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      Stimulus Offers $15 Billion in Relief for Struggling Arts Venues

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus DealThe Latest Vaccine InformationF.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStimulus Offers $15 Billion in Relief for Struggling Arts VenuesThe coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.An empty United Palace Theater in New York. $15 billion of a $900 billion coronavirus relief package is designed to help the culture sector survive after a nearly yearlong revenue drought.Credit…George Etheredge for The New York TimesBen Sisario and Dec. 21, 2020, 4:24 p.m. ETFor the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that congressional leaders agreed to this week offers the prospect of aid at last: it includes $15 billion to help them weather a crisis that has closed theaters and silenced halls.The money, part of a $900 billion coronavirus relief package, is designed to help the culture sector — from dive-bar rock clubs to Broadway theaters and museums — survive. Many small proprietors described it as their last hope for being able to remain in business after a nearly yearlong revenue drought.“This is what our industry needs to make it through,” said Dayna Frank, the owner of First Avenue, a storied music club in Minneapolis. She is also the board president of the National Independent Venue Association, which was formed in April and has lobbied Congress aggressively for relief for its more than 3,000 members.As the news of the deal began to trickle out on Sunday night, a collective sigh of relief ricocheted through group text messages and social media posts. “Last night was the first time I have smiled in probably nine months,” Ms. Frank said.Dayna Frank, the owner of First Avenue in Minneapolis, said, “This is what our industry needs to make it through.”Credit…Jenn Ackerman for The New York TimesBroadway theaters, which have been closed since March, applauded the relief package.“We are grateful for this bipartisan agreement which will provide immediate relief across our industry and a lifeline to the future,” Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, the trade organization for producers and theater owners, said in a statement.Nataki Garrett, the artistic director for Oregon Shakespeare Festival, said that the aid would be crucial for nonprofit theaters. “Our situation was critical and dire,” she said.But the leaders of some large nonprofit cultural organizations worried that the way the bill is structured — giving priority to organizations that lost very high percentages of their revenue before considering the rest — could put them at the back of the line for grants, since they typically get a significant portion of revenues through donations.With the bill set to be approved in both chambers of Congress as early as Monday evening, arts groups around the nation were cautiously celebrating while studying the fine print to see what kind of aid they might qualify for. Most doubt the entertainment industry can fully swing back into action until well into next year, at the earliest.The bill allows independent entertainment businesses, like music venues and movie theaters, along with other cultural entities, to apply for grants from the Small Business Administration to support six months of payments to employees and for costs including rent, utilities and maintenance. Applicants must have lost at least 25 percent of their revenue to qualify, and those have lost more than 90 percent will be able to apply first, within the first two weeks after the bill becomes law.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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      Can We Talk About the Mom in ‘A Christmas Story’?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCan We Talk About the Mom in ‘A Christmas Story’?The woman hasn’t had a hot meal in 15 years and she’s always cooped up at home. 2020 is the year to give this character from a classic holiday movie her due.Melinda Dillon, center, plays Mother Parker in “A Christmas Story.”Credit…MGMDec. 21, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETIt’s been tough to watch movies in 2020 and not project our frustrations and anxieties onto the screen. Maybe the extravagant wedding sequence in “The Godfather” suddenly felt garish compared to all of this year’s Zoom “I Dos.” Or maybe you put on “Elf” to pass some quarantine time, and the crowded mall scenes launched you into a cold sweat, because everyone is inside and no one is wearing a mask.When I watched the classic “A Christmas Story” recently for the 20th time (at least), my pandemic-weary brain zeroed in on something I’d never really noticed. I looked past the cute kids and the leg lamp and the famous tongue-stuck-on-the-pole scene, and became laser focused on the mom. One look at her disheveled hair and shabby robe and exasperated stare and I thought: This woman is a damn hero.