Exactly 20 years ago, Will Ferrell donned yellow tights and a green pointy hat to play Buddy, a man who grew up thinking he was an elf in the North Pole until he learns about his human family in New York City. He leaves the fantastical world he knows to find his biological father, convinced they will be ice-skating and holding hands together once his father learns he exists.
The film, directed by Jon Favreau, was released on Nov. 7, 2003, but it endures as a popular holiday film because of Ferrell’s whole-hearted, sincere commitment to being a human who has a strong “affinity for elf culture,” as he puts it in the movie.
Elves eat sugar as sustenance; Buddy happily pours maple syrup on spaghetti and eats old gum off a subway entrance railing. He runs tireless circles inside elevator doors and shrieks as loudly as children do with joy at the thought of Santa coming to a mall department store. Buddy truly believes in spreading Christmas cheer through the power of people singing loud for all to hear, and by the end of the film, even his skeptics believe it, too.
Since the film’s release, “Elf” has inspired a Broadway musical, an animated special and a video game.
Brian Steinberg is a New York City-based theater actor who is an “Elf” fan and a guide for On Location Tours’ “Elf” tour. He told HuffPost “Elf” remains a movie he has watched with his family each year since he was a kid.
“Elf succeeds because it blends so many classic Christmas stories to tell one definitive tale about belonging and family,” Steinberg said. “From a group of elves who take in a lost child ― ‘Santa Clause is Coming to Town’ ― to a grumpy father who deep down truly loves his family ― ‘A Christmas Story’ ― all mixed into a tale of an outsider who ends up saving Christmas: ‘Rudolph.’”
Buddy is supposed to make you laugh. But what makes him an unforgettable character is how he remains cheerful and kind despite realizing that his whole existence was a lie and feeling continuously out of place everywhere he goes.
And that’s a kind of sincere optimism about life that remains heartwarming to watch ― and is an attitude we all should practice more often.
Why the film’s life lesson of being cheerfully hopeful still appeals.
The comedy of “Elf” is watching Ferrell gleefully hopscotching around New York City sidewalks and honking taxis as he befuddles New Yorkers in his elf attire. But the heart of “Elf” is how it’s a relatable tale about an outsider trying to make a home in a strange new land he left as a child.
In a different film, Buddy could have been mean-spirited. But Buddy delights in everything and everyone he sees. From a child in the doctor’s waiting room to his dad’s secretary, Deborah, Buddy gives everyone he meets his full attention. He genuinely compliments people’s outfits with the sound of their names and remembers what they want for Christmas. “Buddy the Elf, what’s your favorite color?” is how he greets strangers on the phone.
It’s a grace that the people in his life do not extend back to him at first. Buddy grew up with elves and was raised by a kind Papa Elf (Bob Newhart), but his peer elves talk about Buddy behind his back for not being as efficient as them at making toys. And the humans are not initially kind, either. James Caan plays Walter, Buddy’s grouchy father who is not thrilled with learning he has a secret son who believes Santa’s workshop is real.
At first, Walter (pictured in the middle) is skeptical and frustrated by the presence of Buddy (right).
“I don’t belong anywhere,” Buddy laments at his lowest moment alone in Manhattan. But Buddy keeps trying to connect with others and never stays down on himself too long. And that hopeful quest drives the film.
That earnest optimism is beneficial to us living in reality, too. Our brains often have a negativity bias; psychologists say we tend to harp on what’s going wrong rather than focusing on what is ― or what could ― go right. However, research shows a more hopeful attitude is a perk for our well-being: More optimistic people have less stress and better relationships. Buddy’s story is an example of that in action.
At first, Buddy is seen as a strange man by his human family. But after he helps his younger brother Michael win a snowball fight against bullies, Buddy gains a new ally and a confidante. “I’m his brother,” Michael proudly tells Buddy’s co-worker Jovie when they meet. Together, the brothers bond over jumping on mattresses, getting dates and what their Dad is like.
“He’s the worst dad in the world. All he does is work,” Michael tells Buddy about their Dad, who plans to work through Christmas Eve. “All he cares about is money. He doesn’t care about you, or me, or anybody.”
But Buddy does not give up on their Dad; his optimism drives this, too. He knows that his Dad is on Santa’s naughty list, but he continues to sincerely tell his frowning father he loves him and that he wants to hang out with him, even if he’s unused to tickle fights or tucking him in bed.
