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      ‘Family Switch’ Review: Out of Body Experiences for Everyone

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      Even Pickles the dog gets to trade places in this movie directed by McG, but there are no revelations or bursts of originality here.In a holiday-themed twist on “Freaky Friday,” Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms star as out-of-touch parents who suddenly find themselves occupying the bodies of their teenage children (Emma Myers and Brady Noon), and vice versa, in the Christmas comedy “Family Switch.”Jess and Bill Walker bring the whole over-scheduled family — their daughter, CC, is in the running for the U.S. national soccer team, and Wyatt, their older son, is a science prodigy who’s interviewing for Yale — to the Griffith Observatory to witness a rare planetary alignment.A chance encounter with a fortune teller (Rita Moreno, hamming it up) during the celestial event combines with a cosmic energy conversion so powerful that it zaps the Walkers into a triple body swap: Jess with CC, Bill with Wyatt, and their toddler, Miles, with Pickles, the French bulldog. They break the observatory telescope in the process, and fixing it, which will take a week, is the only way to reverse the spell.On top of CC’s soccer tryouts and Wyatt’s college interview, Jess is prepping for a major presentation on the job at an architecture firm, and Bill is set to perform with his cover band (Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson and Brian Bell cameo as his bandmates) at the school holiday concert. Predictable antics ensue as the Walkers try and fail to excel in each other’s roles, and they soon realize that the telescope isn’t all that needs fixing.Loosely based on the picture book “Bedtime for Mommy” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, “Family Switch” carries a surprisingly raunchy streak given its source material. But seeing that it’s directed by McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “The Babysitter”), the gross-out humor shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.Family SwitchRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Stream These 16 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in December

