Category: cinema

Adam Sandler stars in “Leo” as a grumpy lizard who has spent his entire life in the terrarium of a fifth-grade classroom. He’s been joined by a turtle named Squirtle (Bill Burr), and the two are mostly content to stare out the glass, year after year, commenting like Statler and Waldorf on the various tween archetypes that show up on the first day of school: the motormouth, the class clown, the kid with helicopter parents who’s allergic to everything. But the bubble bursts for Sandler’s Leo when he realizes that he’s approaching 75 — the average life span for his species — and has hardly gotten to live out his dreams as a free lizard.

Leo sees an opportunity with the arrival of a no-nonsense substitute teacher, Ms. Malkin (Cecily Strong), after the usual instructor goes on maternity leave. Along with implementing a stricter disciplinary system, she assigns her students at the Florida school to take turns bringing Leo home, caring for him as their own pet. The kids are dismayed, until one of them, the chatty Summer (voiced by Sandler’s daughter Sunny), discovers that the seemingly docile lizard can talk, and begins to open up to him about her problems. Leo, finding fulfillment in his new task, takes on the role of therapist each week, dishing out advice and convincing each student that they’re the only one who can hear him speak.

“Leo” is the second animated film from Sandler’s creative house Happy Madison Productions and his newest release for Netflix. Unlike the company’s first foray into animation, the raunchy 2002 Hanukkah flick “Eight Crazy Nights,” “Leo” aims for wholesome family entertainment, combining themes like the challenges of growing older with a healthy dose of G-rated toilet humor (and a few double entendres that will go over kids’ heads).

Sandler does a fine job as the voice of Leo, delivering a good mix of gruffness and sweetness into an absurd scenario. The kids in “Leo” confide in him their desire to be understood by their parents and peers, and the film drives home the overdone but nonetheless true message that everyone faces this struggle — even popular girls like Jayda (played by Sandler’s other daughter, Sadie). These tender moments are punctuated by several original songs — yes, “Leo” is a full-blown musical — and a plethora of running gags, like portraying the school’s kindergartners as wide-eyed bobbleheads crashing into walls.

Written by Sandler, Paul Sado, and Robert Smigel (who also directed the film with Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim), “Leo” sometimes has trouble identifying its audience. The musical sequences aren’t particularly interesting visually and will drag on for adults, yet it’s hard to imagine children sitting through Leo and Squirtle’s extended riffs on divorced parents or the courtship behaviors of reptiles and not getting a little bored. But with the holidays rolling around and families gathering, this will undoubtedly work as something to put on in the background for everyone.

Leo
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Netflix.

The 20-something comedians Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy, who produce digital shorts for “Saturday Night Live” under the group name Please Don’t Destroy, owe a lot to their “S.N.L.” forebears Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, whose troupe The Lonely Island laid the groundwork for Please Don’t Destroy’s distinctive style of two- to four-minute video skits that relish in juvenile absurdity.

The Lonely Island parlayed late-night stardom into feature films like “Hot Rod” and “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” And now the members of Please Don’t Destroy are here with a movie of their own: “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain,” which borrows the surreal gusto and madcap humor of “Hot Rod” and “Popstar” but shares little of Lonely Island’s originality and charm.

Marshall, Higgins and Herlihy star as lifelong friends stuck in dead-end jobs at a small-town outdoor-supply store owned by Marshall’s father, played by Conan O’Brien. A TikTok video leads them to a treasure map, which leads them on an adventure: sort of like “The Goonies,” though the story is really just a framework for jokes. The jokes have the mixed-bag quality of sketch comedy, and the director Paul Briganti doesn’t have a strong instinct for when bits are dragging on: An “S.N.L.” alum, he tends to treat the film like a string of interconnected skits, which makes its 90-minute run time feel twice that length. The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.

Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
Rated R for crass language, sexual innuendo and comic violence. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Peacock.

In France, a robust appetite is a virtue if not a heroic trait.

Eating gratifies all the senses: We take in the aroma of a handsome dish, delight at the sound of a sizzling steak or crave the crunch of a crusty baguette. So to fully appreciate the various sensory dimensions of a fine French meal is, essentially, to express a sophisticated artistic judgment.

“The Taste of Things,” by the director Tran Anh Hung, is a 19th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. The feature opened in theaters Wednesday in France and will play on screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 10 before its Oscar-qualifying run in mid-December.