The awkward relationship comes to a breaking point when Walter disowns Buddy for costing him a potential publishing deal, and Buddy leaves Walter’s home as a result. When Walter finally finds Buddy in Central Park to apologize and tell his son that he loves him, Buddy could have been justifiably ungracious to the man who continuously snapped at and sidelined him, but Buddy remains kind.
The father and son hug: Walter with a few hesitant taps on the back and Buddy with a long, tight hug. Eventually, Buddy gets the chance to show Walter that Santa is real and to save Christmas, but the true holiday gift Buddy gives his human family is that he believes in their potential to be a family.
“Buddy didn’t save Christmas because he made Santa’s sleigh fly. He saved Christmas because he reminded his family of how much they loved each other,” Steinberg told me.
When Santa asks Buddy to help him fix his broken sleigh, Buddy resists. “I’m not an elf Santa; I can’t do anything right,” he says.
“Buddy, you’re more of an elf than anyone I ever met and the only one I’d want working on my sleigh,” Santa encourages him.
“I’ll try,” Buddy says. “Papa taught me how.”
That makes Buddy special: He holds onto hope even when failure is likely, and he’s inefficient at making toys in the workshop or when his new family does not understand him. He gives it his best shot, which makes you want to root for him ― even 20 years later.
Directed by Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”), “The Marvels” in particular, appears to be a tough project to break through the fog of so-called superhero fatigue. Promotion around the film has been affected by the SAG-AFTRA strike. Even so, the film is billed as an ensemble movie in which two of its central trio of stars — Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan (or Ms. Marvel, the M.C.U.’s first Muslim superhero) — are, to the wider world, relative unknowns.
The film’s release may also be affected by the biases of some fans who are uninterested in a project featuring female superheroes. Earlier this year, when the first trailer for “The Marvels” was released, news reports noted that many fans had appeared to “dislike-bomb” the video: Within hours of its posting on YouTube, the trailer received hundreds of thousands of dislikes along with negative comments about the cast. (The site removed the dislike counter in 2021, though online tools make the number viewable to users.)
As for Larson, speculation has swirled over her possible disillusionment with the M.C.U. as a result of the intense and often sexist backlash she has received from audiences. In October, Joanna Robinson, the co-author of “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” claimed that Larson “doesn’t want to play Carol Danvers anymore.” Larson herself addressed the online hate that led to fans review-bombing the original film on RottenTomatoes.com. Many of the negative reviews, which were removed by the site, referred to Larson’s prerelease comments about wanting to ensure greater diversity among journalists covering the movie. When Variety asked last year in a red carpet interview how long she planned to play Danvers, she responded pointedly, “I don’t know. Does anyone want me to do it again?”
Additionally, getting “The Marvels” to the finish line required four weeks of reshoots and a premiere date that was pushed back multiple times. Those delays prompted DaCosta to complete postproduction remotely in London while she began work on her next film, a move that has fueled gossip about trouble behind the scenes.
DaCosta, though, dismissed the speculation in a recent interview with the YouTuber Jake Hamilton. “Actually at the time that I left to go to London to start prep on my next film, everyone was so clear about what the film was, what we wanted, everyone knew what I wanted,” she said. “So it really wasn’t the dramatic sort of thing that I think people are feeling like it is.”
The first rule in the Code of Elves is to “treat every day like Christmas”, and that, in a nutshell, is Will Ferrell’s comic style. At 6ft 3in, he’s almost always the tallest actor on screen yet his instinct is to play even bigger, with an ungainly exuberance that tends to set the tone for whatever scene he’s in. He’s a Bergdorf Goodman window display. He’s the neighbor who nearly kills himself every year hanging enough lights and gaudy holiday bric-a-brac around his house to slow traffic in the subdivision. He couldn’t fade back into the scenery if he tried – and, to his immense credit, he never, ever tries.
It’s not quite right to say he was born to play Buddy, an exuberant orphan raised in Santa’s workshop in Elf, because he was also the only conceivable person to play Ron Burgundy in Anchorman or Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights. But his casting – and, helpfully, the impeccable casting of the entire film – has turned this agreeable fish-out-of-water comedy into something close to a holiday classic 20 years later. He treats every scene like Christmas, rapaciously tearing into every comic opportunity given to him while bringing the other characters on board, one by one, through his infectious energy. When a gaggle of New Yorkers gather to sing Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town on Christmas Eve, they may as well be crying “uncle”.