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      We rounded up the best titles leaving the streaming service for U.S. subscribers. That includes Oscar winners, comedies, horror and four ‘Jaws’ films.The end of the year means plenty of expiring licenses on Netflix, so December’s list of movies exiting the service is bulkier than usual — and more prestigious, including two Oscar winners for best picture, two massively popular franchises and recent favorites of horror, comedy and family entertainment. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Us’ (Dec. 30)Stream it here.Jordan Peele followed up the massive critical and commercial success of “Get Out,” his Oscar-winning feature debut from 2017, with this similarly potent brew of horror, social commentary and bleak comedy. Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke star as upper-class parents whose family vacation is disrupted by the appearance of silent but terrifying visitors in the night. Are they home invaders? Common criminals? Supernatural doppelgängers? Or something even more sinister? As with “Get Out” before it and “Nope” after, Peele has as much fun building dread and atmosphere as he does delivering shock thrills, slyly threading in pop-culture shout-outs and obscure historical references to keep audiences equally puzzled and frightened.‘American Beauty’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.The Oscar winner for best picture of 1999 has fallen rather out of favor these days, thanks to some of its more controversial themes and the divisive presence of its leading man, Kevin Spacey (who took home his second trophy for best actor). But there’s still a great deal to admire in this story of rebellious teens, midlife crisis and suburban ennui: Annette Bening’s thrillingly unhinged work as an impatient mother and driven real estate agent, Conrad L. Hall’s luminous cinematography (another Oscar winner), and a supporting cast that boasts the likes of Wes Bentley, Thora Birch, Chris Cooper, Peter Gallagher, Allison Janney and Mena Suvari.‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ / ‘Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues’ (Dec. 31)Stream them here and here.The writer and director Adam McKay’s recent shift from broad comedies (frequently starring his “Saturday Night Live” collaborator Will Ferrell) to serious-minded social commentaries (including “The Big Short,” “Vice” and “Don’t Look Up”) took some moviegoers by surprise. But there are big ideas floating through even his goofiest farces, including his 2004 feature directorial debut “Anchorman” and its 2013 follow-up. The original “Anchorman” seems a broad goof on ’70s culture, focusing on the egomaniacal idiot Ron Burgundy (Ferrell) who fears his spot fronting the news on a San Diego station is endangered by the arrival of a new co-anchor (Christina Applegate); look closer, and it’s pointed satire of male insecurity and toxic masculinity in the workplace. “Anchorman 2” could have been more of the same, with Burgundy and his team going national in the then-burgeoning cable news scene; instead, McKay incisively sends up the unsavory practices of ratings-chasing in media. Both are far smarter than they needed to be — and uproariously funny to boot.‘Gladiator’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.Winner of Academy Awards for best picture and best actor (Russell Crowe), Ridley Scott’s action extravaganza from 2000 brought back the sword-and-sandal epic, one of the standbys of late ’50s and early ’60s cinema (particularly out of Italy), but with a modern sensibility and a comparatively gargantuan budget. Crowe stars as Maximus, a Roman general betrayed and enslaved by the evil Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), who returns to prominence as an unstoppable gladiator to exact his revenge. This is Crowe at his best, combining brute physicality and intense internalized emotion, and Phoenix is an appropriately vile villain; it’s a short walk from his work as a petty tyrant here to his current, entertaining reunion with Scott as a tantrum-throwing “Napoleon.”‘Jaws’ 1-4 (Dec. 31)Stream them here, here, here and here.It seems like a gross oversimplification to note that “Jaws” changed movies forever in 1975, but that’s less analysis than common wisdom: It created the template for making and marketing the summer blockbuster, and it sent the career of the director Steven Spielberg (only helming his second theatrical feature) into the stratosphere. It’s so easy to view “Jaws” through its historical and economic lens that it’s easy to forget what a genuinely, indisputably great movie it is — scary, funny, elegantly crafted, beautifully acted and populated with rich and memorable characters. As for its sequels … well, “Jaws 2” is pretty good, a welcome return for Roy Scheider’s no-nonsense Chief Brody, featuring some effective scares and well-executed set pieces. (The less said about “Jaws 3” and “Jaws: The Revenge,” the better.)‘Kung Fu Panda’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.In retrospect, it’s sort of shocking that it took so long to build a family franchise around Jack Black, since he’s so wildly animated and kid-friendly even in live-action movies; creating a cartoon for a living cartoon seems a relatively simple proposition. The inaugural entry of the series (2008), spawning two sequels and a Netflix series, introduces Black as Po, the titular karate-chopping, slapstick-prone giant panda, who must learn the ways of kung fu to fulfill his destiny as the Dragon Warrior. The supporting voice cast is impressive — Jackie Chan, David Cross, Dustin Hoffman, James Hong, Angelina Jolie, Randall Duk Kim, Lucy Liu, Ian McShane and Seth Rogen all turn up, and all seem to be having a ball — the animation is delightful and Black is as hysterically funny and warmly likable as ever.‘Mission: Impossible’ 1- 4 (Dec. 31)Stream them here, here, here and here.In its current iteration, the “Mission: Impossible” franchise is a well-oiled machine, with the recurring writer and director Christopher McQuarrie (who has been with the series since its fifth entry, “Rogue Nation”) orchestrating a cast of repeating characters and running story arcs. But this wasn’t initially the case at all; the first four films in the series were each helmed by a different, distinctive filmmaker, comporting each picture to their own style, with the general story and the star Tom Cruise among the few common elements. The approach was unsurprisingly hit and miss; the John Woo-directed “M: I-2” crosses the line from cool to goofy with more frequency than was presumably intended, and J.J. Abrams’s third picture suffers from a generic style that betrays the director’s television background. But Brian De Palma’s inaugural installment, from 1996, is wildly entertaining, and filled with the kind of Hitchcockian set pieces on which that auteur made his name, while the Brad Bird-helmed fourth film is filled with breathtaking action sequences, memorable supporting players and the beginning of a house style that McQuarrie would refine and perfect.‘Role Models’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.The raw edge yet soft heart of this wildly funny bad-boy comedy from 2008, and the presence of the frequent leading man Paul Rudd, might lead you to assume it’s the work of Judd Apatow. But the roots of “Role Models” go back farther than that — the director is David Wain, one of the minds behind the comedy troupe The State — and several of its members (including Kerri Kenney-Silver, Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino) turn up in supporting roles. Rudd and Seann William Scott star as a pair of irresponsible energy drink salesmen who are ordered to perform community service, and wind up in a Big Brother-type program, mentoring a foul-mouthed kid (the uproarious Bobb’e J. Thompson) and a cosplaying nerd (the “Superbad” favorite Christopher Mintz-Plasse).‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (Dec. 31)Stream it here.Martin Scorsese kicked off his loose trilogy of outsized critiques of the American capitalist system (continuing with “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon”) in 2013 with this savagely funny and narratively ruthless adaptation of the memoir by Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a corrupt penny-stock broker who parlayed his limitless greed and limited ethics into (briefly, at least) an unimaginable fortune. As with his earlier “Goodfellas,” Scorsese makes Belfort’s indulgences of sex, drugs and good times into virtuoso scenes of visceral and vicarious thrills; he similarly makes his protagonist’s fall from grace into an ugly indictment of both the individual and the system that made him possible.ALSO LEAVING: “8 Mile,” “Catch Me if You Can,” “Field of Dreams,” “Lost in Translation,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Scarface” (all Dec. 31). More

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      ‘Squid Game: The Challenge’ Is More Depressing Than the Original

