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

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

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      Five Science-Fiction Movies to Stream Now

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      This month’s picks feature family-friendly superheroes, eerie phone calls (and eerier cab rides), alternative universes and a perilous trip to Mars.‘How I Became a Superhero’Stream it on Netflix.Like the series “Lupin,” also on Netflix, this engaging French movie delivers fleet-footed, family-friendly fare that does not talk down to its audience or look as if it’s surreptitiously hawking Happy Meal toys.Douglas Attal’s action comedy is set in a world where special abilities are common enough that a cop like Moreau (Pio Marmaï) is assigned to catch “super-criminals.” He does not look kindly on his new partner, Lieutenant Schaltzmann (Vimala Pons), who is not used to these unusual perps, and off we go with frenemy banter out of the “Lethal Weapon” playbook.The main plot involves a drug that can turn people into human flamethrowers, shooting fire from their hands, but the visual effects are so clunky that it feels as if it’s an afterthought. The movie is on much surer footing when it lets its terrific actors have fun. Marmaï and Pons, who are often associated with the young French auteur cinema, excel in a romantic-comedy register. But the best scenes involve the brilliant Belgian star Benoît Poelvoorde (“Keep an Eye Out”) as Monte Carlo, who used to fight villains with Leïla Bekhti’s Callista in the Pack Royal superteam. Nobody is likely to complain if these two get their own spinoff.‘The Call’Stream it on Netflix.Younger viewers may be perplexed by the odd object at the center of Lee Chung-hyun’s creepy hybrid of science-fiction, thriller and horror. It’s black and clunky, and you talk into it: Yes, that is a cordless phone, connected to a so-called landline. When Seo-yeon (Park Shin-hye) picks it up, Young-sook (the intense Jun Jong-seo) is on the other end. Both women are about the same age and, as it turns out, live in the same house. Except that Seo-yeon is calling from 2019 and Young-sook from 1999.In the rules governing this Korean movie’s internal logic, you can change both the future and the past, with each person’s present adjusting instantly, in front of their eyes. The bad news is that one of the people is a psychopath. Lee has a firm grasp on the aesthetics and shot framing — everything looks simultaneously gorgeous and unsettling — but more important, the events are easy to follow. There has been, in recent years, a fetishization of hypercomplex plotlines, as if any screenplay requiring an explanatory diagram is automatically granted depth. “The Call” has a clarity that has become rare in this type of storytelling; that makes the film only that much more powerful.‘The Fare’Stream it on Amazon Prime; buy it or rent it on Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.It seems impossible to put together one of these columns without including a time-loop movie: Not only can they be done on the cheap, but they have an addictive quality — the desire to keep coming back is baked in.In D.C. Hamilton’s “The Fare,” a cabby, Harris (Gino Anthony Pesi), picks up a passenger, Penny (Brinna Kelly, who also wrote the screenplay). When he resets the meter, their interaction repeats. He doesn’t realize what’s going on at first; she, on the other hand, has always been ahead of him.Warning bells have been ringing from the start, though: After all, Harris drives an old-fashioned Checker cab in the middle of a landscape so barren, it’s startling to hear the dispatcher mention streets.The film was shot mostly on a soundstage using rear projections, but these budget-minded constraints actually help create a dreamy mood, as if the action were happening in a chiaroscuro netherworld. Visual hat tips to old Hollywood movies and “The Twilight Zone” are an added benefit. (Hamilton is not as successful wringing uniformly solid performances from his cast.)Many such stories focus on the protagonists’ efforts to escape the temporal loop and don’t bother explaining how it came to be. But that aspect is key to “The Fare,” and the left-field reveal turns out to be surprisingly satisfying.‘Parallel’Stream it on Amazon Prime; buy or rent it on Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.One day, four friends discover that an old mirror in their shared house functions as a portal to alternate universes that duplicate ours, with at least one major difference: Time in those places passes much more slowly. This, for example, allows Noel (Martin Wallström from “Mr. Robot”) and Josh (Mark O’Brien) to beat a seemingly impossible deadline for an important business meeting. Leena (Georgia King) passes off artworks from a mirror universe as her own and finally lands a gallery exhibition. As for Devin (Aml Ameen), he keeps trying to find an alt-reality where his father is still alive.The buddies also get to have stoopid fun in mirror worlds without fear of consequences, since they can always retreat to the safety of their regular home — in those scenes, Isaac Ezban’s film feels as if it’s a “Goonies”-type lark, with mindless adults.But after one friend dies and the other three kidnap the mirror version, we enter a game of Whac-a-Mole as unruly paradoxes sprout up and the movie can’t keep them under control. One character’s ambition is revealed to be amorally destructive. Eventually we realize that the worm was in the apple: no need to go find trouble through a mirror when it’s been sitting right there all along.‘Stowaway’Stream it on Netflix.A scientist (Daniel Dae Kim) and a physician (Anna Kendrick) are on an exploratory journey to Mars under the leadership of their commander (Toni Collette, who gets to keep her Australian accent for a change). The entire mission is endangered when the crew discovers the title character (Shamier Anderson): There simply won’t be enough oxygen for four people.Joe Penna’s film is more concerned with practical matters and intimate human dilemmas than large-scale, interstellar whiz-bang. Life-or-death decisions must be made, and “Stowaway” brings up major issues: How do you evaluate a life’s worth? How do you rank a person’s value and decide who lives and who dies? These are tough questions, and the movie struggles when it needs to dig deeper — there is little chance anybody will mistake Penna for Andrei Tarkovsky. At the same time, “Stowaway” does not shy away from the consequences of actions, and Kendrick’s presence anchors the viewer: She is believable as a medical prodigy, while her Everywoman quality gives genuine poignancy to the doctor’s choices. More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Great Filter’ Review: Earth Men, Home Alone