The picture-book framing casts Bob Newhart as Buddy’s adoptive father and the film’s narrator, greeting the audience with a low-key “Oh hello, you’re probably here about the story.” Having slipped into Santa’s bag as a toddler, Buddy is the first human to set foot in his workshop, a crossing-the-streams situation that recalls Monsters, Inc from two years earlier, only the North Pole proves more accommodating. That doesn’t make Buddy an easy fit, however, with his enormous size and his woeful inefficiencies as a toymaker, with production that far exceeds what a normal human could do in a day but is 915 Etch A Sketches off the pace of an actual elf.
And so, inevitably, Buddy asks questions about his roots and learns that his one surviving parent, Walter Hobbs (James Caan), is a curmudgeonly children’s book publisher who works in the Empire State Building. Santa warns that Walter is on “the naughty list”, but Buddy is undeterred from journeying to New York City via an ice floe, a Candy Cane forest, the Lincoln Tunnel and a lot of yadda-yadda-ing in between. When his father initially rejects him, Buddy heads straight to the Santa display at a nearby department store in his full elf suit, gets mistaken for a hired hand and meets Jovie, a sullen fellow employee with a certain twinkle in her eye. She’s played by Zooey Deschanel, a performer that not even an oversized man-elf of indefatigable cheer can out-whimsy.
The plotting of Elf is as cookie-cutter as the stale frosted treats left out for Santa on Christmas Eve, with Walter serving as the Scrooge-like miser who puts his work ahead of his family and cares so little about pleasing children that he sends a mediocre book to print with missing pages. And as a naif thrown into the hustle-bustle of a confusing and hostile city, the Buddy character owes a lot to Daryl Hannah’s beached mermaid in Splash, who also learns much about humanity from a department store. It’s no great surprise that the city bends more to his will than he to theirs, because the Christmas spirit needs to prevail and he’s the one who possesses all of it.
But beyond the superb performances – Mary Steenburgen, reprising her cheeriness as the mother from another Ferrell comedy, Step Brothers, plays off Caan’s dyspeptic grouch perfectly – Elf thrives in the details. It kindly offers children a decent-enough explanation of how so many presents get made and distributed every year, with elves dutifully pouring sand into Etch A Sketches and product-testing Jack-in-the-Boxes for a sleigh that’s supplemented reindeer-power with horsepower. The director, Jon Favreau, nods charmingly to Rankin-Bass with an animated snowman and other North Pole denizens, and his New York is affectionately coarse. Like Caan, the city projects a menace that its soft heart belies.
Photograph: New Line/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Some of the funniest running gags rely on Buddy being between worlds, neither fully human nor elf. He may fall behind his quota in Santa’s workshop, but he can whip together a piece of New York skyline with Lego bricks or construct a sturdy rocking horse out of the family entertainment center. His hosts are horrified by his request for maple syrup on pasta night, but he’s awake the next morning packing spaghetti for their lunches, because it’s what he imagines they might like. In a way, his cluelessness isn’t so far out of step with other humans: it may be funny that Buddy surprises Jovie on a date by taking her to a restaurant that claims to have “the world’s greatest coffee”, but is that any worse than the native New Yorker Travis Bickle taking a date to a XXX-rated movie in Taxi Driver?
Ferrell was only a year away from his long stint as a performer on Saturday Night Live and Elf seems tailored to his versatility as a sketch maestro. He excels at stepping into a new space and transforming it, whether Buddy’s turning a grim mailroom full of work-release drones into party central or disrupting a meeting with a temperament author (Peter Dinklage) he mistakes for a fellow elf. Ferrell is playing a simpleton, but Buddy’s persistence is the key to the whole film: either these city-folk can continue being miserable or they can surrender to the Christmas cheer he’ll keep foisting on them so relentlessly.
The bar is low on holiday classics. Do a Google search for “Christmas movies” and most of the ones that have endured are merely passable, all summoning up the expected emotions in the usual way, through pratfalls or treacle or often both at once. Elf is a modest winner in that regard, but over 20 years, it has become as appealing a go-to option as any film of its time. No one works harder than Ferrell to keep spirits bright – and that’s as true all year ’round as it is here.