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      “Squid Game: The Challenge” keeps the slick design of the dystopian drama but loses the point.Late in the first season of Netflix’s “Squid Game” — two-year-old spoiler alert, I guess — an elaborate, deadly contest among 456 needy contestants is revealed to be an entertainment for the viewing pleasure of a handful of crass, wealthy “VIPs,” who watch the gruesome proceedings wearing golden animal masks.You could look at that situation and see a dramatization of the way a decadent system exploits desperate souls. Or you could look at it and say: All that production effort and they couldn’t monetize the show for a bigger audience?For everyone in the latter group, there is now “Squid Game: The Challenge.” The reality spinoff, whose first five episodes premiered Wednesday on Netflix, keeps the drama’s kaleidoscopic set design, its outfits and many of its competitions. It gets rid of the messy murder business — sort of — along with most of the uncomfortable ideas.What’s left is a beautifully designed but empty game box, a creepy dystopia cosplay, an answer to the question of what happens when you take a darkly pointed TV satire and remove its brains.The worldview of the original “Squid Game,” written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, was as subtle as a gunshot. Debtors, criminals and sundry other last-chancers are recruited by a mysterious organization to compete in scaled-up versions of playground games. One player will win a life-changing sum; the penalty for losing is death.Through the protagonist, Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae), we confront the question of whether one can survive the game, and by extension a ruthless economic system, and still keep one’s soul. The commentary could be blunt and obvious; “there’s a difference between making reference to something and actually illuminating it,” my colleague Mike Hale wrote. But the show had something to say and said it with style.“The Challenge” keeps the style, with the copycat precision of an A.I. image generator. It opens with a montage of colorful re-created “Squid Game” sets and the singsong of the giant robo-doll that presided over the opening game of Red Light, Green Light.That game opens “The Challenge,” with the full mob of contestants, dressed in familiar green track suits, stop-start racing to a finish line. Those who fail, by moving when they are supposed to be frozen, are eliminated faux-execution-style; tiny squibs explode under their shirts, spattering them with black ink. (Apparently a simulated shooting massacre is tasteful as long as you don’t use red.) They fall “dead,” like war re-enactors. The survivors are brought to a re-creation of the cavernous prison-dorm and burst out in cheers. “Best slumber party ever!” one says.The stakes are real, if not life-or-death. For every player fake-murdered, $10,000 is added to the prize pot, represented as in the drama by a giant piggy bank, up to $4.56 million.The idea of basing a real game on a brutal fake one isn’t inherently bad. (The reports of “inhumane” filming conditions are another matter; Netflix has said that “all appropriate health and safety measures were taken.”) Plenty of great reality shows gamify deadly situations. “Survivor” is a stylized shipwreck. “The Traitors,” from the same studio as “The Challenge,” is essentially a murder mystery.The problem with “The Challenge” is symbolized by those little pops of black “blood.” It’s painfully literal, yet colorless.Between contests, the players stay in a hangar-like dormitory as in the original.Pete Dadds/NetflixIt doesn’t want you to forget for a second that you’re visiting the wonderful world of “Squid Game” — that I.P. is too valuable to abstractify. Besides rebuilding the sets, it tries to reproduce characters from the series, finding contestants to fill the roles of hard villains, doomed softies and sympathetic elders. One group of allies dub themselves the “Gganbu Gang,” using the Korean word for a close friend that was a key term in the series.But “The Challenge” shies away from everything in “Squid Game” that cut to the jugular — in particular, the commentary about how capitalism pits ordinary people in gladiatorial combat. Like a lot of reality shows, it peppers in interviews with players who want to win the prize to support family or achieve dreams. But the competition is cast as opportunity, not exploitation. “The Challenge” does not want to bum you out.Why does it matter? Great games don’t just have good mechanics. They have ideas, like Monopoly, the family rainy-day pastime originally conceived to disseminate Georgist concepts about land use and equity. Reality shows have ideas, too, uplifting or cynical or even satirical. A game’s rules are an expression of values; the kind of play that works in a certain game says something about the kind of behavior that works, or should work, in the world.So if you take a reality competition — even a fictional one — and keep its aesthetics while stripping its foundational ideas, you’re left with, in this case, a well-produced, boring version of “Big Brother.” There’s a lot of generic conflict, a lot of stultifying downtime in the bunk room and way too many characters to try to build investment in.And because “The Challenge” wants to reproduce the look and gameplay of “Squid Game” while staying all in good fun (a producer likened it to a theme-park ride based on a movie), it’s a tonal mess.At times, it offers a bleak view of human nature. Players are disdained for cracking under pressure and one contestant, an early “villain” in the narrative, says, “sympathy, it’s only a weakness.” Other times, it is stickily sentimental and heartwarming. Sometimes the show encourages, or at least allows, cooperation; sometimes it forbids it.“The Challenge” does pull off some exciting set pieces. There’s a wicked twist to set up the pairings in the one-on-one marble game (which was also the dramatic high point of the original series). It even manages to improve on the glass-bridge hopscotch game. (Other events, like a board-game-based replacement for the drama’s tug of war segment, feel interminable.) But even at its best, you’re always conscious of watching an escape-room simulacrum of a famous TV show.And that’s where there is a kind of message in “Squid Game: The Challenge,” if an inadvertent one: It is an object lesson in how entertainment can appropriate any artistic or political statement. There is no dystopia so chilling that, with the right production values, you can’t sell it back to the audience as escapist fun.Since “The Challenge” does depend on being escapist fun, though, it can’t embrace this meta idea either. Maybe the biggest loss in this adaptation is the tension between the players and the competition itself. In the original drama, the game was the ultimate villain, and we saw the hero finally rebel against its shadowy makers.In the reality show, I’d expect no such satisfaction. The only way to win is not to watch. More

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      In ‘Squid Game: The Challenge,’ the Deaths Are Fake, but the Cash Is Real

