’s family in the audience as the soundtrack abruptly cuts out, allowing us to glimpse the sometimes blanketing isolation of a silent world. In moments like this, when the quippy dialogue subsides and the story relaxes, we see the ghost of a more fruitful movie, one that would rather surprise its viewers than feed them a formula they have come to expect.CODARated PG-13 for unrestrained flatulence and a bawdy mime. In English and American Sign Language with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Apple +. More

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      ‘White as Snow’ Review: The Fairest of Them All

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      The director Anne Fontaine spins the Snow White fairy tale into a thriller, with Isabelle Huppert as the jealous stepmother.Whatever rehabilitation wicked stepmothers have undergone of late encounters a setback in “White as Snow.” Isabelle Huppert brings a frost to her role as Maud in the director Anne Fontaine’s darkly playful gloss on the Snow White saga. Lou de Laâge portrays the hotelier’s shy, impossibly lovely stepdaughter and rival, Claire.This is fairy tale as comedically aware thriller. There are red apples; red, red dresses; and long, self-appraising glances into the mirror on Maud’s part. Of course, her jealousy is misdirected. Her husband, Bernard (Charles Berling), is a besotted fool, trying to assuage his own anxieties about aging. But the die is cast, nonetheless.Once Claire finds herself deep in the woods, conveyed there by a hired killer and saved by a hunter with a twin back at a large stone farmhouse, nature gets its redolent due, with farmland and forest providing a backdrop to sexual congress. Claire’s brush with death frees her of any erotic inhibitions but never represses her ample decency and kindness. (How many men does Claire encounter? Seven, naturally.)Quite a few of the film’s pleasures come by way of its fluid tango with the source material. Fontaine and her co-writer, Pascal Bonitzer, manage several didn’t-see-that-coming zags. Nods to Hitchcock abound with the aid of the cinematographer Yves Angelo’s tracking shots and the composer Bruno Coulais’s low foreboding notes.As satisfying as Huppert is, the movie dances on the pinpoint of de Laâge’s performance. The name Claire signifies light and clarity, and there’s a transparency to de Laâge’s portrayal of this innocent who remains thus while discovering a lavish sensuality.White as SnowNot rated. In French with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Watch Ryan Reynolds Power Up in ‘Free Guy’

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      The director Shawn Levy narrates a sequence where the character Guy discovers something new about the world he’s been living in.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.New revelations come quickly and colorfully to Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who transforms from a supporting character in a video game character to its biggest star.In this scene, Guy, a bank teller whose work day plays out predictably, down to a daily bank robbery, this time turns the tables. He takes down a robber, including the special glasses he wears. When Guy puts them on, he sees an entirely new graphical layer of his town that he has been missing before.Discussing the scene, the director Shawn Levy said that he wanted to unlock this secret part of the video game world using a lively visual motif, with bursts of color and action all around.“I wanted this sequence, frankly, to be a little bit overwhelming to the audience,” Levy said, “like there’s too much to take in because that’s exactly what Ryan’s character is experiencing.”Levy said that he played a lot of video games when researching the movie, and he kept noticing how the camera moved in less of a human-operated way, and instead was “almost robotic in its speed and fluidity,” he said. For this scene, he and his team sought to mimic that by mounting the camera on a robotic arm. They then programmed the arm to move around Guy as he sees things through his glasses. Because the movement were locked in by code, Levy said, Reynolds had to be precise with his blocking to avoid being injured by the camera.Read the “Free Guy” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Free Guy’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      ‘Searching for Mr. Rugoff’ Review: Man Behind the Movies

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      A documentary looks at an influential distributor and theater owner who went after visionary films, including “Scenes From a Marriage” and “Putney Swope.”Not every documentary features its director calling his subject “kind of a terrible person.” But Ira Deutchman’s “Searching for Mr. Rugoff” happily looks at the man in full: Donald S. Rugoff, the influential distributor, New York City theater impresario and certifiable “piece of work” (to quote one testimonial).During a blazing run in the 1960s and 1970s, Rugoff went after visionary movies that made audiences sit up and take notice: “Z,” “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Scenes From a Marriage,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Harlan County USA,” “Nothing but a Man,” “Putney Swope,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” and, yes, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”As a former employee and later a distributor and producer, Deutchman brings firsthand insights into the indefatigable Mr. Rugoff (who died in 1989). He assembles an amused and bemused circle of fellow veterans of Rugoff’s distribution company Cinema 5, old-school commentators, Rugoff’s ex-wife and sons, and grateful filmmakers (Lina Wertmuller, Robert Downey Sr., Costa-Gavras). Deutchman, a professor at Columbia University, also visits Edgartown, Mass., for traces of Rugoff’s life after his company was taken over.As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship. Equally so for the brief inclusion of Dan Talbot, fellow distributor and theater maven, whose cinemas and unparalleled New Yorker Films catalog also remain at the heart of the medium. It’s all part of an essential history of film culture that continues in new and different ways today.Searching for Mr. RugoffNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Apple TV and other streaming services. More

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      ‘The East’ Review: Imperialist Blues

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      This thoroughly generic war movie explores the Netherlands’ colonial legacy in Indonesia.At the tail-end of World War II, an armed conflict broke out that is known today as the Indonesian War of Independence. The Dutch, after having lost their former colony to the Japanese in 1942, regrouped and deployed forces to reconquer the archipelago in 1946. Naturally, Indonesian nationalists were having none of it. And perhaps even more predictably, the Dutch Army responded with a violent campaign.“The East,” a bloated and thoroughly generic war movie by the Dutch filmmaker Jim Taihuttu, reckons with the Netherlands’ colonial legacy by spotlighting this overlooked moment in history. The details may be novel — even eye-opening for some — but this story of white guilt and brutality feels mighty old.For one thing, Johan (Martijn Lakemeier), a young, idealistic soldier, disillusioned by the impotence of Dutch efforts to fend off rebel forces, quickly acquires a taste for blood. A volunteer recruit hoping to make spiritual amends for the sins of his Nazi-collaborator father, he is initially the most polite and benevolent of his group of juvenile, sex-obsessed troopers. The good boy goes bad, however, when he meets Raymond “The Turk” (Marwan Kenzari), a mustachioed brute known for his merciless tactics. Cue the firing squad, terrorized villagers, and shame-fueled inner torment.The jumbled script straddles two timelines: the events in Indonesia and Johan’s return to the Netherlands after completing his service. It’s all bleakness and self-loathing without the momentum or punch. Neither a joyless, immersive thrill ride (“1917”) nor a cartoonish display of tough-guy patriotism (“Midway”), “The East” fits squarely into the tradition of Vietnam War movies like “Platoon,” whose depictions of imperial carnage and psychic derangement might have once been provocative. Today, a film like “The East” feels more like a numbing recapitulation.The EastNot rated. Running time: 2 hour 17 minutes. In Japanese, Dutch and Indonesian with subtitles. In theaters. More