In 1982, Wayne Wang’s “Chan Is Missing” became the first feature film by an Asian American director to get a mainstream theatrical release. A decade later, Wang broke more ground when he directed “The Joy Luck Club,” widely considered the first major Hollywood studio movie featuring an all-Asian cast. (Famously and embarrassingly, it took 25 years to make another one: 2018’s “Crazy Rich Asians.”)
“So I think [Criterion] figured: Let’s just keep connecting the dots backwards and see what we get,” Hu said in an interview with HuffPost.
“At some point, it becomes strange to go further back because the term ‘Asian American’ is fairly new. And then the idea of Asian American cinema is relatively new and has changed in terms of how it’s been defined. So at some point, if you keep moving back, you find that you’re inventing a notion of Asian American cinema out of nothing.
“I think the ’80s is where it really starts to coalesce into something, and I was really interested in that. When something is first being named and people are finding value in a term, what does it look like? And, also, how does it differ from today, to get a sense of how things have changed?”
As Hu explained, the 1980s marked a turning point in Asian American cinema because for the first time, Asian American directors were entering the arena of feature films. Prior to that, they were primarily making short films, documentaries and student productions. The growth in opportunities and visibility resulted from the confluence of several developments: a new wave of American independent film, the rise of art house cinemas in major U.S. cities, and the first generation of Asian American artists who came of age after the start of the Asian American movement in the 1960s now figuring out how to assert themselves.
“You have two circuits going on at the same time. You have that sort of white, upper-middle-class, New York-educated ‘we want to watch films that are outside of the box.’ And then you also have young Asian Americans — many of them the first generation that took Asian American studies classes — who are now saying, ‘Are we a market onto ourselves?’” Hu said. “Can going into the movies be a communal act, and can going to watch our movies be part of the larger political movement that we’ve been hoping to be part of since the late ’60s? So all of this is coming together in the 1980s.”
In addition, Asian Americans had more avenues to get their films funded and seen, like through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (or NEA) and public television, and the rise of Asian American film festivals. They were also figuring out what Asian American cinema even meant, and to what extent their work should confront questions about identity.
“You have some filmmakers who are like: ‘I just want to make weird movies. I just want to make silly B movies. And do those things all go together?’” Hu said. “And what I love about this period is they don’t always. And you have people who are imagining what ‘Asian American’ can be in wildly different ways, that might not adhere perfectly to that sense of needing to be very clearly part of the Asian American movement as defined in the ’60s. So it was a moment of ‘anything goes,’ that there were no rules yet. They were making it up as they went along. So that’s really appealing.”
Speaking to HuffPost, Hu went on to detail some landmark Asian American films of the period, a few underappreciated gems, the connections and differences between Asian American cinema then and now, and how one might go about developing the idea of an Asian American film canon.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
What specifically in the ’80s was different from how we think of Asian American cinema now, or the Asian American movement more broadly? What was different in the ’80s that sort of led to a lot of these filmmakers just trying to figure out what that meant, and how they fit — or how they maybe didn’t fit into that idea?
So, I’m interested in a filmmaker like Peter Wang. He made a film called “A Great Wall” in the 1980s. He’s a transnational figure in a sense that he’s originally from China, his family moved to Taiwan, he grew up in Taiwan, and then he came to the United States to become an engineer. He dabbled in theater in San Francisco, and then he worked on Wayne Wang’s “Chan Is Missing” as an actor in a small but memorable role. And then he directed his own film called “A Great Wall.”
So around this time, there was a lot of discussion about Asian Americans, [how] the Asian American community needs to emphasize its “Americanness,” that what makes us an important political faction is that people have to stop thinking about us as a perpetual foreigner. And yet he makes a film that’s set in China, and he, like, finds home via China.
I’m sure the film is also about wanting to say how Chinese Americans are different from people in China. But they are sort of not afraid of thinking about one’s Asian American identity as necessarily transnational. And I think we’ve come around to that now because of, like, K-pop. I think Asian Americans think it’s fine to consume stuff from Asia, even though that sort of marks us as not necessarily, like, homegrown American in our pop cultural interests, for instance. But Peter Wang was really, at that time, thinking beyond the boundaries of the nation. His subsequent films — he made a feature in Taiwan. He lives in Taiwan now. So how does he fit within the Asian American rubric? So, there’s someone like him.
