The Life of Chuck (Movie)

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    How the World Ends in ‘The Life of Chuck’

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    The screenwriter and director Mike Flanagan narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Violet McGraw. (Plus, Chuck.)In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A whimper? A bang? In this scene from “The Life of Chuck,” the world ends with a TV glow.At the center of the sequence is Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who is walking through a dark neighborhood as all is falling apart. His phone has died and he is headed to see his ex-wife when he encounters a young woman (Violet McGraw) on roller skates and strikes up a conversation. Their moment is interrupted by the cool glow of screens, all mysteriously projecting images of a man named Chuck (Tom Hiddleston).In his narration, Flanagan said, “What I found really striking about this scene when Stephen King wrote it is that it’s a very kind of casual conversation of two people who just happen across each other during this apocalyptic time.”The sequence is shot in a neighborhood near Mobile, Ala., where, Flanagan said, “we took over the power grid and basically blacked out the entire world there.”For the glowing screens, rather than using expensive visual effects, Flanagan said, “we accomplished this the very old-fashioned way by hanging televisions in the windows on their sides and prerecording these videos and running around hitting play on each of them in order to get the image to appear.”Read the “Life of Chuck” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      7 Father’s Day Movies to Watch in Theaters

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      Whether you’re in the mood for dragons or a new Wes Anderson, theaters this weekend are filled with fatherly flicks.It’s tough being a dad, but you can at least be assured that you don’t have to contend with fire-breathing dragons, rooftop body slams or assassination attempts (we hope).Instead, you can enjoy watching other dads — and surrogate dads — confront those thrills this month in theaters.Here’s a roundup of what to watch with the father figure in your life.The Heartwarming‘How to Train Your Dragon’Hiccup isn’t like the other vikings. He can barely lift a battle ax, much less wield one; he’d rather tinker than trade insults with his peers, and he’s more clumsy than courageous. He is, in other words, tough for his manly-man village chief father (played by Gerard Butler), to love. But when he unexpectedly vaults to the top of his dragon-fighting training class — using mysterious means — his father is over the moon. However, when Hiccup suggests NOT killing dragons? Cue the shame. In theaters.‘Elio’Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) with Glordon (Remy Edgerly) in “Elio.”Pixar/Disney/Pixar, via Associated PressWhen your dad is a warlord, and you just want to make him proud — preferably without the need for intergalactic conquest — well, it’s not easy for either father or son. But that’s the case among Glordon, a sluglike purple alien with no eyelids, and his dad, the fearsome space ruler Lord Grigon, in the latest Pixar film “Elio.”When Glordon and the titular protagonist, 11-year-old Elio, who must negotiate with Lord Grigon to prevent him from destroying the universe, become fast friends, loyalties will be tested. Will Glordon’s dad come around when his son is kidnapped and agrees to be used as a bargaining chip? Or will he abandon the kid to fate? (Yes, this one isn’t quite out yet, but no one says you can’t buy your dad advance tickets!) In theaters June 20.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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      In “Life of Chuck,” Tom

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      A creeping sense of dread washed over Tom Hiddleston as he read the script for “The Life of Chuck.” He knew that its director, Mike Flanagan, wanted him to play Chuck Krantz, or, as the actor put it, “a harbinger of the apocalypse.”But as he read on, there came excitement, a thrill. Chuck has a secret: He loves to dance.Hiddleston, 44, loves to dance, too, a discovery he made when he was a teenager. “It was instinctive,” he said in a recent interview via video. “But it was only for me. I didn’t train, I wasn’t in dance classes.”He went out dancing with friends. The 1990s were his time. “My love for Daft Punk,” he said of the electronic music duo, “is enduring and real.”While he is foremost an actor, Hiddleston has become something of a dance ambassador. Lean and elegant, he has the air of Fred Astaire. His limbs are long, but they don’t slow him down; his feet are fast and accurate. Known for his spontaneous eruptions of dance joy — on talk shows and the red carpet — Hiddleston is a natural with rhythmic acuity and, at times, riveting attack. His dancing, whether smooth or sharp, is instinctive and shaped by coordinated fluency.Tom Hiddleston discovered he loved to dance as a teenager: “But it was only for me. I didn’t train, I wasn’t in dance classes.”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesWhat’s apparent is the pleasure he gets from it: Certainly, there is Hiddleston the man, but also discernible is the boy within. There is innocence and fearlessness in his love of motion. An avid runner, Hiddleston said, “I’ve always thought of running as dancing forward.”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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      ‘The Life of Chuck’ Review: Don’t Worry, Be Happy