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      A new reality competition based on the violent Korean hit features 456 players vying for a $4.56 million prize.Player 450, dressed in a green and white tracksuit, lunged forward, rushing to reach the finish line. Suddenly, the head of a gigantic doll swiveled around and she froze, but it was too late. She crumpled to the ground.Those who watched the TV thriller “Squid Game” will remember the Red Light, Green Light blood bath, in which players had to race across a room and stop moving every time a doll’s head turned around, or be shot to death.But in this version of the game, it wasn’t blood soaking Player 450’s shirt — it was black ink from a squib under her T-shirt. And not long after dropping to the ground, Player 450 would get up, disappointed but otherwise unscathed.She and 455 other contestants were competing for a $4.56 million prize as part of “Squid Game: The Challenge,” a Netflix reality competition, premiering Wednesday, that recreates the devilish games of the streamer’s hit Korean drama, including the dalgona candy contest, the glass bridge challenge and the marbles game. When Netflix opened its casting call in 2022, more than 80,000 people applied to join.As their numbers dwindle, the players forge alliances and break promises, making Machiavellian maneuvers to avoid elimination and gain the upper hand in pursuit of the cash prize.“We wanted the show to reveal, just as the drama had revealed, a study of human nature under pressure and what people are really made of,” John Hay, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. The show, filmed in England, is co-produced by the Garden and Lambert Studios.The show recreates the games from the original, like the dalgona candy contest.NetflixUnlike with the original drama, the producers of this show say they didn’t know ahead of time who would ultimately win. Earlier this year, some former players told Rolling Stone that the games were rigged, claiming that some players were preselected to advance to the next rounds.In a statement to The New York Times, Netflix denied that this happened. “All eliminations in the series were approved by our independent adjudicators, who were on set at all times to ensure fairness of all games,” a spokesman said.In an interview, executive producers said they compiled an enormous amount of footage of all the contestants early in the games, which allowed them to edit the show to focus on contestants who survived until later stages.To supplement the games, the producers also introduced a series of “tests of character”: mini-challenges in which contestants are forced to make difficult choices. Early on, two contestants receive the option to either eliminate a player or give another player an advantage for the next game. In a different test, a man gets a phone call and is told he has two minutes to convince another player to take the phone from him and be eliminated.“The drama is all about the alliances and groups people form,” said Stephen Lambert, an executive producer. “We needed to find ways to create challenges for people that would play to their sense of loyalty and sense of trust.”Recreating the games required complex engineering and a scientific attention to detail. To re-enact the dalgona game, in which contestants had to extract part of a candy without breaking it, the show’s designers spent months testing a variety of cookie recipes to find one that would accommodate contestants’ allergies while not being too soft or too brittle.Re-enacting Red Light, Green Light also posed challenges. To design the doll, which is more than 13 feet tall, the show’s designers requested exact dimensions from Hwang Dong-hyuk, the director of the original drama.Then they fed the designs into the largest 3-D printer in the United Kingdom and left it running for a month in order to fabricate the doll’s components, said the lead production designer, Mathieu Weekes. The most difficult task was designing an enormous head that could whip around fast enough to eliminate contestants without flying off the doll’s body in the process, said Ben Norman, the lead games designer. Once the doll was ready, the contestants were brought into a gigantic airship hanger in Cardington, a city north of London, to play the game.Former contestants told Variety and Rolling Stone earlier this year that they were forced to play the game in cold temperatures, resulting in some players receiving medical attention, a claim that Netflix has confirmed.The Red Light, Green Light contest included a working replica of the show’s 13-foot doll.Netflix“On the day of filming Red Light, Green Light, a small number of people were treated for mild medical conditions caused by the cold temperature, and one person was treated for a shoulder injury,” a Netflix spokesman said. “There were no other medical issues with the contestants during the remainder of the games.”The spokesman added that medics were on set at all times and that “all appropriate health and safety measures were taken throughout the filming period.”One of the contestants, Bryton Constantin, 23, said in an interview that he recalls people complaining about the cold, but he doesn’t remember any contestants experiencing severe injuries because of it.“We didn’t sign up for a beach trip in Hawaii,” he said. “We signed up for ‘Squid Game’ to win $4.56 million.”A Netflix spokesman would not say whether or not any contestants were compensated for their physical suffering or other unpleasant experiences on the show.After filming Red Light, Green Light, the show moved to studios in east London, where contestants lived in a large room filed with dormitory-style bunk beds, similar to the living quarters in the original series. Once they entered the studios, the lucky few who survived to the end would not leave for 18 days.“Nobody likes to sit in a room with 200 other people and eat not good food every day,” Constantin said. “But you’re in there struggling because everyone’s there for the same exact reason.” More

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      ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Review: Beloved Film Gets Anime Treatment