There’s Elliott Hong, who made “They Call Me Bruce,” which in some ways, when you’re watching it, feels, like, politically regressive. It’s about a guy who — people think he’s Bruce Lee, and he’ll play along with it. I think for a lot of Asian Americans, especially in the 1980s, I’ve talked to so many, especially Asian American men, who grew up in the ’80s, and they didn’t have anything in the media that represented them. But suddenly, even though this is a guy who’s playing on stereotypes, he also seemed to be winking at them at the same time, and that was refreshing.
So watching it now, it’s cringey. It’s a creature of its time. But we could say that it’s a creature of its time before a certain kind of, like, savviness about Asian American pop cultural politics. It was like, we didn’t have the liberty to ask for everything. We had to play within the rules of certain kinds of B movie tropes and bad B movies with a lot of stereotypes in them. How do we use these kinds of forms to get a little bit of us in there?
Brian Hu, an associate professor at San Diego State University and curator of the Criterion Channel collection "Asian American '80s."
What also was happening within the industry at the time, in independent film, that opened up these opportunities for Asian American directors to get their foot in the door and start making these films?
Yeah, that’s a great question. Because the late ’70s, early ’80s, that’s when Hollywood was starting to say, all right, we were interested in independent cinema in the late ’60s, early ’70s, with “Easy Rider” and that sort of thing. By the late ’70s, you have “Jaws,” you have “Star Wars” — Hollywood is saying, “Let’s pivot back to the blockbuster.”But you have this institutionalization of, you have film schools, you have distributors who have been dabbling in art cinema.
And so in the 1980s, you have really a refining of, like, all right, independent cinema doesn’t have to just be an “Easy Rider,” kind of druggie youth movies. It could also be movies for adults and movies for people who just want to think at the movies — that sort of cliché of independent cinema that persists today. And “Chan Is Missing” fed really into that, this idea of “let’s watch some movie to see something new.” And “Chan Is Missing” still feels so fresh today.
So there was this sort of urban hunger for new kinds of cinema. And a lot of these films were being subsidized not by the market, but by grants from, like, the NEA and stuff. And so those institutions were in place. Independent cinema was also entering its straight-to-video phase. So you have films like “They Call Me Bruce,” that has that sort of exploitation, straight-to-video — it’s playing upon those genres.
Oh, and then you also have the rise of public media, public television saying, “Hey, we’re also interested in narrative.” Public television had understood that documentary needs to be a big part of their mission. But they’re starting to say, ”Oh, what if we did, like, little TV plays?” So a film like “The Wash” was essentially made for public television. And so those opportunities were arising too. So in the American independent scene, I think those are the major shifts that were inspiring filmmakers to say: “We can do this. We can make feature-length narrative films, which had not existed in Asian American cinema before this.”
And then of course, the rise of the Asian American film festival circuit, which was more than just a place to show movies, because you’re not getting paid for being shown in an Asian American film festival. But it creates a certain ecosystem for building audiences, for getting reviews of your films. And then you have, for instance, what’s now known as the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco. And they were also funding films that could be shown on PBS. So yeah, there was a certain ecosystem for finding audiences, for cultivating one’s professional identity — but also the possibility of sustaining one’s career financially.
You mentioned Wayne Wang’s “Chan Is Missing” already. What were some of the landmark Asian American films you immediately knew you had to include in this series?
A question we asked was: “How much Wayne Wang is there? Is there too much Wayne Wang?” And I think we decided no.
He’s the central figure of Asian American cinema in the ’80s, at least on the narrative side, for sure. He got so much prominence through “Chan Is Missing,” and the stylistic daring of it became the inspiration, I think, for a lot of other filmmakers to say: “Wait, I can do that as well. I’m not just making a film, but I can do anything I want with this film, without caring as much about, say, narrative development in the traditional sense.” It could blur the lines between fiction and documentary, especially since at this point, Asian American filmmakers had been mostly working in documentary. This is a film that’s sort of a natural transition from that documentary moment to one that embraces narrative feature filmmaking.
So the Wayne Wang films for sure. “Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart” is to me as important as “Chan Is Missing,” or at least as satisfying a film as “Chan Is Missing.” But it’s a lot lesser known.