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      Tom Hiddleston dances his way through a movie about death and dystopia, based on a Stephen King story, that has an incongruous feel-good vibe.It’s the end of the world as we know it, or at least that’s how it seems in “The Life of Chuck.” A strange, feel-good fantasy about the end times, the movie traces a loose network of characters going about life while facing multiple personal and planetary catastrophes. When the story opens, Earth’s big clock, a.k.a. life itself, seems close to running out: Cataclysmic disasters, both natural and otherwise, are raging worldwide, species are rapidly going extinct, people are checking out and the internet is about to do the same. That’s bad, though given our enduring connectivity issues, it can also seem like just another day on Planet Reality.“The Life of Chuck” is a curious movie, starting with its relatively relaxed, almost blasé attitude toward extinction of any kind. It uneasily mixes moods and tones, softens tragedies with smiles and foregrounds a title character — Chuck, an accountant with a tragic past, played as an adult by Tom Hiddleston — who has a tenuous hold on both the story and your interest. Chuck is present from the start but only comes to something like life midway through. He has a kid and is happily married, at least according to the narrator (Nick Offerman), whose dry, lightly detached voice-over winds throughout. That the narrator proves to be a more vivid presence than Chuck is another oddity, one that’s presumably unintentional.Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the movie is based on a vaporous three-part novella by Stephen King, also titled “The Life of Chuck,” that’s included in the author’s 2020 collection “If It Bleeds.” Flanagan’s adaptation is scrupulously, unwisely faithful to the source material. As in King’s tale, the movie unfolds in three sections in reverse chronological order. Also as in the original, Chuck first appears on a billboard that doesn’t seem to be selling anything. It just features a photo of a suited Chuck at a desk smiling out at the world, a mug in one hand, a pencil in the other. “39 Great Years!,” the billboard reads. “Thanks Chuck!”The billboard catches the eye of the movie’s most fully realized character, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the focal point of the disaster-ridden inaugural chapter. A schoolteacher whose slight connection to Chuck emerges much later, Marty is dutifully plugging away in class despite the world’s looming end. “I contain multitudes,” one of his students unpersuasively reads from the Walt Whitman poem “Song of Myself.” Given everyone’s palpable listlessness, Marty’s included, T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” would probably have been too on the nose: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”A sensitive, appealing performer, Ejiofor is a master of melancholy, and he gets the movie off to a fine start. His soft face and large, plaintive eyes naturally draw you to him, but even when they water, as directors like them to do, it’s Ejiofor’s talent for emotional nuance and depth that holds your gaze. That skill is particularly useful for characters as vaguely conceived as Marty, a nice, lonely guy who’s still close to his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan). There’s not much to either character or their relationship, but Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably.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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      Oscar Contenders Emerge After Film Festival Season