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      Frank Winters’s play, about two astronauts in lockdown after a mission, uneasily grafts tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy.An “experiment that could forever revolutionize the way that humanity interacts with the cosmos.”“TF-7 cloud seeding.”“Terraformation initiative.”Men in NASA-branded outfits speak these lines, which are not even linked to a Jeff Bezos joke: You don’t often hear this kind of talk onstage, so having it bandied about in the new show “The Great Filter” elicits a frisson of delight for audiences drawn to the tiny intersection of the Venn diagram of theater and science fiction.Sadly, Frank Winters’s play squanders that promise, and ends up as stuck in place as its two characters, a pair of astronauts held in lockdown after their return from an expedition. (The show, at the Wild Project through Saturday, will stream July 29-Aug. 29, with all the ticket sales donated to the Cultural Solidarity Fund.)David and Eli (Jason Ralph and Trevor Einhorn, co-stars in the Syfy series “The Magicians”) have been kept in isolation for three weeks in tight living quarters. James Ortiz’s excellent white set has a slightly old-fashioned vibe, vaguely spacey but not antiseptic, and suggests a hazy timeline for the show: This could be an old Apollo mission we’ve never heard of, or a near future in which terraforming other planets has become a matter of survival. (Ortiz’s own play “The Woodsman,” which told the back story of the Tin Man from Oz, did quite well a few years ago.)Countdown to what? Einhorn and Ralph in limbo.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWinters does not really explore that angle, nor does he get into specifics about what Eli and David were up to in space, because his main concern is the return to Earth. One day, just before a scheduled news conference, the men are facing radio silence from the control center. Comms are dead, except for one message, equally cryptic and disturbing: “No survivors,” in Morse code.Making things even more tense, the men notice a countdown clock in their habitat; there is about an hour left on it, and they don’t know what will happen when it hits zero.David, the mission commander, brainstorms: “If we could somehow redirect the pressure from one of the back up generators into a J-cell unit with enough force,” he muses. But this is not “The Martian,” in which Matt Damon jury-rigged his way through hostile circumstances. Instead, we are in the kind of story where a gun mysteriously appears — what? — and building a bomb becomes an option.While David tries to find solutions, including dumb ones (see: bomb), Eli paces around, listening to himself talk and talk and talk. He’s classified as a “specialist” but it’s unclear of what, and it comes as a shock to learn that he’s a college professor.“The Great Filter” uneasily tries to graft together tropes borrowed from hard sci-fi and odd-couple comedy. At times you could picture John Mulaney and Nick Kroll doing an Eli and David skit, and maybe the show, which Winters also directed, if it went all in on the comedy. This would also play to the combined strength of Ralph and Einhorn — who founded the “apparel and whatnot” company Looks Like a Great Time, one of the show’s producers — and have a natural rapport that enriches the characters’ opposites-thrown-together dynamic.As it is, the play can’t decide what it wants to do, or how, and just give us hints of what could have been. It is not lost in space, but, more prosaically, close to home base.The Great FilterLive through July 3 at the Wild Project, Manhattan; on-demand July 29 to Aug. 29; thewildproject.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      Smithsonian Will Display Star Wars X-Wing Fighter