“A Christmas Story,” which TBS has played on a loop every holiday season for over a decade, takes place in early 1940s Indiana, and follows a young boy named Ralphie (Peter Billingsley) who desperately wants a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, even though his mom (Melinda Dillon, referred to as “Mother” in the credits), says his dream gift is too dangerous. That’s pretty much the plot, but the director Bob Clark and the writer Jean Shepherd somehow created an oddball, timeless Christmas movie that manages to be both darkly comic and sweet. Every year I’ve watched this movie assuming Ralphie is the protagonist. Now I’m not so sure.Peter Billingsley in “A Christmas Story.”Credit…MGMWhen we meet Mother, she’s frazzled, serving food and wearing dowdy clothes that look like rags next to her husband’s comparatively haute couture suit. While The Old Man (Darren McGavin) reads the paper or grumbles about the faulty furnace, Mother cooks, cleans, wrestles the kids into their gigantic snow suits and frets about everyone’s well-being, even though no one frets about hers.Normally I wouldn’t find her plight so enthralling, but on this viewing, as soon as her husband and kids left for the day, I desperately wanted to know what this woman did with her alone time. She wasn’t juggling home school and work during a global crisis, so did she just keep on cleaning? Maybe she mixed herself a clandestine Tom Collins and took a bubble bath. Where were the scenes of her celebrating her freedom by dancing through an empty house, like Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman”? Was I projecting?Something tells me she was not sipping cocktails and pirouetting from room to room.Instead, we see Mother serving up cabbage and meatloaf, which practically makes her a saint in my book. I’ve occasionally handed my toddler son Goldfish and some grapes for dinner over the past year (toddlers are picky!), so at least her uninspired meals are home cooked. We also see her washing Ralphie’s mouth out with a huge bar of red soap after he says “the queen mother of dirty words.” My son said his first curse word this year also, only he’s 3-years-old instead of 9 like Ralphie. Rather than stuffing soap in his mouth, I looked away to hide my laughter and to avoid giving the word any attention. Mother didn’t have the luxury of reading fancy books by child psychologists instructing her about what to do when kids curse. What she did have was a big bar of soap.Mother might not get treated like a superstar, but Dillon received top billing in “A Christmas Story.” She came to the film with a Tony nomination for her Broadway debut in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” plus two Academy Award nominations, for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice.” Dillon started out as the first coat check girl at the improv theater The Second City in Chicago, but when her career quickly took off, she was overwhelmed by the prospect of fame. She turned her energy away from acting and toward marriage and kids. The role of real-life suburban mom quickly lost its allure, though.“I got buried alive,” Ms. Dillon said of her stay-at-home stint in a 1976 interview with The Times. She went back to work.Reading that, it’s hard not to imagine that Ms. Dillon brought some of those feelings to the role of a woman who, as Ralphie says early on in the movie, “hadn’t had a hot meal for herself in 15 years.”She’s not just a meatloaf baking pushover, though. Mother has mastered the art of outsmarting her husband. She uses stealth tactics to convince him not to turn on the hideous leg lamp he won in a contest, like suggesting he keep it off so they don’t waste electricity (this qualifies as a stealth tactic in my eyes). She later not-so-subtly asserts her authority by destroying the leg lamp in a fit of rage. I cheered her on with every off-camera smash. Deprived of hot meals and cooped up at home, she needs this.From left, Ian Petrella, Billingsley, Dillon and Darren McGavin.Credit…MGMAt the end of “A Christmas Story,” Ralphie and Randy tear open their many presents, and The Old Man opens a gift from Mother, a shiny blue bowling ball. As I watched her observe her husband and son’s delight around the Christmas tree, I noticed that she was holding something that could either be a gold spatula or a fly swatter. I hoped that whatever her gift was, it was not either of those things. Suddenly, on the umpteenth viewing of this movie, I needed to know if this woman, the saint of the film, got a Christmas present.Frantic Google searches combining “mother” “Christmas Story” “gift” and “spatula” yielded nothing, so I emailed A Christmas Story House & Museum in Cleveland, the site of the actual house from the movie, hoping for answers.