“Living on Tokyo Time” was a very important one for me to get. It’s just about slacker type Asian Americans who want to be in bands. It was important that this was not the cliché of independent Asian American cinema that we think of, what I often joke as the “my mom won’t let me date this person” movie — the movies that are about intergenerational conflict, cross-racial encounters or often about …
Yeah, or about queerness. Sometimes it’s about that too. But sometimes it’s just about young people who are not that great. [Laughs.] But that are charming in their own way, and just worthy of a story too.
I think a lot of Asian American folks around this time were trying to define their identities vis-à-vis Asian culturalness. So for instance, in the 1970s, there was this great short documentary about Asian Americans who are defining their culture through Japanese music. So what sets us apart from the rest of America, perhaps, is the fact that we’ve inherited these different kinds of musical traditions, and then we can fuse that with rock-and-roll and folk and stuff like that. Whereas “Living on Tokyo Time” says, “No, I just like punk rock.” It’s just about being oneself in a mundane sense.
I loved “The Wash.” It’s one of the first and few Asian American films about two Asian Americans in love, an Asian American couple. It is shockingly rare, until maybe 10 years ago, just to see in the movies two Asian Americans who are in a relationship. They’re not always in a happy relationship in this movie, but you get the sense of where their affection comes from and their history of romance. It’s shockingly rare. And so that was a really important movie for me to include here as well.
Were there films that you as a film scholar didn’t even really know about, that you unearthed or rediscovered through putting together this series?
A lot of my research was actually spent on the short films, because there are certain feature films that are well known to people who’ve been investigating it, as I have. There aren’t that many on the feature side. I feel like I watched a pretty high percentage of Asian American feature-length narrative films for this project. Short films, though, that’s a lot harder, one, to research to even know what’s out there, and then secondly, to find them. And so I did a lot of research into film festival catalogs, into writing that was happening around that time, reviews of film festivals, to see what people were getting excited by. The writing of the filmmaker, critic, scholar, everything, Renée Tajima-Peña — who ended up directing the [2020] “Asian Americans” series on PBS, as well as co-directing [the documentary] “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” — she was writing a lot during the 1980s as a commentator, as sort of an insider-outsider.
And her writing was very important because I think she understood why short films are so important, because until the 1980s, it was just short films. The feature films were the novelty in this decade. But the short films had been the lifeblood, and continue to be a certain lifeblood. But of course, these are the films that are not on the tip of anybody’s tongue. So [I did] a lot of research and then working with distributors, working with filmmakers — like for the film “Otemba,” which became one of my favorites, a 16-minute short film, a student film at [the University of California, Los Angeles]. ... The filmmaker passed away over a decade ago, and I worked with her sister on securing the rights to this film. And so these short films don’t necessarily have distribution. They’re not necessarily in catalogs of films for people to see. So a lot of it I had not seen before.
Series art for "Asian American '80s," a collection of 12 films streaming this month on the Criterion Channel.
Something you said earlier: In the ’80s, there are films about identity, and then there are films that aren’t about identity at all. And I feel like we’re sort of in that moment now as well, both in film and on TV. We’re figuring out the balance of things made by Asian Americans about being Asian American, versus things where the characters happen to be Asian American, but the film isn’t really about that at all. Do you see connections, or are those things very different between then and now?
There are both kinds of films in the ’80s. There are films that are very much “who are we?”
“Chan Is Missing” is like that. “What is a Chinese person in the United States?” is what it’s asking. It doesn’t feel like the kind of identity film that we’ve come to know of, which is that “I brought food to school and people think it’s stinky” kind of an identity film. I feel like in the 1980s, both kinds of films — the identity films versus the ones that were “characters just happened to be Asian” films — they were coexisting without there being debate, or a sense of which is better or not.
By the 1990s, I think this starts to change, especially as these films get more visibility. And also, the possibility of mainstream success becomes part of the equation. Within the 1980s, it really wasn’t, except for “Chan Is Missing.” None of these films became national phenomena.
I’ve always seen this sort of as a pendulum swing. Like in the 1990s and early 2000s, there were a lot of these kinds of identity films, especially in South Asian American films. A ton of them were about parents trying to get their kids married off, and it was like “no, but I’m American.” And then it sort of swung the other way a little bit after “Better Luck Tomorrow,” which was very much of a “no, we’re just a bunch of bad kids in school.” So, an anti-model minority film.
