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    ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: How We Used to Escape

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    An outstanding not-quite-horror film about being a fan just before the internet took over.We’ve forgotten how hard being a fan used to be. You had to labor at it in multiple media: scouring listings and keeping tabs on schedules, reading books of lore and compiling episode recaps. Pop culture was built around presence, real physical presence: To see the latest episode of “The X-Files” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” you had to show up at your TV when it aired. If you missed a key episode, you were out of luck, unless someone remembered to tape it for you, at least until it went into reruns or syndication. And if your taste ran to the niche, discovering that someone else loved the same thing you loved felt revelatory, like you’d stumbled upon a person who spoke a language only you could understand.The social internet, algorithms and streaming blew most of this up, shoving our favorites at us and making them available all the time. Some of the magic disappeared as well, the uncanny immersive quality. You can bury yourself in a binge-watch for a day or a week, but then it’s over, no long in-between stretches to hash out each episode. Sustaining a relationship with the world a show built is still possible; connecting with others over your shared love is preposterously easy. Something, however, has been lost.“I Saw the TV Glow” captures this obsessive, anticipatory submersion in a long-form weekly TV show, to the point where it ignites the same feeling. A lot of movies tell you stories, but the films of the writer and director Jane Schoenbrun evoke them; to borrow a term, they’re a vibe. Like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” Schoenbrun’s previous film, this one isn’t quite horror, but it gives you the same kind of scalp crawl. In this case I think it’s the mark of recognition, of feeling a tug at your subconscious. It’s oddly hard to put into words.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was the tale of a lonely teenager living in the oddness of our internet era, where intimacy is free and plentiful and confusing and could be dangerous, or could be banal. “I Saw the TV Glow” dials that same tone back a generation, centering on a couple of lonely teenagers who find one another through a show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a mash-up show, instantly recognizable in its own way: It airs on something called the Young Adult Network (clearly a stand-in for The WB, the teen-focused TV network that turned into The CW) at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday nights, a time reserved for shows barely hanging on by a thread. The opening credits we glimpse suggest the show is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-adjacent (it even uses the same typeface), but with elements reminiscent of “The X-Files” and “Twin Peaks” — in all these cases, not exactly horror, but not quite anything else. (There’s also a band in the show, one that apparently performs a song in every episode, which plays expertly tuned mid-90s teen-show music; the musicians are Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl.)“I Saw the TV Glow” is set in 1996, right at the moment when entertainment was about to dive over the cliff and become what media theorists sometimes refer to as convergence culture. Back then, TV was still a few years away from being participatory for most youthful viewers. The internet wasn’t mature enough yet for the majority of teens to really haunt it, and those who did were posting on the kinds of message boards and websites that would eventually come to define both the TV and the fan-driven internet of the early aughts. (“The X-Files,” for instance, which premiered in 1993, was one of the first shows with a developed online fandom; they communicated through a Usenet newsgroup.) If you knew how to find message boards and chat rooms, you might have bonded with other fans. But if you were just a kid at home in the suburbs, you were most likely planning your schedule around episodes.The story of “I Saw the TV Glow” mostly belongs to Owen (played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman, and then from high school up by Justice Smith). He is nervous and anxious and sheltered, but he catches an ad for an episode of “The Pink Opaque.” He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s obsessed. One day, waiting for his parents to finish voting in the school cafeteria, he wanders into a room and finds Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading a book that recaps episodes of the show. Maddy explains the show to Owen: It’s about two girls, Tara (Lindsey Jordan, the musician Snail Mail) and Isabel (Helena Howard), who meet at camp and discover they share a connection that enables them to fight that most stalwart trope of ’90s TV dramas: the Monster of the Week. There’s a Big Bad in their world, too — the