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      Not quite a reboot or a sequel, this anime series brings back the cast of the beloved “Scott Pilgrim” movie but lands without the same charm.Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers in the Netflix series “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”NetflixDid you know that at some point in the ’90s there were two separate, very different Sonic the Hedgehog TV series running simultaneously? “And the same guy played Sonic in both shows,” Scott Pilgrim, the doofy 23-year-old layabout of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” shares, unprompted, to his love interest, Ramona Flowers. “Isn’t that wild? The same guy playing two different versions of the same guy??”Totally wild. It’s almost like how the same guy (Michael Cera) has now played two different versions of this same guy (Scott Pilgrim) — first in Edgar Wright’s damn-near-perfect 2010 film, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and now in this underwhelming Netflix anime adaptation, both based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s beloved graphic novel series.In the books and in the film, Scott discovers that Ramona, a girl he’s been seeing in his dreams (because of a convenient subspace highway that runs through his head, of course) is real, but he can’t date her until he defeats her seven deadly exes in epic video-game-style faceoffs.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” isn’t a reboot or a sequel; it begins almost identically to the film but takes a sharp turn at the end of the first episode that sets it up as essentially an alternate-reality scenario. Here, Ramona and her exes take center stage, and though the series is still set, like the film, in a Toronto from “not too long ago,” this new story feels more grown up, often at the expense of its humor.The film, which condensed the six-book series into a svelte 112 minutes of addictive original songs and millennial- and Gen X-friendly references, more baldly satirized hipster culture and the cliché ways in which young adults sabotage their relationships and fail to hold themselves accountable for their knuckle-headed decisions.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” directed by Abel Góngora, is more dutiful in its depiction of toxic relationship behaviors and more generous in redeeming its characters — even its antagonists — through their own arcs of personal growth.The band Sex Bob-Omb in “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off.”NetflixToo bad those are also the blandest story lines. There are some intriguing new reveals and romantic pairings, along with jamming music from Scott’s band, Sex Bob-Omb (original songs by Anamanaguchi), but the bulk of the eight-episode series feels like a filler arc or, to use an anime term, OVAs (original video animations).The jokes are either wholly lackluster or slightly tweaked and watered-down versions of what appeared in the movie. The pacing lags too, and though most of the film’s stars return to voice their animated counterparts — including Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Schwartzman — the performances often land like bad English dubs, with any emotiveness muted and intonation flatlined.Anime is a cozy fit for O’Malley’s work. But for as much as “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” is conversant in the medium’s visual motifs, gags and gestures, it doesn’t fully take advantage of the absurdity that the format allows. Or at least not until the ending; in its last two episodes, the series finally exhibits the kind of imagination one would expect from a story featuring superpowered vegans and spying robots.So I won’t say “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” completely fails to launch, because it offers a wholesome sense of closure for fans of the books and of the film. But the series never fully succeeds either. The characters may have grown, but in this incarnation, the story itself is stuck in a state of arrested development. More

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      ‘Scott Pilgrim Takes Off’ Reunites the Movie Cast, Now in Anime Form