“Who cares what the mom gets for Christmas,” replied the museum’s owner Brian Jones. Turns out he was joking, but still. “No one has ever asked me that in nearly two decades in the business,” he wrote.According to Jones, Mother is indeed holding a fly swatter. If she gets any presents, we never see them. Is her Christmas gift the fact that her husband and sons are all happy and fulfilled? Where is her reward for multitasking and keeping everyone fed and clothed and protected from blizzards, all while sacrificing her own time and energy to make yet another cabbage stew? They could have at least given her a card!From now on, when I watch the end of “A Christmas Story,” I won’t be focused on Ralphie’s BB gun or Old Man Parker’s bowling ball. I’ll be rooting for the mom, and imagining a deleted scene where she kicks up her feet, has that Tom Collins and gets a quiet moment all to herself.Dina Gachman is an Austin-based writer and the author of “Brokenomics.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘City Hall’ and ‘The Masked Dancer’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat’s on TV This Week: ‘City Hall’ and ‘The Masked Dancer’Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary airs on PBS. And “The Masked Dancer” debuts on Fox.Mayor Martin J. Walsh of Boston, as seen in Frederick Wiseman’s “City Hall.”Credit…Film ForumDec. 21, 2020, 1:00 a.m. ETBetween 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, Dec. 21-27. Details and times are subject to change.MondayWONDER WOMAN (2017) 6 p.m. on Cartoon Network. Superpowered sword and shield meet World War I weaponry in this DC Comics blowout, the first stand-alone “Wonder Woman” movie with Gal Gadot. (The second, “Wonder Woman 1984,” comes out this weekend.) Directed by Patty Jenkins, this take on the superhero’s origin story takes place primarily in the early 20th century, introducing Gadot’s character as a mythical Amazon warrior who lives with other Amazons on a Mediterranean island. That island is magically insulated from the rest of the world — until an American fighter pilot (Chris Pine) crash-lands there, tailed by German soldiers. The hodgepodge of mythology (of both the Greek and the comic-book varieties) and history that follows makes for a movie that “cleverly combines genre elements into something reasonably fresh, touching and fun,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. The film’s “earnest insouciance recalls the ‘Superman’ movies of the ’70s and ’80s more than the mock-Wagnerian spectacles of our own day,” Scott added, “and like those predigital Man of Steel adventures, it gestures knowingly but reverently back to the jaunty, truth-and-justice spirit of an even older Hollywood tradition.”TuesdayCITY HALL (2020) 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The documentarian Frederick Wiseman (“Titicut Follies,” “Ex Libris”) trains his patient, piercing lens on the Boston City government in this, his most recent documentary. Shot around Boston’s administration building and in other areas of the city (including, during one extended sequence, Faneuil Hall), the film follows Boston’s mayor, Martin J. Walsh, and other city employees during moments both mundane (streams of people arriving at City Hall, workers answering calls at a 311 center) and extraordinary (a town-hall meeting about a proposed cannabis dispensary that turns into an impassioned debate). In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film is both “an exploration of civil society and the common good” and “fundamentally a portrait of a people.” Dargis and Scott each included the film on their lists of the top 10 movies of 2020.WednesdayChris Rock, left, and Bernie Mac in “Head of State.”Credit…Phillip V. Caruso/DreamWorks PicturesHEAD OF STATE (2003) 10 p.m. on Showtime 2. A black-tie donor event derailed by Nelly’s “Hot In Herre.” A presidential debate where candidates quarrel over whether a debate is the same thing as an argument. These are a couple memorable moments from “Head of State,” Chris Rock’s directorial debut and a very early-2000s satire of American electoral politics. Rock stars as Mays Gilliam, an alderman who’s unexpectedly chosen to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. (He eventually enlists his older brother, played by Bernie Mac, to be his running mate.) The tone is set in the very first sequence, when a staid shot of Mount Rushmore tilts down to reveal the singer Nate Dogg performing at the monument’s base.MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944) 8 p.m. on TCM. Hear Judy Garland sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — and other songs that became standards — in this technicolor musical. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, the film follows four sisters coming-of-age over the four seasons leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The story it tells through sound and color, Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1944 review for The Times, is “warm and beguiling.”ThursdayA CHRISTMAS CAROL (1951) 7:50 p.m. on FXM. When this British adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” debuted in 1951, it stood in stark contrast to some of the more upbeat versions that had come before. “Where the last ‘Carol,’ produced by Metro, was a ruddy and generally cheerful affair, this one is spooky and somber, for the most part, except toward the end,” Crowther wrote in a review for The Times. It’s fitting, then, that FXM is airing the 1951 version, with the Scottish actor Alastair Sim, alongside a rebroadcast of last year’s FX’S A CHRISTMAS CAROL, another gritty take on the tale. That newer version, with Guy Pearce as Scrooge and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past, airs at 9:40 p.m.FridayFrom left, Cliff Parisi, Daniel Laurie and Annabelle Apsion in “Call the Midwife Holiday Special.”Credit…BBC Worldwide LimitedCALL THE MIDWIFE HOLIDAY SPECIAL 9 p.m. on PBS. This British series based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, an English nurse, has developed a fan base by offering a compassionate look at life — and a group of nuns at work — in a poor area of London in the late 1950s and ’60s. In a review for The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis called the show “unfailingly humane.” Those running low on holiday cheer may want to give this special episode a look.Saturday1917 (2019) 8 p.m. on Showtime. This time last year, the director Sam Mendes exploded into the award-season race at the last minute with this meticulous World War I movie. (It ended up winning several Oscars, including one for Roger Deakins’s cinematography, though it fell short of winning best director or best picture honors.) Made to look as though it were shot in a single take, the film follows a pair of British soldiers (played George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) who are sent on a dangerous mission to deliver a message to a battalion on the front lines. It’s the kind of movie most would doubtlessly prefer to watch in a movie theater, as many audiences did last holiday season; the contrast between December 2019 and December 2020 is pretty well encapsulated by the idea of watching “1917” on a small screen, stuck at home.SundayA scene from “The Masked Dancer.”Credit…Michael Becker/FOXTHE MASKED DANCER 8 p.m. on Fox. Fox had a hit with “The Masked Singer,” a bizarre competition show in which celebrities compete in singing contests while their identities are hidden by elaborate costumes. The series, which was itself adapted from a South Korean program, gets a spinoff with “The Masked Dancer.” The new show’s participants will presumably be up against both their fellow contestants and the elasticity of their costumes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barbara Windsor, Beloved British TV and Film Star, Dies at 83

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarbara Windsor, Beloved British TV and Film Star, Dies at 83She went from bubbly sex symbol in the “Carry On” films to working-class hero on “EastEnders.” Her private life was often as troubled as her “EastEnders” character’s.The actress Barbara Windsor at the British Academy Television Awards in London in 2009. She was a star of the series “EastEnders” on and off from 1994 to 2016.Credit…Luke Macgregor/ReutersDec. 18, 2020Updated 4:07 p.m. ETLONDON — Barbara Windsor, a star of the “Carry On” films and the long-running BBC soap opera “EastEnders,” whose dirty staccato laugh and ability to embody working-class life seared her into Britain’s collective memory, died on Dec. 10 at a care home here. She was 83.Her death was announced in a statement by Scott Mitchell, her husband and only immediate survivor, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.Ms. Windsor with Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year in London. Mr. Johnson wrote on Twitter that Ms. Windsor had “cheered the world up with her own British brand of harmless sauciness and innocent scandal.”Credit…Pool photo by Simon DawsonIn a sign of the impact Ms. Windsor had on Britain’s cultural life over the last six decades, members of the royal family were among those who paid tribute on social media, as was Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who wrote on Twitter that Ms. Windsor “cheered the world up with her own British brand of harmless sauciness and innocent scandal.”Ms. Windsor also had an impact in the United States, albeit briefly, when she appeared on Broadway in 1964 in “Oh! What a Lovely War,” Joan Littlewood’s music-hall-style show that used irreverent songs from World War I to mock the absurdity of conflict.Some American theatergoers might have found Ms. Windsor’s cockney accent hard to understand — one of her first movies, “Sparrows Can’t Sing,” played with subtitles at some screenings in New York — but she was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical.In 1970, she told a BBC interviewer that she really wanted to make a film in Hollywood, preferably a comedy with Jack Lemmon. “That’d be smashing, wouldn’t it?” she said. She didn’t achieve that particular ambition, but she was soon immortalized in British movie theaters thanks to her roles in the farcical, innuendo-laden — and hugely successful — “Carry On” movies.Later, she became even more well known for her role as the matriarchal pub