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Alice McDermott, 70, writer There are three kinds of novels I’ve never taken to heart: science fiction, murder mysteries and novels about novelists. So I’ve decided to try my hand at each. If I fail, they’re probably not books I’d want to read anyway. Thurston Moore, 65, musician and author I’m putting the final touches […] More
Famous women play the famous women in Ryan Murphy’s new period drama. In a group interview, they discuss the series and the burdens of public life.The first season of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” aired in 2017. A juicy survey of the bitter rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the co-stars of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” the show earned 18 Emmy nominations, winning two. A second season, based on Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s troubled marriage, was developed then scrapped, mostly because Murphy felt that he could never outdo “The Crown.” Another iteration, centered on William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, also fell apart. Murphy and his producers toyed with a half dozen other ideas, though never for very long.“It’s very easy to do a show where people are just nasty to each other,” Murphy said in a an interview earlier this month. “But feuds are never about hate. They’re about love.”Then Murphy read “Capote’s Women,” by Laurence Leamer, a gossipy, trenchant study of the novelist Truman Capote and the society women he befriended and later betrayed. Murphy had long been fascinated by Capote. He was equally entranced by the women Capote referred to as his Swans, self-created creatures whom he admired for their style, wealth and savoir faire. Their gift, as Capote wrote in his late collection “Portraits and Observations,” was to offer “the imaginary portrait precisely projected.”Tom Hollander plays Capote, whose betrayal of Babe Paley (Watts) was perhaps the most cutting.FX“It was a full-time job,” Moore said of the roles performed by the real-life women she and her co-stars play in “Feud.” “There were no casual sweatpants.”FXLeamer’s tale had luxury, treachery, artistry and spite. It had love, too, “the very fragile, wonderful relationships that exist many times between gay men and straight women,” Murphy said. With a script by Jon Robin Baitz and direction by Gus Van Sant, the story became “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans,” an eight-episode series that premieres on FX on Wednesday. (Episodes will stream on Hulu the day after they air.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? More
Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten craft a mysterious New York thriller with mumblecore sensibilities.Simultaneously high stakes and low-key, “Slow Machine,” the enigmatic debut feature of Joe DeNardo and Paul Felten, who also wrote it, follows a Swedish actress named Stephanie (Stephanie Hayes). She becomes romantically involved with Gerard (Scott Shepherd), an intelligence agent for the New York Police Department, and bunks with indie musicians upstate, including Eleanor Friedberger (as herself). Along the way, Stephanie attends an A.A. meeting and grabs drinks with Chloë Sevigny (playing a prickly version of herself) — both events are slightly interrupted by a possible bomb threat.Difficult to describe and confounding to follow, the film is best when you submit to the surreal nature of it; then, you will be open to witnessing one of this year’s most mesmerizing movies unfold. Films of such lo-fi aesthetics rarely feel this major.The mystically inclined French auteur Jacques Rivette explicitly influenced the directors, but there are also paranoid, insomniac traces of Sara Driver’s “Sleepwalk” and Bette Gordon’s “Variety.” The taboo flirtations with authority and danger are reminiscent of Jane Campion’s “In the Cut.” All are New York movies, but DeNardo and Felten’s New York is nearly impossible to place. Vague locations, along with the use of pointillistic 16-millimeter film and actorly monologues, enhance a dreamy, meta quality at play.Much of Gerard and Stephanie’s relationship is contained in a barely furnished apartment. When he takes her to a diner, she asks what borough they’re in (Queens, by the way). In the film’s best scene, Sevigny dives into an oration about a bizarre audition somewhere she cannot place, realizing “the world had dissolved around us — not dissolved, died.” Watching “Slow Machine” has that sort of strange effect: It transports you deep into a world that you’re desperate to grasp.Slow MachineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More
#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 storyIn ‘Demonlover,’ Cyber Kicks and Dangerous Video GamesA new director’s cut restores the nasty glory of Olivier Assayas’s 2002 thriller about global elites and pornographic anime.Chloë Sevigny in a scene from “Demonlover,” a thriller directed by Olivier Assayas.Credit…Janus FilmsFeb. 10, 2021, 3:55 p.m. ETMoving confidently back and forth between youth films, backstage stories, family sagas, period pieces, melodramas, romantic comedies, diva vehicles and biopics, Olivier Assayas may be the most versatile French director of his generation.“Demonlover” (2002), streaming via Film at Lincoln Center in a new director’s cut, combines several modes. It’s an intricately plotted, cool and nasty cyber-thriller that, twisting itself into a Möbius strip, means to expose cutthroat industrial intrigue in the video game industry.Snazzy from the onset, “Demonlover” opens mid-red-eye in a first-class airline cabin populated by high-powered business types. As her colleagues snooze, the enigmatic Diane (an elegantly wan Connie Nielsen) laces one of their water containers with a powerful sedative to eliminate a rival. Complications ensue, accentuated by hard-edge techno and a score mainly supplied by Sonic Youth.Cutting on motion from close-up to close-up (or from TV to laptop screen), “Demonlover” gives the impression of continuously switching the channel. A heady globalism prevails. Business lunches are negotiations in three languages. Casual references to Qatari real estate deals punctuate the matter at hand, namely an interest by Diane’s firm in acquiring worldwide distribution rights for pornographic anime — providing none of the female cartoon characters are underage. The meeting smoothly segues to the animation studio, a strobe-lit Tokyo disco, then back to a hotel where, having revved their engines on separately watched porn, Diane and her boss Hervé (Charles Berling) go through the motions of nearly having sex.Every character in “Demonlover” is a player in a murkily grasped game. As impassive as she is, Diane demonstrates her action chops, fencing with two rival women. An American interloper (Gina Gershon, bursting onto the scene in an “I ♥ Gossip” T-shirt) briefly commands the movie, while Diane’s grouchy assistant Elise (Chloë Sevigny) conspires behind the scenes.Elise maintains the illusion of a normal life, checking on her babysitter in the midst of brutal intrigue, even as Diane’s role as a double (triple?) agent appears increasingly theoretical. Like her, the movie grows more abstract as the action accelerates. Well before coldblooded Diane survives a car-crash conflagration, it’s apparent that she is some sort of avatar, a kind of Lara Croft (or maybe a replicant gone rogue) living in a live-action anime.The plot doesn’t thicken so much as dissolve or self-destruct. “Demonlover” evokes “Irma Vep” (1996), Assayas’s mock vérité account of an unmade French crime film, in pondering its entertainment context, which, in this case, is a world of soulless sensation and virtual thrills. (The movie also recalls David Cronenberg’s hilariously maligned “Videodrome,” from 1983, which concocts a cable TV network even creepier than the S&M website that holds Diane in thrall.)As noted by Stephen Holden in his New York Times review, “‘Demonlover’ is a movie about becoming what you watch,” not least if the viewer is a suburban teenager supposedly doing his homework. The movie struck many as annoyingly trendy when it premiered at Cannes in 2002. Nearly two decades later, its Everything-is-Now pyrotechnics have aged well, although it is hard to ignore the flip-top phones.DemonloverAvailable to stream starting Feb. 12 at Film at Lincoln Center; filmlinc.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