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      “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” revives the bassist who battles his romantic rivals. In an interview, the creators discuss the next chapter, for Netflix.Let’s get ready to rumble … again! Friday brings the premiere of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” an anime series based on the comic book about a young, lollygagging amateur bass player battling seven of his new love’s exes.It is the second major screen adaptation of the six-volume “Scott Pilgrim” series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, which were published from 2004-10. A live-action film by Edgar Wright titled “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” (2010), was a critical favorite, and the eight-episode anime reunites most of the movie cast including Michael Cera as Scott; Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his girlfriend, Ramona Flowers; Kieran Culkin as Scott’s pal Wallace Wells; and Chris Evans and Brandon Routh as two of the former flames.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” was written and developed by O’Malley and the writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (“Happily”), a longtime friend. It is produced by Netflix, Universal Content Productions and Science Saru, a Japanese animation studio. At a panel about the show at New York Comic Con last month, the creators said scheduling a cast of actors who have gotten much more famous since the film was one of the most difficult aspects of making the series.“You end up with this weird game of Tetris trying to get everybody,” Grabinski told the audience.From left, Kieran Culkin, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” They all signed on to voice the new series.Universal PicturesEven for those who have read the comic, seen the film or played the video game version, the anime will hold surprises. (There was a robust list of topics and guest voice actors that reporters were asked not to spoil.) O’Malley and Grabinski came to the New York Times offices last month to discuss the new series, reuniting the movie cast and what comes next for Scott Pilgrim. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did the anime come about?BENDAVID GRABINSKI Bryan found out that Netflix and Science Saru were interested. We went to dinner to talk about the pros and cons of doing a straight adaptation.BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY This was like a year after they asked. So I was a little reticent because I didn’t have a great idea. But then BenDavid had a series of great ideas at this dinner. He’s a traditional Hollywood screenwriter who will just walk into a room and make up a bunch of stuff.Were there specific characters you knew you wanted to focus on in this version?GRABINSKI I wanted to spend as much time as I could with the ensemble. The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott’s friends, with Ramona.O’MALLEY People always ask, “What’s your one regret?” I wish I could have done more with the evil exes, partly because I didn’t fully understand them. The first thing I think of when I think of anime is villain scenes. That was my first way in, and then BenDavid blew the doors off after that.The idea for the show began with Netflix and the Japanese anime studio Science Saru. which jointly approached O’Malley about the concept.NetflixWhat’s new about the series?GRABINSKI We will say that there are some big twists and turns that no other adaptation of this story has done yet. The great thing about making this show and having Bryan sitting five feet away is I have the guy who can veto things and say, “I never would have written that joke,” or “I don’t think that guy would do that.” As much as I would like to feel like every single thing in there is my idea, there’s an equal amount of ideas that I pitched where Bryan would politely text me back and say, “That’s not ‘Scott Pilgrim.’”O’MALLEY And sometimes less politely.GRABINSKI Yeah, I’m just trying to be nice about it. That’s the benefit of knowing each other for so long: You can be a little bit more blunt. This would not have worked if we didn’t know each other very well, because we’re both incredibly opinionated people. We just had a rule from the beginning that nothing could go on the show that either of us hated.O’MALLEY You want it to be unpredictable, but the surprises have to be satisfying. That’s the goal every single time.Were there conflicts?GRABINSKI Our episodes are very different, as the audience will see once they watch it. We never want it to feel stale, but it does need to feel consistent.O’MALLEY We both love episodic TV, so we wanted to embrace that.GRABINSKI I didn’t want to have something like, “Oh, it’s a four-hour movie that’s split into chunks.” We wanted the episodes to feel like episodes, but the season is one story with a beginning, middle and end.What was it like getting the film cast back together?O’MALLEY They’ve all blown up.GRABINSKI I have to give thanks to Edgar Wright. One, he put together one of the best ensemble casts of all time. And two, they all loved the experience so much that we benefited from that. After we started making the show, he reached out to the cast. He sent them the scripts and they immediately all said yes. We can’t take credit for the returning cast members. Guest stars, yes.O’MALLEY I had some involvement casting back then. He showed me every casting tape. So it’s really cool to have seen all those people flower so much and to get a chance for them to come back and revisit that work with their newfound maturity. The same way I feel about it, looking back and revisiting and finding new shading, the way we were finding it in the writing, they found in the acting. There’s a profound feeling to it and I love that.The creators said the series diverges from previous “Scott Pilgrim” stories in multiple ways.NetflixIs it the art that makes it an anime? Or is it more about the sensibility?O’MALLEY For me it’s just because we’re working with Science Saru: They are an anime studio. There’s a certain method of production and we had to slot ourselves into that. We’re not telling them what to do, other than giving them scripts. They are very autonomous.GRABINSKI Our feedback is about emotion or plot points. We wanted it to feel specific to their sensibilities. A lot of the time it became like a feedback loop where we would rewrite our scripts to match the things they were doing.O’MALLEY Abel Góngora is the director, so we wanted to give him all the autonomy. Each episode is storyboarded by different artists. They’re all Japanese artists, other than him.GRABINSKI The music and the cast, we’re extremely involved with.O’MALLEY That was the one aspect we wanted to control, because it’s so crucial to the tone of “Scott Pilgrim” to get that music correct.Are any of the characters more fun to write than the others?GRABINSKI I love Lucas Lee [played by Chris Evans] just because I’m pretty obsessive about action movies. There’s a tone to that character that is so fun to me. But honestly, the great thing is that they’re all so different. I’ve worked with Brandon Routh a lot and I knew he could be really funny, and we got him to do a bunch of stuff that I think is unexpected and very silly, and he embraced it.O’MALLEY It’s like each of the exes has their own genre, and it lets you mix it up.GRABINSKI That was the thing that was most exciting to me: pairing up characters who had never been seen together. What if they fought or what if they became best friends?O’MALLEY But not making it feel like fan fiction. Really bringing weight to it.GRABINSKI The difficult thing is trying to make sure it all feels like an organic part of the story. As much as we think, “Oh it would be really fun to have these two characters fight,” we can’t do that unless there’s a real reason that they want to fight that comes from the story.“The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott’s friends, with Ramona,” Grabinski said.NetflixWhat’s next? Will there be a Season 2?GRABINSKI I can’t think about anything beyond this. I’m glad that we told a story that has an ending for all the thematic things that we’re exploring. So if TV stopped existing on Nov. 18th, I’d feel really proud of what we did.O’MALLEY We wanted to be satisfied with what we get if we never get more. I don’t love it when a show feels like a setup for Season 2. We just wanted to have a complete dramatic and comedic arc to everything.How long did the entire production process take?GRABINSKI It was a few years to go from the beginning of doing outlines to the finish.O’MALLEY But it was also fast. We started writing in January 2022. We met Science Saru in June 2022. We were seeing episodes by spring of this year. We were pretty much done recording the voices before the strike started. So it was like 18 months. Saru is very fast, which is part of the appeal of this whole process. That’s what they pitched me: “We’ll do a season a year!” It took a little longer than that, but it’s pretty magical to get something this beautiful this quickly.Will you revisit “Scott Pilgrim” in comic book form?O’MALLEY Even if I was super inspired, I wouldn’t have time for it right now. But I think it’s definitely possible. And we’ve talked about other episodes. If those never got to fruition as TV, then I would definitely consider doing a comic and co-writing with BenDavid.GRABINSKI I hope that someone, someday, does a manga adaptation of the show.O’MALLEY If someone in Japan would want to do their own adaptation without any input from us, that would be really cool. More