landlady Peggy Mitchell on “EastEnders,” a character she portrayed on and off from 1994 to 2016. She stopped once her Alzheimer’s made it impossible to continue.Ms. Windsor with her “EastEnders” co-stars in 1999, during the filming of an episode that included the wedding of her character, Peggy Mitchell.Credit…John Stillwell/PA, via Associated PressMs. Windsor was born Barbara Ann Deeks on Aug. 6, 1937, in Shoreditch, then a working-class part of East London. Her father, John, a bus driver, and her mother, Rose, a dressmaker, had a tumultuous marriage, and at 15 Ms. Windsor was made to testify about their rows at a divorce hearing.As a child in World War II, she was evacuated to Blackpool, a seaside resort in northern England. There, she revealed in her 2001 autobiography, “All of Me: My Extraordinary Life,” she first stayed with a family that tried to abuse her sexually, before moving in with a friend whose mother sent them both to dance lessons. The mother was so impressed by her talent that she wrote a letter to Ms. Windsor’s parents begging them to let her take lessons in London. “She’s a proper show-off,” the letter said, Ms. Windsor recalled in the 1970 BBC interview.Back in London, Ms. Windsor was spotted by a talent agent who tried to cast her in a pantomime, the peculiarly British form of theater popular at Christmas, but her school refused to give her time off. She eventually left to go to acting school, where the teachers repeatedly tried — and failed — to get her to lose her accent.Ms. Windsor became celebrated for her bawdy roles in the “Carry On” comedy movies. She is seen here with Sid James, as King Henry VIII, in a scene from “Carry On Henry” (1971).Credit…Bob Dear/Associated PressFor all the promise Ms. Windsor showed, her break didn’t come until 1960, when she traveled to East London to audition for a role with Ms. Littlewood’s Theater Workshop, a company whose works often brought working-class life and humor onstage. The acclaim she got for her work there soon led to appearances on TV and then in film, where she became celebrated for her bawdy roles in the “Carry On” comedies.In those films, the camera often focused on the short (4-foot-11) but buxom Ms. Windsor’s figure. She is probably best remembered for a scene in “Carry On Camping” (1969) in which her bikini top flies off during an outdoor aerobics class (during filming an assistant pulled the top off using a fishing line). That clip has been shown numerous times on British television ever since.Ms. Windsor in 1980 with Ronnie Knight, her first husband, who had just been released on bail after more than two weeks in custody. He was accused (and later acquitted) of ordering a hit man to murder his brother’s killer.Credit…Associated PressAlthough Ms. Windsor found success onscreen, her private life was troubled. She had liaisons with a series of famous men, including the soccer player George Best and the East London gangsters Reggie and Charlie Kray. In 1964 she married Ronnie Knight, another gangster, who in 1980 was tried for ordering a hit man to murder his brother’s killer (he was acquitted), and in 1983 was involved in stealing six million pounds (more than 17 million pounds, or about $23 million, in today’s money) from a security depot and fled to Spain.Her relationship with Mr. Knight caused her to have a nervous breakdown, she told the BBC in the 1990 interview. That marriage and a subsequent one ended in divorce.Her life got back on track on the 1990s after she was cast as Peggy Mitchell on “EastEnders,” the wildly popular kitchen-sink soap opera whose story lines often reflected social issues.She quickly became one of the show’s stars, known for slapping her co-stars when the plot demanded a climatic moment and for story lines that could be far darker than anything one would find in a “Carry On” movie. (In 2010, one of her character’s sons burned down the pub in the middle of a crack cocaine binge.)In the 1990s, her character had breast cancer twice and underwent a mastectomy, a plot that led hundreds of viewers to write to the BBC to express gratitude for how sensitively she handled the subject. In 2016, in her final appearance on the show, her character killed herself because her cancer had returned.Whatever happened to Ms. Windsor, onscreen or off, she never lost the joy of performing.“I don’t think negatively,” she told the BBC in 1990 when asked how she would look back on her life. “I’ll pick out all those wonderful things that have happened, and how lucky that I got paid — paid! — for doing something that I absolutely adored.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Film Academy Museum Delays Its Opening Again