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      Starting late next year, an X-wing from “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” will go on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.The National Air and Space Museum holds some of the most hallowed objects of the aerial age.Visitors can marvel at the 1903 Wright Flyer that skimmed over Kitty Hawk, N.C., the bright red Lockheed 5B Vega that Amelia Earhart piloted alone across the Atlantic Ocean and the bell-shaped Friendship 7 capsule that made John H. Glenn Jr. the first American to orbit the Earth.Now, the museum said, it will display a spacecraft that has flown only onscreen, in an entirely fictional galaxy where good and evil seem locked in eternal battle.That’s right: An X-wing Starfighter will grace the museum’s newly renovated building on the National Mall sometime late next year, the museum said on Tuesday, which was celebrated by “Star Wars” fans as a holiday because it was May 4 (May the 4th be with you).The Hollywood prop, with a wingspan of 37 feet, appeared in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” in 2019 and is on long-term loan from Lucasfilm, the movie’s production company.While air and space purists may grumble about precious exhibition space being turned over to a pretend craft that played no role in advancing actual space travel, the exhibition is not the first time the museum has allied itself with the franchise’s crowd-pleasing power. In the late 1990s, it presented “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” a show based on the original “Star Wars” trilogy; that show went on tour across the country.“Despite taking place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, ‘Star Wars’ introduced generations of fans here on Earth to outer space as a setting for adventure and exploration,” Margaret Weitekamp, the museum’s space history chairwoman, said in a statement. “All air and space milestones begin with inspiration, and science fiction so often provides that spark.” She added that “the X-wing displayed amid our other spacecraft celebrates the journey from imagination to achievement.”Designed as the nimble fighter that Luke Skywalker used to destroy the Death Star in the original 1977 “Star Wars” movie, the X-wing was named for the distinctive shape of its “strike foils when in attack position,” the museum said.Artists at Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects studio founded by George Lucas, the movies’ creator, depicted X-wings and other “Star Wars” spacecraft with miniatures as well as full-size models and cockpits, enhanced with visual effects, the museum said.This particular X-wing will undergo “conservation” — also known as cleanup and prep work — in the Restoration Hangar at the museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., where it will be visible to the public before it goes on display at the museum next year.While this will be the first “Star Wars” prop on long-term display at the museum since the “Magic of Myth” exhibit in 1997, the museum has also displayed a studio model of the starship Enterprise from the original 1960s “Star Trek” series as well a Buzz Lightyear toy, from the animated “Toy Story” films, that was flown to the International Space Station in 2008.A photo released by the museum showed the orange X-wing in a hangar next to a real twin-engine bomber, nicknamed Flak-Bait, that survived more than 200 missions over Europe, more than any other existing American aircraft during World War II.“Look what’s arrived in the shop for a tune up,” the museum said on Twitter. “If you see Poe Dameron around, let him know work on his X-wing is coming along nicely, and it’ll be ready for display soon.” More

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      Andy Weir’s New Space Odyssey

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      When Andy Weir was writing his new novel, “Project Hail Mary,” he stumbled into a thorny physics problem. The book’s plot hinges on a space mold that devours the sun’s energy, threatening all life on Earth, and that propels itself by bashing neutrinos together. He needed to figure out how much energy would be produced […] More

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      Beyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in Comics