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      in Television

      ‘Scott Pilgrim’ Is Back, Now in Anime Form

      by

      “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” revives the bassist who battles his romantic rivals. In an interview, the creators discuss the next chapter, for Netflix.Let’s get ready to rumble … again! Friday brings the premiere of “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off,” an anime series based on the comic book about a young, lollygagging amateur bass player battling seven of his new love’s exes.It is the second major screen adaptation of the six-volume “Scott Pilgrim” series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, which were published from 2004-10. A live-action film by Edgar Wright titled “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” (2010), was a critical favorite, and the eight-episode anime reunites most of the movie cast including Michael Cera as Scott; Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his girlfriend, Ramona Flowers; Kieran Culkin as Scott’s pal Wallace Wells; and Chris Evans and Brandon Routh as two of the former flames.“Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” was written and developed by O’Malley and the writer-director BenDavid Grabinski (“Happily”), a longtime friend. It is produced by Netflix, Universal Content Productions and Science Saru, a Japanese animation studio. At a panel about the show at New York Comic Con last month, the creators said scheduling a cast of actors who have gotten much more famous since the film was one of the most difficult aspects of making the series.“You end up with this weird game of Tetris trying to get everybody,” Grabinski told the audience.From left, Kieran Culkin, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Michael Cera in “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” They all signed on to voice the new series.Universal PicturesEven for those who have read the comic, seen the film or played the video game version, the anime will hold surprises. (There was a robust list of topics and guest voice actors that reporters were asked not to spoil.) O’Malley and Grabinski came to the New York Times offices last month to discuss the new series, reuniting the movie cast and what comes next for Scott Pilgrim. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did the anime come about?BENDAVID GRABINSKI Bryan found out that Netflix and Science Saru were interested. We went to dinner to talk about the pros and cons of doing a straight adaptation.BRYAN LEE O’MALLEY This was like a year after they asked. So I was a little reticent because I didn’t have a great idea. But then BenDavid had a series of great ideas at this dinner. He’s a traditional Hollywood screenwriter who will just walk into a room and make up a bunch of stuff.Were there specific characters you knew you wanted to focus on in this version?GRABINSKI I wanted to spend as much time as I could with the ensemble. The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott’s friends, with Ramona.O’MALLEY People always ask, “What’s your one regret?” I wish I could have done more with the evil exes, partly because I didn’t fully understand them. The first thing I think of when I think of anime is villain scenes. That was my first way in, and then BenDavid blew the doors off after that.The idea for the show began with Netflix and the Japanese anime studio Science Saru. which jointly approached O’Malley about the concept.NetflixWhat’s new about the series?GRABINSKI We will say that there are some big twists and turns that no other adaptation of this story has done yet. The great thing about making this show and having Bryan sitting five feet away is I have the guy who can veto things and say, “I never would have written that joke,” or “I don’t think that guy would do that.” As much as I would like to feel like every single thing in there is my idea, there’s an equal amount of ideas that I pitched where Bryan would politely text me back and say, “That’s not ‘Scott Pilgrim.’”O’MALLEY And sometimes less politely.GRABINSKI Yeah, I’m just trying to be nice about it. That’s the benefit of knowing each other for so long: You can be a little bit more blunt. This would not have worked if we didn’t know each other very well, because we’re both incredibly opinionated people. We just had a rule from the beginning that nothing could go on the show that either of us hated.O’MALLEY You want it to be unpredictable, but the surprises have to be satisfying. That’s the goal every single time.Were there conflicts?GRABINSKI Our episodes are very different, as the audience will see once they watch it. We never want it to feel stale, but it does need to feel consistent.O’MALLEY We both love episodic TV, so we wanted to embrace that.GRABINSKI I didn’t want to have something like, “Oh, it’s a four-hour movie that’s split into chunks.” We wanted the episodes to feel like episodes, but the season is one story with a beginning, middle and end.What was it like getting the film cast back together?O’MALLEY They’ve all blown up.GRABINSKI I have to give thanks to Edgar Wright. One, he put together one of the best ensemble casts of all time. And two, they all loved the experience so much that we benefited from that. After we started making the show, he reached out to the cast. He sent them the scripts and they immediately all said yes. We can’t take credit for the returning cast members. Guest stars, yes.O’MALLEY I had some involvement casting back then. He showed me every casting tape. So it’s really cool to have seen all those people flower so much and to get a chance for them to come back and revisit that work with their newfound maturity. The same way I feel about it, looking back and revisiting and finding new shading, the way we were finding it in the writing, they found in the acting. There’s a profound feeling to it and I love that.The creators said the series diverges from previous “Scott Pilgrim” stories in multiple ways.NetflixIs it the art that makes it an anime? Or is it more about the sensibility?O’MALLEY For me it’s just because we’re working with Science Saru: They are an anime studio. There’s a certain method of production and we had to slot ourselves into that. We’re not telling them what to do, other than giving them scripts. They are very autonomous.GRABINSKI Our feedback is about emotion or plot points. We wanted it to feel specific to their sensibilities. A lot of the time it became like a feedback loop where we would rewrite our scripts to match the things they were doing.O’MALLEY Abel Góngora is the director, so we wanted to give him all the autonomy. Each episode is storyboarded by different artists. They’re all Japanese artists, other than him.GRABINSKI The music and the cast, we’re extremely involved with.O’MALLEY That was the one aspect we wanted to control, because it’s so crucial to the tone of “Scott Pilgrim” to get that music correct.Are any of the characters more fun to write than the others?GRABINSKI I love Lucas Lee [played by Chris Evans] just because I’m pretty obsessive about action movies. There’s a tone to that character that is so fun to me. But honestly, the great thing is that they’re all so different. I’ve worked with Brandon Routh a lot and I knew he could be really funny, and we got him to do a bunch of stuff that I think is unexpected and very silly, and he embraced it.O’MALLEY It’s like each of the exes has their own genre, and it lets you mix it up.GRABINSKI That was the thing that was most exciting to me: pairing up characters who had never been seen together. What if they fought or what if they became best friends?O’MALLEY But not making it feel like fan fiction. Really bringing weight to it.GRABINSKI The difficult thing is trying to make sure it all feels like an organic part of the story. As much as we think, “Oh it would be really fun to have these two characters fight,” we can’t do that unless there’s a real reason that they want to fight that comes from the story.“The main appeal of the show to me was to dig deeper with the exes, with Scott’s friends, with Ramona,” Grabinski said.NetflixWhat’s next? Will there be a Season 2?GRABINSKI I can’t think about anything beyond this. I’m glad that we told a story that has an ending for all the thematic things that we’re exploring. So if TV stopped existing on Nov. 18th, I’d feel really proud of what we did.O’MALLEY We wanted to be satisfied with what we get if we never get more. I don’t love it when a show feels like a setup for Season 2. We just wanted to have a complete dramatic and comedic arc to everything.How long did the entire production process take?GRABINSKI It was a few years to go from the beginning of doing outlines to the finish.O’MALLEY But it was also fast. We started writing in January 2022. We met Science Saru in June 2022. We were seeing episodes by spring of this year. We were pretty much done recording the voices before the strike started. So it was like 18 months. Saru is very fast, which is part of the appeal of this whole process. That’s what they pitched me: “We’ll do a season a year!” It took a little longer than that, but it’s pretty magical to get something this beautiful this quickly.Will you revisit “Scott Pilgrim” in comic book form?O’MALLEY Even if I was super inspired, I wouldn’t have time for it right now. But I think it’s definitely possible. And we’ve talked about other episodes. If those never got to fruition as TV, then I would definitely consider doing a comic and co-writing with BenDavid.GRABINSKI I hope that someone, someday, does a manga adaptation of the show.O’MALLEY If someone in Japan would want to do their own adaptation without any input from us, that would be really cool. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The Killer’ Review: He’s a Deadly Bore