mysterious Man in the Moon named Mr. Melancholy. Owen is even more consumed.Owen’s father won’t let him stay up to watch the show, but Maddy and Owen concoct a way to make it happen. This is where “I Saw the TV Glow” starts to leave the realm of straightforward plot and slip-slide into some nether region at the intersection of fantasy, nostalgia, fear and longing. Escapism has always belonged to children’s literature, fantastical other worlds into which we might leave the ordinary behind and discover ourselves special. Owen and Maddy are trapped in their own worlds, but “The Pink Opaque” gives them the sense that a parallel dimension might be where they really belong.There’s a heartbreak at the center of this film that made me gasp to see it, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s better not to go back to what we once loved because now, in the cold light of adulthood, it all looks very different. There are other layers, too: implications that awakenings around gender dysphoria and sexuality are tied up in the teens’ obsession with the show, though they barely understand. Even more broadly, the immense pain of pushing down your true self, and the brittle breaking of that shell, is woven throughout.But what’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable. Teenage malaise, untreated, can sour into an adult psychic prison; the TV is just one way that we escape.I Saw the TV GlowRated PG-13 for some really trippy stuff. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The American Society of Magical Negroes’ Review

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      Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy, starring Justice Smith, tries to explore the trope but leans too hard on the conventions of superhero tales and rom-coms.Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy, “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” opens in an art gallery where people are milling about. A young Black man tries to walk through the crowd, constantly apologizing and sidestepping the gallery-goers. He acts as if he feels in the way and out of place. But as we learn when he arrives at his own yarn installation, he’s one of the artists whose work is for sale.The scene says a lot with a little, hitting comic beats but ending deflatedly thanks to the art dealer’s ruthless reaction to this diffidence. Yet the behavior of the young artist, Aren (the enormously talented Justice Smith), is exactly what catches the eye of a bartender at the show, Roger (David Alan Grier), who hides a secret identity. Cue the title of the film, which turns the movie trope of the “Magical Negro” character into a mission statement: Roger belongs to an elite group tasked with eliminating discomfort for white people and making them feel better about themselves.Roger recruits Aren, and within moments, they’re helping white people leap their anxieties in a single bound. Libii’s premise rests on the rationale that “the happier they are, the safer we are,” as Roger puts it. When he and Aren pacify a disgruntled white cop by helping him get into a nightclub, it seems clear that the stakes involve the threat of racial violence, though these ideas prove to be a challenge to explore in a film that leans into romantic comedy.Aren’s big assignment is to go undercover at a tech company and build up a co-worker, Jason (Drew Tarver), who’s feeling down for a couple of reasons. He’s hit a dead end at work, and he’s sweet on his superior, Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), but barely seems to know it. Aren must help Jason realize his dreams while suppressing his own: Aren and Lizzie have already flirted, quite promisingly, in an early meet-cute scene.Libii’s story underlines the self-negation involved in the trope of the title and ridicules the expectations and constraints forced upon Black people in myriad ways. The American Society of Magical Negroes has a hideout where Aren and other agents are trained on scenarios that echo the selfless-helper plots of “The Green Mile” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With Humor, Kobi Libii Gives His Characters a Different Superpower

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      The writer and director of “The American Society of Magical Negroes” has made a satire that may feel primed to be provocative. He responds to some of the discourse.In “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” the writer-director Kobi Libii’s debut feature film opening March 15, a mysterious group of Black people possess superpowers. But unlike Black Panther or Miles Morales’s Spider-Man, this group doesn’t fight criminals or take on villains.Instead, the members of this society wield their powers only for a very specific purpose: soothing the anxieties of white people.Endowed with the ability to perceive white people’s frustrations — represented by a floating dial that measures “white tears” — the members spend their days making lost purses reappear, transforming bland outfits into hip ones and doing whatever else white people require to be happy.This conceit satirizes the cultural trope of the Magical Negro, in which Black characters in a plot exist solely to aid the white protagonists. By incarnating this trope in the form of a secret society set in present-day America, the film critiques the ways in which Black people continue to be forced into deference toward white people.