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeyond ‘Black Panther’: Afrofuturism Is Booming in ComicsA bumper crop of graphic novels and comic books melds African culture and science fiction, with influences as wide-ranging as space travel, Caribbean folklore and Janelle Monáe.“Hardears,” set on a mythical version of Barbados, is among the titles coming from Megascope this year.Credit…Abrams BooksFeb. 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWhen Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, it struck the author and illustrator John Jennings as so unprecedented, such a break from American history, that it was like an event from some far-flung future.“Before then, the only time you would see a president who was Black was in a science-fiction movie,” he said in a phone interview last month. Jennings compared it to the sorts of imaginative leaps one finds in the most forward-thinking works categorized as “Afrofuturist.”This year, fans of Afrofuturism will see a bumper crop of comics and graphic novels, including the first offerings of a new imprint devoted to Black speculative fiction and reissues of Afrofuturist titles from comic-book houses like DC and Dark Horse.Afrofuturism, whether in novels, films or music, imagines worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect. The term was coined by the writer Mark Dery in 1993 and has since been applied to the novels of Octavia Butler (“Kindred”), the musical stylings of the jazz composer Sun Ra and more recently films such as “Get Out” and “Black Panther,” which presented a gorgeously rendered vision of the technologically advanced, vibranium-powered nation of Wakanda.“Afrofuturism isn’t new,” said Ytasha L. Womack, a cultural critic and the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” a primer and history of the movement and aesthetic. “But the plethora of comics and graphic novels that are available is certainly a new experience.”Graphic novels published in January included “After the Rain,” an adaptation of a short story by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor, and “Infinitum,” a tale of African kings and space battles by the New York-based artist Tim Fielder.For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, the artist Tim Fielder created Aja Oba, an African king cursed with eternal life. Credit…Harper CollinsThis month marks the long-awaited return of the “Black Panther” comics written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which the National Book Award-winning author began in 2016, as well as the latest installment of “Far Sector,” a series written by N.K. Jemisin and inspired by the actor and musician Janelle Monáe, about the first Black woman to become a member of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps.Even older works are getting new looks. Black superheroes from the ’90s-era comic company Milestone — including Icon, a space alien who crash lands on Earth in 1839 and takes the form of an African-American man — are finding new readers on DC Universe Infinite, a subscription service that launched in January. Meanwhile, the Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse plans to release the comics of the Nigerian-born writer Roye Okupe, who previously self-published them, including his Afrofuturistic series “E.X.O.,” a superhero tale set in 2025 Nigeria.Comics are particularly well suited for Afrofuturism, Womack said. Many Afrofuturistic narratives are nonlinear, something that comics, with their ability to move and stack panels to play with notions of time, can convey. Comic artists can also employ visual elements such as images from the Black Arts Movement, or figures from Yoruba and Igbo mythology, in ways that aren’t available to prose writers.“Afrofuturism is constantly moving into the future and back into the past, even with the visual references they’re making,” Womack said.John Jennings is the founder and curator of Megascope, a publishing imprint “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.”Credit…Jamil Baldwin for The New York Times“After the Rain” marks the launch of Megascope, an imprint of the publisher Abrams “dedicated to showcasing speculative works by and about people of color.” Its advisory board includes the scholar and author Henry Louis Gates Jr.“Afrofuturism is the catchall,” Jennings, the imprint’s founder and curator, said. “It’s really Black speculative fiction. But that’s sort of a mouthful. I just don’t want people to think that Megascope is only Afrofuturist. We’re dropping horror books, crime fiction, historical fiction.”Okorafor, the author of the imprint’s leadoff title, “After the Rain,” considers her work “Africanfuturism,” a term she coined to describe a subcategory of science fiction similar to Afrofuturism, but more deeply rooted in African culture and history than in the African-American experience. “Nnedi is a very hot author right now,” Jennings said, “so I thought it would be a great kickoff.”In April, the imprint will publish “Hardears,” a fantasy-adventure story set on Jouvert Island, a version of Barbados populated by mythical creatures — giant “moongazers” and shape-shifting “soucouyants” — drawn from Caribbean folklore. “Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.“After the Rain,” adapted from a short story by Nnedi Okorafor, was published in January.Credit…Abrams BooksA professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has devoted much of his career to Afrofuturism, writing scholarly works about it and leading panels devoted to Afrofuturist comics. He has worked with the artist Stacey Robinson, as the duo “Black Kirby,” to reimagine the work of the Marvel artist Jack Kirby through an African-American lens: for example, “The Unkillable Buck,” based on “The Incredible Hulk.”To Jennings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an Afrofuturist. “The mountaintop that Dr. King spoke about does not exist in this universe,” Jennings said. “It’s an imaginary construct of what the future could be.”For “Infinitum,” released by the HarperCollins imprint Amistad, Fielder created Aja Oba, a powerful African king cursed with eternal life. Oba travels from Africa to the United States and beyond, witnessing Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps, the rise of American slavery, the civil rights movement and (spoiler alert) the death of our solar system.Despite the fleet of spaceships on the cover, much of Fielder’s narrative is set in history. “Afrofuturists do not have the privilege, like general futurists, of just looking forward constantly,” Fielder said. “There’s so much of our work that was ignored, discarded or destroyed that, as an Afrofuturist, I’m forced to work on projects that are based in the past.”“Black Star,” a cat-and-mouse tale of two astronauts stranded on a desolate planet, comes out in May.Credit…Abrams BooksFielder’s immortal hero is also a response to the longstanding cinematic trope of Black men dying before the final credits roll. One of his strongest childhood memories was watching the Black hero’s untimely end in the 1968 horror movie “Night of the Living Dead.” “The white guys are all losing it, and it’s the one brother who keeps his wits about him,” he said. “And then he’s killed. I never forgot that.”“Infinitum” has a distinctly cinematic feel — Fielder’s influences include the “Star Wars” artist Ralph McQuarrie — and the shared references and influences between comic books and movies are likely to continue. After Coates restarts (and ends, after three issues) his run on “Black Panther,” Marvel Studios is expected to release “Black Panther II,” while over at Disney, producers are working with the comic-book company Kugali on “Iwaju,” an animated series set in a futuristic Lagos.Perhaps more than anything, Afrofuturist comics are a means of staking a racially inclusive claim on a multitude of futures. “And just because it’s about a Black subject doesn’t mean it’s just for Black people,” Jennings said. “I love Daredevil, but Marvel would never say: ‘Oh, you know what? This is just for white, poor Irish-American people.’ These stories are for everyone.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Mira Furlan, Actress on ‘Lost’ and ‘Babylon 5,’ Dies at 65