      by

      Michael Fassbender stars as a loquaciously dull hit man in David Fincher’s latest film about bloody exploits.David Fincher can’t get enough of that murderous stuff — his filmography bleedeth over with miscreants (“Alien 3”), home invaders (“Panic Room”) and multiple maniacs (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl”). During one of his periodic breaks from painting the big screen red, Fincher served as a producer and director on the Netflix show “Mindhunter,” another of his visually impeccable, morgue-cold creep-outs. This one was about F.B.I. agents profiling serial killers like Edmund Kemper, a ghoul whose silkily insinuating manner resonated more deeply than the show, which ended after two seasons.“Mindhunter” was easier to admire than to love, which is habitually true of Fincher’s work and was certainly true of his last movie, “Mank,” an Old Hollywood exhumation about powerful people who kill dreams and souls. In Hobbesian terms, life in a Fincher film tends to be solitary and poor, nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short. That’s the case again in his most recent movie, “The Killer,” about a nameless hit man — played by Michael Fassbender — a chatty loner first seen waiting for a victim to show up. In time, the mark appears, the Killer shoots but misses, and spends the remainder of the story trying to clean up the mess.“The Killer” is based on a French comic book with the same title written by Alexis Nolent (who goes by Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. The protagonist is an outwardly ordinary-looking hit man who’s as physically unassuming as he is inevitably nihilistic: Other people are awful, the world is hopeless, “we’re living on a pile of corpses,” etc. He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts. What makes him ostensibly interesting isn’t his job or body count; what’s intriguing, at least before your eyes finally glaze over, is that he’s dull.The idea of an anti-Bond type with an illegal license to kill is, yes, an idea, one that flickers weakly on the page amid a mass of genre clichés. What’s most distinctive about the comic is the contrast between its protagonist and Jacamon’s cinematic illustrations, with their rich hues, canted angles and interplay between realism and expressionism. You keep reading only to keep looking. Fincher’s visual approach in the movie is relatively muted by contrast. He bathes the screen with sulfurous yellow, throws in a few showy shots — an unblinking eye seen through a gun scope — and, as he likes to do, goes dark and then darker, as in one extended fight sequence that’s so dimly lit it sometimes hovers on the threshold of visibility.Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the movie ditches a lot of the comic’s gasbag observations, shaves the plot to the bone, folds in some pop-culture yuks (the Killer uses sitcom aliases) and takes a jab at WeWork. Fassbender’s character still prattles on a lot, mostly in voice-over, both when he’s on the job and off, but much of what he says is repetitive and on occasion near-affirmational. “Forbid empathy,” he murmurs. “Trust no one.” On occasion, he sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself or just settle his mind so he can focus on the violent task at hand; at other times, he sounds as if he’s dispensing avuncular advice to students of slaughter: “This is what it takes if you want to succeed.”One problem with the movie is that without the Killer’s anti-humanist rants, his historical references and political entanglements, there isn’t much left other than Fincher’s virtuosity, Fassbender’s tamped-down charisma and the thorny pleasures of watching evil people commit evil with great finesse. What this Killer has are a lover (Sophie Charlotte), who’s merely a plot contrivance, a luxe beachfront house and a storage unit kitted out with the tools of his trade (guns, passports). What he doesn’t have is much of a personality or a code, a way of being that complicates the violence, as in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and his admirers. So what is the Killer? Mostly, it seems, he is a way for Fincher to kill time.After the first job in the movie goes bad, the Killer finds that he’s now a target, which adds a bit of tension and mystery as he dodges threats amid the bang-bangs — the gunfire is more polyrhythmic than the metronomic editing — and the splashy entrances and exits from the other generic types: the Lawyer (Charles Parnell), the Client (Arliss Howard), the Expert (Tilda Swinton), the Brute (Sala Baker). Throughout, Fassbender holds the center with his lissome, controlled physicality and near-unmodulated voice. The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.The KillerRated R for ultraviolence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More