The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.

When I first watched “The Taste of Things” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surrounded by a delightfully vocal audience. The oohing and ahhing was ubiquitous and, apparently, a visceral response, similar to what is elicited by beholding Monet’s water lilies or being wrapped in the velvety textures of Whitney Houston’s voice. Savoring a tasty meal (or even just watching one come together on a big screen) brings a kind of joy that can’t be explained by logic or reason.

Reviews of the film in France have been mixed. Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre found its blissful atmosphere and near-absence of dramatic tension perplexing and boring. Olivier Lamm of Libération wrote that there’s much more to the film than its food-porn attractions — it’s also about the assault of junk food and globalization on French standards.

The country’s rich gastronomic tradition — and its long history of nationally regulating the quality and authenticity of its wines and produce — is a particular point of national pride, and French film industry leaders have embraced the gourmand label. This year, “The Taste of Things” was selected as the French submission for the Oscar’s best international film category over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”

The decision was met with objections from French critics, who said Triet was punished for the political charge of her acceptance speech at Cannes. However, the selection of Hung’s film isn’t all that surprising given the selection committee’s evident partiality to films commenting on the country’s national identity — or, from a more cynical standpoint, films that offer Oscar voters a tourist-friendly idea of France.

The French devotion to the culinary arts is a bit of an onscreen cliché, and Hollywood films like “Ratatouille” and “Chocolat” (the latter, also starring Binoche, made big money in the United States, but fared far less well in France) have relied on stereotypically French settings, like a rustic village and a Parisian bistro, to communicate lessons about food’s revolutionary and unifying powers.

More rewarding — and complex — is the 1956 French classic “La Traversée de Paris,” starring the Frenchest of all Frenchmen, Jean Gabin, as an artist-turned-black market courier in Nazi-occupied Paris. This black dramedy stars Gabin and the comedian Bourvil, who play a bickering duo who must transport four suitcases of contraband pork across the city while evading the authorities and a horde of hungry hounds.

Political instability not only cuts off access to revered foodstuffs, it drains the very spirit of those committed to the art of eating. In the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French chef, is forced to flee from her Parisian neighborhood when the Paris Commune, an insurrectionist government, seizes power in 1871.

Seeking refuge in the Danish countryside, Babette moves into a spartan Protestant household manned by two Protestant sisters accustomed to eating the same brown fish stew, which has a mudlike consistency. Fourteen years into her employment with the sisters, Babette miraculously wins the French lottery and, rather than fund her return to France, spends all her winnings on a multicourse dinner for the townspeople.

The feast — a turtle soup, stuffed quail, rum sponge cake and more — breaks the guests’ brains, while Babette, in the final scene, emerges as an emissary of the sublime. Her culinary gifts, her cooking’s ability to disrupt the very foundations of what her Danish friends perceived to be reality, make her angelic.

At the same time, isn’t fine dining — like certain kinds of music, literature and art — rather bourgeois? Nothing screams upper middle class like the prim and proper dinner scene. This is delightful in films by, say, Éric Rohmer, who was fond of depicting the natural choreography of mealtime, the mess of wine glasses and plates of fruit and cheese floating between guests in the middle of a meandering conversation.

In other films, dinnertime can seem ridiculous. Consider Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which three couples try over and over to enjoy a white tablecloth feast, but do not actually eat. Over the course of the film, their polite mannerisms and refined gestures become increasingly absurd.

Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe” plays like a glutton’s version of “Salo,” linking the pleasure of eating to consumerist society and the gross hedonism of the leisure class. In the film, four friends literally feed themselves to death, feasting on an endless parade of shrimp, turkey, pot roast and sausage while reading excerpts from canonical works of literature and, notably, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomical bible, “The Physiology of Taste.”

“La Grande Bouffe” is a nauseating showcase and a welcome retort to the glorification of tunnel-vision foodies like Brillat-Savarin. Ferreri was also a gourmand, and he reportedly had difficulties keeping himself from binge eating. His film points a finger at himself as well as society at large.

“The Taste of Things” is an adaptation of the 1961 novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, which was itself inspired by none other than Brillat-Savarin. “The Physiology of Taste” is supposed to be about the science of eating, but it often veers off into discussions about sex, love and sensuality.