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMira Furlan, Actress on ‘Lost’ and ‘Babylon 5,’ Dies at 65The Croatian-born actress played Ambassador Delenn on the science fiction TV series “Babylon 5” throughout its five seasons and in two movies.Mira Furlan as the scientist Danielle Rousseau in “Lost.”Credit…Mario Perez/Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesJan. 22, 2021, 3:08 p.m. ETMira Furlan, an actress best known for her roles on the fantastical TV series “Babylon 5” and “Lost,” died at her home in Los Angeles on Wednesday. She was 65.The cause was complications of the West Nile virus, according to Chris Roe, her manager.From 1993 to 1998, Ms. Furlan starred in “Babylon 5,” a space opera that followed the relationships, politics, interspecies tensions and galactic conflicts aboard a United Nations-type space station in the mid-23rd century. She played Ambassador Delenn, representing the Minbari alien race on the space station.Ms. Furlan in “Babylon 5: In the Beginning.”Credit…Doug Hyun/TBS“Delenn is a wonderful creation, a woman who must be a leader and must be strong, but who is also full of emotion and secrets,” Ms. Furlan said in 1997.Ms. Furlan twice won a Sci-Fi Universe Award for best supporting actress for her work on the show, which also starred Bruce Boxleitner and Stephen Furst. She appeared in all 111 episodes and in two “Babylon 5” TV movies.In 2004, she began playing the scientist Danielle Rousseau on the popular ABC drama “Lost,” about a group of survivors stranded on a remote mysterious island after the crash of their jetliner. She played her character, known as “the Frenchwoman,” through the show’s final season, in 2010.Mira Furlan was born on Sept. 7, 1955, in Zagreb, Croatia, where she was a leading actress in theater, film and TV and was part of the Croatian National Theater. A profile once described her as “the Balkan equivalent of Meryl Streep.”Amid civil war in her homeland, she emigrated in 1991 to New York City with her husband, Goran Gajic, a writer and director. She lived and acted in the city until moving to Los Angeles for “Babylon 5.” In addition to her husband, she is survived by their son, Marko Lav Gajic.Her other acting credits include appearances on “NCIS,” “Law and Order: LA” and over 25 films. She most recently appeared in another science fiction series, “Space Command,” playing a former archaeologist.At the time of her death, Ms. Furlan was working on her autobiography.An excerpt released by her manager and posted on her website invoked space to describe her sense of peace as she battled illness.“I look at the stars,” she wrote. “It’s a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near. That’s where I’ll be going soon.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More