“I was sat down quite explicitly by older Black people in my life and told how to act around the police, that I needed to be polite there and that’s what I needed to do to stay alive,” Libii said in an interview.“And I personally believe I overlearned that lesson,” he added.Justice Smith, left, and David Alan Grier in “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”Focus FeaturesWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Beginner’s Guide to Dungeons & Dragons

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      The filmmakers behind “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” help explain the characters, monsters and spells that make up their new film.“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” a comedy-fantasy movie from the directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, is a loose adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, more commonly known among fans as D&D. A social game of chance, strategy and a kind of improvisational storytelling, D&D is hugely complex and deeply immersive, demanding of its players an almost scholarly commitment to learning its history, its rules and its mythology — all of it chronicled in a series of exhaustive, encyclopedic official rule books that are the foundation of the game.With so much advanced knowledge and folklore out there, it might seem daunting to approach this “Dungeons & Dragons” film (now in theaters) as a newcomer to D&D. But the movie has in fact been made with novices in mind.“The intention was for nothing in the film to have to be explained prior to seeing it,” said Daley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Goldstein and Michael Gilio, in a recent video interview. “We knew that was of the utmost importance, so that we’re not alienating an audience that doesn’t know D&D.” Although the film contains more than enough Easter eggs and references to satisfy die-hard fans, “none of that is a requirement,” said Goldstein. “You don’t have to know how to fly an F-18 to enjoy ‘Top Gun.’”To help answer any lingering D&D questions you might still have going into “Honor Among Thieves,” Daley and Goldstein explained some of the movie’s more arcane nods and allusions.Who are the good guys and the bad guys?Broadly speaking, the film features two competing factions: the Harpers and the Red Wizards of Thay. (For much of the running time, our heroes are caught in the battle between them.) The Harpers are “a benevolent faction of essentially spies, who work in conjunction with good-aligned characters and places to help root out evil entities,” Daley said. One of their primary adversaries is Szass Tam, the leader of the Red Wizards, who rules as a dictator of the nation of Thay.Daisy Head, left, as Sofina in the film.Paramount PicturesWhat’s a class, and what classes are our heroes?One of the first steps in a game of “Dungeons & Dragons” is the choosing of a character class: It defines your identity based upon set skills and abilities, and limits what you can and can’t do in the game. Standard classes include monks, fighters, wizards and warlocks.The characters in the film were written with these classes in mind. Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard. Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) is a barbarian. We also see sorcerers (Justice Smith’s Simon), paladins (Regé-Jean Page’s Xenk) and a rare tiefling druid (Sophia Lillis’s Doric). Goldstein said that they wanted there to be “a clear distinction between each of the classes that was immediately recognizable to people who were aware of the game,” but they didn’t want the characters actually describing their types out loud. “Nobody ever says, ‘I’m a barbarian, what do you want from me?’ or anything like that.”Who’s aligned with what?One of D&D’s most enduring contributions is the idea of alignment — a moral category determined along the axes of good versus evil and law versus chaos. (If you have ever heard of someone being described as lawful good or chaotic evil, that’s where it comes from.)It’s easy enough to determine the alignment of each of the characters in “Honor Among Thieves,” as D&D fans will no doubt be glad to do. But Daley said that the alignments were less expressly conceived for the film than “coincidentally obvious” based on the way all fictional characters tend to be written.What are all these monsters?“Honor Among Thieves” is rife with curious creatures — all of them taken from the original game. Some are considered beasts, which are animals that could exist in the real world, and others are monstrosities, which Goldstein described as more “fantastical.”There are Mimic Chests (huge carnivorous mouths disguised as treasure chests) and the fan-favorite Gelatinous Cubes (more or less what it sounds like: huge cubes of goo that trap people inside).