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Latest Vaccine InformationU.S. Deaths Surpass 300,000F.A.Q.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFilm Academy Museum Delays Its Opening AgainThe Academy Museum of Motion Pictures pushed back its opening to Sept. 30, 2021, from April 30, citing the difficulty of forecasting when public life may begin to normalize.The museum recently installed a 1,208-pound model of the shark featured in “Jaws” above an escalator.Credit…Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressDec. 18, 2020, 1:00 p.m. ETLOS ANGELES — The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is starting to feel a little cursed. Since the project was announced in 2012 — with an opening expected in 2017 — setbacks have included sparring architects, the discovery of mastodon fossils by excavation crews, a budget that ballooned by roughly 90 percent, the ouster of its founding director and now, for the second time, the coronavirus pandemic.On Friday, the museum pushed back its opening to Sept. 30, 2021, from April 30, citing the virus and difficulty forecasting when public life may begin to normalize. The pandemic already scuppered a planned opening this week. “With the current surge of Covid-19, it would be irresponsible to maintain an April opening,” Bill Kramer, the museum’s director and president, said by phone. “It’s not because we aren’t ready. Work has been moving forward. We’re completely on track.”Ted Sarandos, chairman of the museum’s board of trustees and Netflix’s co-chief executive, added in a statement: “It’s just a matter of patience, for all of us, as we look ahead to opening our doors on Sept. 30.” A private gala was set for Sept. 25.How did the museum select those dates? This month, for instance, Warner Bros. said it would still be too difficult to release movies normally by next December because of the pandemic.Mr. Kramer said summer was not an ideal time to inaugurate a cultural institution (too many people scattered here and there). An early September opening would collide with the Telluride and Toronto film festivals.Had the $482 million museum stuck to its April plan, a marketing campaign would have started next month. Hiring was also set to begin for gallery guards and ticket takers.For all of its stops and starts, the museum has gotten its act together under Mr. Kramer, who was hired last year. (He previously served as vice president of development for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) In recent months, the museum has hired the film scholar and Turner Classic Movies host Jacqueline Stewart as its chief artistic and programming officer; repaired relationships with Hollywood collectors; attained LEED eco-friendly certification; and reached its pre-opening fund-raising goal of $388 million. Despite difficult working conditions because of the coronavirus, crews have installed exhibits, including a 25-foot-long, 45-year-old fiberglass model of the mechanical shark that Steven Spielberg used to film “Jaws.”Mr. Kramer called the shark, nicknamed Bruce, “shockingly cool.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Better Than Besties: Why Gay Holiday Films Matter

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyReporter’s NotebookBetter Than Besties: Why Gay Holiday Films MatterThis season’s movies with queer characters may be a largely chaste affair, but their comforting formulas also tell L.G.B.T.Q. viewers that they are seen.Heath (Juan Pablo Di Pace), left, and Wyatt (Peter Porte) get romantic in “Dashing in December,” on the Paramount Network. Credit…Paramount NetworkDec. 18, 2020, 12:59 p.m. ETI gasped so loudly, it sounded like Judy Garland had shown up at my Christmas party.It happened during “Dashing in December,” a new holiday film on the Paramount Network about two men who fall in love on a ranch. I involuntarily inhaled as Wyatt, a stuffy venture capitalist, locked lips with Heath, the sweetheart ranch hand. Watching it made me feel like Santa put me at the top of his nice list.I’m gay. I kiss men. Never at a ranch, once at a Denny’s. But there was something so surprisingly renegade about the movie’s smooch. Leading men just don’t kiss each other in the conservative fraternity of holiday TV movies.They do now. As I recently reported, this year there are six new holiday-themed films with gay and lesbian leading characters, including “Happiest Season” (Hulu), “The Christmas House” (Hallmark Channel) and “The Christmas Setup” (Lifetime). In this chaste genre, that’s a milestone.Nia Fairweather thinks so, too. She plays an Afro-Latina woman of fluid sexuality in the new indie “A New York Christmas Wedding,” now on Netflix.“There’s a list — a list — where there never was a list,” Fairweather said. “That lets us know this year has been different.”This change is significant for me, a holiday movie fan whose biggest gay Christmas memory is George Michael gazing lovingly at Andrew Ridgeley on the cover of the Wham! album “Last Christmas.” But as I reported the article, I wondered if I was overstating the arrival of a New Queer Christmas Cinema. Will we look back on horrible 2020 — as I think we will — as the year that finally gayed up Christmas movies?I called up holiday movie aficionados to ask: Is this a big deal?Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis in “Happiest Season” on Hulu.Credit…Hulu, via Associated Press“This is a big deal,” replied Joanna Wilson, the author of several books about Christmastime entertainment. “Queer people have been bosses and co-workers and siblings of the main characters. Being the central romance is very exciting and comes not a moment too soon.”Blake Lee, who stars with his husband, Ben Lewis, in “The Christmas Setup,” framed it as an answer to a chaotic 2020.“We are four years into a presidency that has attacked the L.G.B.T.Q. community and projected hate,” Lee said. “I feel like these writers with these stories were like, now’s the time.”What holiday films provide — nostalgia, predictable formulas and an escape from real-world adversities like Covid-19, bankruptcy, bigotry — can be especially comforting to queer people, said Michael Varrati, the screenwriter of several holiday films, including the new “Christmas With a Crown.”“Movie Christmas is a lot different than real Christmas,” Varrati said. “Not everybody has a great relationship with their family or has pristine memories of yesteryear.” In holiday movies, he added, queer people “get to live in the Christmas they always wanted or didn’t get to have.”Jake Helgren told me he wrote and directed “Dashing in December” as an Americana romance and a “love letter to the ending” he wanted in “Brokeback Mountain.” Lawrence Humphreys, the film’s production designer, said the set was a teary mess as he and other crew members, straight and gay, watched the leading men kiss.“We knew what we created was something beautiful,” said Humphreys, who has worked on several Christmas films. “It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever been a part of and the one I’m most proud of.”L.G.B.T.Q. holiday entertainment has roots in the days when the word “queer” landed with a punch to the face. Performers surreptitiously conveyed stereotypical gayness — through winks, camp, sass, frippery — that was evident to in-the-know audiences but sailed over others’ heads. Liberace’s television show featured a Christmas episode in 1954. Paul Lynde starred in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” a 1977 ABC special. That same year, “All in the Family” ran groundbreaking Christmastime episodes about the murder of Edith Bunker’s friend Beverly LaSalle, who refers to herself as a transvestite. (She was played by Lori Shannon, the drag stage name of Don McLean.)L.G.B.T.Q. characters are now regulars on holiday-themed TV. But until this year, queer leads in holiday movies were few, relegated to low-budget indies like “Too Cool for Christmas” (2004), which was also released in a straight version, and “Make the Yuletide Gay” (2009). Supporting queer characters were mostly on the sidelines and white. That changed this year, as actors of color took on leading roles, including Fairweather, who is Afro-Caribbean, and Juan Pablo Di Pace, the Latino actor who plays Heath in “Dashing in December.” Transgender characters and actors are still rare, though.Ben Lewis, left, and Blake Lee in “The Christmas Setup” on Lifetime.Credit…Albert Camicioli/LifetimeSo is sex. Couples of all orientations rarely get heavier than a kiss in mainstream holiday fare. “Dashing in December” is a little more sexually adventurous, and by adventurous I mean a scene in which Wyatt, in just underwear, encounters a wet Heath in a towel. By the chaste standards of holiday rom-coms, “Dashing in December” is “Cruising.”And yet — it’s not. What you won’t see in these new films are activists, leathermen, butches or foul-mouthed drag queens. That’s not the Lifetime or Hallmark brand, so that’s no shock. But that’s what happens with assimilation. If gay people want straight people to believe our love deserves a holiday movie, don’t be surprised when straight people expect that movie to look like theirs.To counter the new gay sweetness, I binged renegade holiday movies about queer people who are raunchy, vulgar, camp, deranged. Or as BenDeLaCreme, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star, put it: “the beautiful, bizarre things that queer people exposed themselves to when they had to search harder.” BenDeLaCreme is doing her part with a saucy new holiday special on Hulu with the “Drag Race” Season 5 winner Jinkx Monsoon.Whatever the opposite of “The Christmas House” is, I watched it. There was “Naked City: A Killer Christmas” (1998), a Peter Bogdanovich film that used the fear of an Andrew Cunanan-style gay serial killer in service of a lurid thriller. On Amazon, the ensemble dramedy “Some of My Best Friends Are …” (1971) was set on Christmas Eve at a bustling Greenwich Village gay bar, featuring moving performances from Rue McClanahan and Candy Darling. (This paper called it “a very sad gay movie.”)The value in these films — as grim and mirthless as they may seem — is that they paved the way for “Happiest Season.” They are historical benchmarks showing that L.G.B.T.Q. performers and creators made Christmas entertainment because — surprise! — they loved Christmas, despite the Scrooges who said they didn’t belong there.My binge ended with “Letters to Satan Claus,” a new horror satire on Syfy about a girl who misspells her letter to St. Nick and instead summons the Angel of Death. Featuring a same-sex subplot, a trans actor (Xavier Lopez) and a nonbinary Santa creature, it’s Christmas counterprogramming at its queerest.Yet Mike Zara, who wrote the film, seemed perfectly Hallmark as he talked about what inspired the story.