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      After film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, a slate of contenders has emerged. Still, there are few front-runners.Fall foliage may still be weeks away, but the tea leaves of Oscar season are ready to be read.Now that festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto have concluded and all but a handful of this year’s contenders have had their first public peek-out, the story is beginning to come into focus. And unlike the last two years, which were dominated by the season-long sweepers “Oppenheimer” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this race seems much more wide open.Still, two movies already look like significant contenders across the board. One is “Conclave,” a handsomely mounted thriller about sneaky cardinals plotting to pick a new pope. It premiered at Telluride and stars Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci. Some of my fellow journalists sniffed that “Conclave” was just a potboiler with prestige trappings, but I think that’s exactly what will appeal to Oscar voters, who love to reward a rip-roaring yarn as long as it’s well-made with a soupçon of social-issue relevance. Directed by Edward Berger, whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” won four Academy Awards, “Conclave” could be a big hit with audiences, too.If Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” felt like the biggest movie of Venice, that’s in part because of its mammoth 215-minute run time, which comes complete with a 15-minute intermission. There’s no denying the outsize ambition of this film, which was shot on the old-fashioned VistaVision format and chronicles the epic tribulations of a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) as he emigrates to America after World War II. Expect plenty of awards recognition for Corbet and supporting performers Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, as well as a surefire Oscar nomination for Brody, who somehow still holds the record for the youngest best-actor winner after taking that Oscar at 29 for “The Pianist.”Two buzzy performances from big stars also debuted in Venice. Daniel Craig looks likely to earn his first Oscar nomination, for Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” in which he plays an American expat besotted with a young man in midcentury Mexico City. And Nicole Kidman won the best actress award at Venice for the erotic “Babygirl,” which also finds her falling for a younger man. (Perhaps age-gap romances are the new Oscar bait.)The Venice trophy will help Kidman build a case for her sixth Oscar nomination (she won for “The Hours”), though she’ll face a surplus of strong lead-actress contenders who also emerged from the fall fests: Angelina Jolie as the opera diva Maria Callas in “Maria”; the Brazilian star Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here”; Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a mouthy malcontent in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”; and the double act of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s empathetic “The Room Next Door,” which won the top prize in Venice, the Golden Lion.The director Jason Reitman has crafted a crowd-pleaser in “Saturday Night,” a comedy about the chaotic backstage negotiations that preceded the debut episode of “Saturday Night Live,” though its wide Oct. 11 release will have to go well if the movie hopes to sustain the momentum it earned from Telluride and Toronto. “Joker: Folie à Deux” has the opposite problem: Though this sequel to the billion-dollar hit is certain to make money when it’s released next month, it was coolly received by Venice critics and will face a much more uncertain awards future than its predecessor.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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      The Life of Chuck’ Wins Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award

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      This adaptation of a Stephen King novella stars Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mark Hamill. “The Substance” and a Tragically Hip documentary also won.“The Life of Chuck,” a cosmic story of accounting and life’s mysteries adapted from a Stephen King novella, won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. Winners often go on to best picture nominations at the Oscars or even, as in the case of “Green Book” and “Nomadland,” to take the top Academy Award.Told in reverse chronological order and closer in tone to the King adaptation “Stand by Me,” “The Life of Chuck” opens as the world seems about to end. Amid phenomena like enormous sinkholes and television blackouts, ads thanking Charles Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) for his service are everywhere, puzzling denizens played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan and Carl Lumbly. The film, which also stars Mark Hamill and features a much talked about dance sequence with Hiddleston, was written and directed by Mike Flanagan, who’s no stranger to King’s work: “Gerald’s Game” and “Doctor Sleep” are among his credits. “The Life of Chuck” doesn’t have a release date yet.The festival announced other People’s Choice winners on Sunday. In the Midnight Madness section, devoted to genre titles, the prize went to “The Substance,” written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. That horror film, which won best screenplay at Cannes, stars Demi Moore as an aging actress who takes the mysterious elixir of the title, giving birth to a youthful version of herself played by Margaret Qualley. “The Substance” is due in theaters on Sept. 20.In the documentary section, the People’s Choice award went to “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal,” centered on the Canadian band’s final concert. The docuseries was directed by Mike Downie, brother of the band’s lead singer, Gord Downie, who died at 53 of brain cancer. The series is expected to be released on Amazon Prime Video later in the fall. More