“There are also deeper cuts, like the Intellect Devourer, a brain-shaped creature with legs that takes control of your mind and kills you,” Goldstein said.A Gelatinous Cube traps one character in the film.Paramount PicturesAnd that … owl … bear … thing?… is an Owlbear, actually. It’s a big owl-bear hybrid that the druid, Doric, transforms into a couple of times in the film. Large and powerful, it’s one of the film’s more striking creatures.“The traditional Owlbear design often is more of a grizzly bear, but we thought it would look more beautiful if it looked like a snowy owl,” Goldstein said.Where does the movie take place?“Honor Among Thieves” isn’t set in a generic fantasy land. In fact, its globe-trotting adventures are situated in clearly delineated spaces based on pre-existing “Dungeons” maps and settings. “While writing the movie, we consulted the map,” Goldstein said. “We treated it like it was a movie about a real place with a real history.”The film largely takes place within an area called the Sword Coast, of the Forgotten Realms, along the western side of the continent of Faerun. We see such cities as Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, glimpse the Arctic tundra of the northern Icewind Dale, and much more. The filmmakers took pains to make the geography game-accurate, being mindful of relative positions, travel times and how different areas relate. “If they go from Triboar to the Evermoors by horseback, we know that it’s a certain distance and that it would be possible,” Goldstein said.The film uses various locations from the game, like the ice prison Revel’s End.Paramount PicturesSo all of these places were already in the game?Not exactly. As the film opens, Edgin and Holga are serving a life sentence in the remote ice prison of Revel’s End, having been busted during a botched heist. Daley and Goldstein always knew they wanted to begin the movie this way — but when they reached out to the game’s manufacturer, Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), to ask if such a prison existed in the wintry region of Icewind Dale, they were informed that none did.Fortunately, Wizards worked their magic: A new “Dungeons” book released in the fall of 2020, “Rime of the Frostmaiden,” added Revel’s End and its parole board, the Absolution Council, to the official D&D canon. “That was one of the most gratifying parts of this whole process: seeing our names in a D&D book,” Daley said. “More so even than seeing our names on the poster for the movie.”What’s all that weird writing?As in “Star Wars,” “Honor Among Thieves” contains no written English. Instead, any of the script you see throughout the film is written in Thorass, a well-known in-game “Dungeons” language with its own established alphabet. Much as Trekkies can speak Klingon, many D&D obsessives will know the text by sight — and will no doubt be taking notes on what it means. “It was all very deliberate,” Goldstein said. “Anything you see in the film has meaning and can be translated.” More

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      ‘Sharper’ Review: The Big Con

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      The film stars Sebastian Stan and Julianne Moore in a baroque but lackluster story of con artists circling a Manhattan billionaire’s fortune.Perhaps phishing emails have taken the romance out of con artistry, but “Sharper” feels downright quaint in its Russian-doll plotting of elaborate scams. That’s no crime in itself, but the movie also confirms that stories about con artists might require more panache, or at least a sense of danger.The movie opens with a rom-com coziness, as Sandra (Briana Middleton) meets Tom (Justice Smith) in his tastefully appointed Greenwich Village bookshop. Their goo-goo-eyed dating ends badly, with the extraction of a large sum of cash. Each chapter of the film then pulls back the curtain on one of the characters. We learn that Sandra previously crossed paths with Max (Sebastian Stan), a smooth operator who is close to the Fifth Avenue habitué Madeline (Julianne Moore).Madeline in turn is dating a billionaire (John Lithgow), who’s about as safe in this setup as a chicken in a shark tank. The false fronts of the plotting are the film’s only reliable kick, and so they’re best left unexposed here, but the general modus operandi hinges on triggering protective impulses and panic responses.Yet this tony-looking film, directed by Benjamin Caron (“The Crown”), feels less poker-faced than prim about its characters and their behavior. The story misses the clinical bravado of David Mamet’s heists, the psychosexual menace of “The Grifters,” or — despite opening with a dictionary definition — the crooked community described in the David Maurer classic “The Big Con.”The film’s biggest trick might be casting Moore, Stan and the positively glowing Middleton and still never quite catching fire.SharperRated R for language throughout and some sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More