Brillat-Savarin’s passion for food is not unlike the passion he might develop for another person, a dynamic that Hung’s film depicts with a hypnotic warmth. When I see Binoche’s Eugénie, laboring away on a buttery risotto or a vegetable omelet, I’m overcome by the sense memory of something deliciously intimate, like being held tight or a loved one’s scent. In that moment, nothing else seems to matter.

The union that represents movie and television actors said on Friday that its 76-member national board had voted with 86 percent support to send a tentative contract with studios to members for ratification.

The ratification process will start on Tuesday and end the first week in December. Actors can go back to work immediately, however.

Members are expected to approve the contract, which Fran Drescher, the union’s outspoken president, valued at more than $1 billion over three years. She highlighted the “extraordinary scope” of the agreement, noting that it included protections around the use of artificial intelligence, higher minimum pay, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, improved hair and makeup services on sets, and a requirement for intimacy coordinators for sex scenes, among other gains.

“They had to yield,” Ms. Drescher said at a news conference during a 28-minute monologue that touched on Veterans Day, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula costume, her parents, the Roman Empire, studio stubbornness, Buddhism, Frederick Douglass and her dog.

The union, SAG-AFTRA, which represents tens of thousands of actors, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, reached the tentative agreement on Wednesday. It followed a bitter standoff that contributed to a near-complete shutdown of production in the entertainment industry. At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history.

The tentative deal was also historic, according to the studio alliance, which said it reflected “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.” In a statement, the alliance said it was “pleased” that SAG-AFTRA’s board had recommended ratification.

“We are also grateful that the entire industry has enthusiastically returned to work,” the alliance said.

The actors’ strike, combined with a writers’ strike that started in May and was resolved in September, devastated the entertainment economy. Hundreds of thousands of crew members were idled, with some losing their homes and turning to food banks for groceries. Some small businesses that service studios — costume dry cleaners, prop warehouses, catering companies — may never recover.

The dual strikes caused roughly $10 billion in losses nationwide, according to Todd Holmes, an associate professor of entertainment media management at California State University, Northridge. While the big studios are based in Los Angeles, they also use soundstage complexes in Georgia, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.

Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist with the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, was more cautious with his estimate, putting losses at more than $6 billion. He said it “may take a while” to know the true size.

On Friday, the SAG-AFTRA board, which includes Sharon Stone, Sean Astin and Rosie O’Donnell, made public a summary of the tentative contract’s contents. While not receiving everything it asked for, the union achieved significant gains.

The final sticking point involved “synthetic fakes,” or the use of artificial intelligence to create an entirely fabricated character by melding together recognizable features from real actors. The union won consent and compensation guarantees.

“You could imagine prompting a generative A.I. system that’s been trained on a bunch of actors’ performances to create a digital performer, for example, who has Julia Roberts’s smile,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said in an interview. “Before this agreement, there wasn’t any contractual or legal basis to require consent or prohibit that. Now there will be.”

But this strike was never about stars. A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Brad Pitt negotiate their own contracts (or, more precisely, their agents do). The tentative contract covers minimums, or what actors who don’t have any clout get paid.

SAG-AFTRA had demanded an 11 percent raise for minimum pay in the first year of a contract. Studios had insisted that they could offer no more than 5 percent, the same as had recently been given (and agreed to) by unions for writers and directors. In the end, the union was able to win a 7 percent first-year raise.

“This is really important because it sends a very clear signal to other unions,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said. “I’m not aware of anyone ever being able to break the pattern before, because it’s always been that the A.M.P.T.P. establishes a number and everyone gets held to it.”

SAG-AFTRA failed in one regard. It had gone into negotiations demanding a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Ms. Drescher had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”

Instead, the studio alliance proposed a new residual (a type of royalty) for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take. It is similar to what the Writers Guild of America achieved in its negotiations: Actors in streaming shows that attract at least 20 percent of subscribers will receive a bonus.

Unlike the Writers Guild, however, SAG-AFTRA also got the studio alliance to agree to a system in which 25 percent of the bonus money will go into a fund that will be distributed to actors in less successful streaming shows.

“I felt like, is this a win or a loss?” Ms. Drescher said. “But we’re getting the money. We opened a new revenue stream. What matters is that we got into another pocket.”