“It’s about finding joy through tragedy and darkness,” he said. “That sounds corny, but I wanted to talk about all the scars we carry with us. We can embrace them but also not live in that darkness forever.”Sounds like a New Year’s resolution to me.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Berlin Film Festival Is Delayed. Will Cannes and Venice Follow?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBerlin Film Festival Is Delayed. Will Cannes and Venice Follow?The postponement of the first major international movie event of 2021 raises the specter of another difficult year for the industry.The cast and crew of “There Is No Evil,” which won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019.Credit…Michele Tantussi/ReutersDec. 18, 2020, 11:54 a.m. ETThe Berlin Film Festival, which was scheduled to start Feb. 11, has been postponed because of the coronavirus, its organizers said on Friday in a news release, making it the first — but probably not the last — major cultural event of 2021 to be affected by the pandemic.With coronavirus cases soaring in Germany, the Berlinale, as the festival is known, will now occur in a digital form for movie industry professionals in March, the festival said.The festival’s competition will take place as part of the March event, and a jury in Berlin will select prize winners, the release added. Berlin’s film fans will get to watch entrants at a separate event in June, involving open-air screenings as well as presentations in movie theaters.“There is a great desire to meet face to face,” Mariette Rissenbeek, the festival’s executive director, said in a statement, but “the current situation does not allow a physical festival in February.” On Sunday, Germany announced a lockdown as coronavirus cases surged, banning most cultural activities until at least Jan. 10.The delay to the first major international movie event of 2021 is likely to cause concern that other festivals might need to be pushed back, even as Europe prepares to roll out a Covid-19 vaccine.The Cannes Film Festival is scheduled to start on May 11, just weeks after the delayed Academy Awards, on April 25. Cannes organizers intend the event to occur as scheduled, Aida Belloulid, the festival’s spokeswoman, said in an email, but are “waiting until the beginning of next year to evaluate the pandemic evolution.”“Then, if we consider May won’t be possible, we will work on new dates, from end of June to end of July,” she added. Whatever date the festival occurs, it will be “a ‘classic’ Cannes,” with a full program and stars on the Croisette, Ms. Belloulid said.Earlier this year, Cannes was postponed at the last minute because of the pandemic. The organizers ended up staging a “special” edition in October, with just a handful of films and little of the festival’s usual glamour. That event received barely any media attention.In contrast to Cannes, the Venice Film Festival has yet to make contingency plans and its organizers intend to go ahead as normal, in September. “Of course we don’t know what the situation will be,” Alberto Barbera, the festival’s artistic director, said in a telephone interview, “but we were lucky enough to go ahead with the festival this year without any problems, so next year should be even better.”This year’s Venice Film Festival featured mandatory masks and a distinct lack of blockbusters, but it was still widely seen as a success, given that it was one of the few major international cultural events to actually happen in 2020.There was no reported transmission of the coronavirus during the 11-day event, Mr. Barbera said, which suggested the measures had been a success. Some element of social distancing might still be in place in 2021, he added, but that would depend on the state of the pandemic.Mr. Barbera said any changes to the film festival calendars, following the Berlinale’s move, were unlikely to affect movie release dates. The major studios and distributors will start releasing films only when movie theaters reopen, he said.“I feel the majority of big films will wait until the fall,” he said, “so that could be a huge chance for the few festivals, like us, Toronto, New York.”The Berlin Film Festival said in its news release that it was still in talks with its sponsors, including the German government, about the budget for its new events. It said it had no choice but to delay. “The Berlinale would like to emphasize once again that the health and the well-being of all guests and employees come first in all aspects of the planning,” the news release said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More