But really, I see the pendulum swing all the way to the other end with the [filmmaking group] Wong Fu Productions age in the late 2000s, early 2010s, when YouTube opened up a possibility for young people to just make films on their own. And they’re not sitting around talking about identity all the time. They’re making films, like, silly little rom-coms or “what I did in school,” and they happened to be Asian. Of course, there’s also a little bit of “we’re actually white, but we just happen to be Asian.” There’s some projection of a kind of assimilated middle-class, suburban identity.
I feel like I’m seeing the pendulum swing a little bit back now. I mean, [2020′s] “Minari” is very much in that sort of immigrant identity film. [Last year’s] “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is as well.
“The Farewell,” for sure. For me, “The Farewell” goes back to Peter Wang and “A Great Wall.” These are both films about Chinese Americans going back to China and discovering their own Americanness through differences with someone from China. So are we swinging back a little bit, or are we finding some comfortable space in between? Right now, I’m not seeing so much of the grumbling about another identity film. I mean, 15 years ago, people grumbled so much about that: “Please don’t make me do another movie about how I’m different from my parents.”
But I think that maybe it’s because these films are now getting a lot more prestige — and they’re cool. I mean, what’s cooler than “Everything Everywhere All At Once”? Maybe Asian Americans have settled into this point where it’s like, “I’m OK with these stories representing us now again.” But I also see it as, the mainstream still requires us to represent, to have the burden of representation, and say, like, “Well, we want to give you space, but tell us how you are different.” Anyway, so we’ll see how this continues to swing — and if [production and distribution company] A24 will continue to have an outsized role in telling these stories, which is a whole other issue.
I’m curious about what you think about the idea of an Asian American canon. I feel like I’m always sort of thinking about that as an Asian American culture reporter, and this series got me rethinking about that. How do you feel about that idea? And as Asian Americans, how do we go about actually bringing that idea out into the open?
Yeah, because “canon” could be a dirty word.
It could be about gatekeeping, or about, I mean, who is represented by a canon? If the Asian American film project has been about undoing canons, why are we therefore settling into a new one? As well as the fact that a lot of Asian American cinema has always been invested in things like queerness, that’s about breaking categories and rethinking institutions like history-making and boundaries. And yet, what I was starting to feel, especially after “Crazy Rich Asians,” was the sense that nobody knew the history of Asian American cinema, because everyone was saying, “‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ the first since ‘Joy Luck Club.’”And then everyone had to walk that back and say, like, “first Hollywood film [since ‘The Joy Luck Club’],” because they realized they don’t know anything about the independent side. Or they know it exists — they may have heard of “Better Luck Tomorrow” — but they don’t feel well versed enough to talk about it.
I did a project with the ... [Los Angeles] Times where I polled people who I knew were observers in the scene: film festival curators, critics. I intentionally didn’t poll filmmakers because they were just going to pick their own friends’ films. I’m not saying that to be sort of mean about it. Much of Asian cinema has been built on helping each other, lifting each other. But to me, canon-making is also about — I hate to use the word “expertise” — but who has actually watched everything in order to say, “These are important films that we should be talking about.”
So for me, it was less about greatness and more about memory — and so, the extent to which we can think about canon as memory-making, or just reminding us of what came before. Because I think for us to have a future, it helps to have a sense of a shared memory, right? A set of narratives and characters that we can draw from. Because otherwise, I guess I was thinking about “do Asian Americans have nostalgia for something common?” The same way that mainstream white Americans can say [1942′s] “Casablanca” is part of our cultural heritage, even though maybe you’ve never seen it before — all these classic American films that you’ve never seen before, but you’ve accepted as part of our cultural history.
Can Asian Americans sort of invent that themselves? Can we know of Peter Wang’s cameo in “Chan Is Missing” or something like that as a touchstone that we can all refer to? Inventing this cultural history — I think that is, for me, why this thing that resembles canon-making is important. And that really was a major inspiration for how I approached not just this series, but also, the 2000s one.
Nicolas Cage is not afraid to go big. This is, after all, a man who channeled the grandiose gestural acting of German expressionist films while starring in “Moonstruck” and was nearly fired from “Peggy Sue Got Married” for using a voice he had modeled on the Claymation sidekick Pokey from “Gumby.” Even the decision to change his name — born Nicolas Coppola, he traded his filmmaking family’s famous moniker for the comic-book superhero Luke Cage’s — allowed him to invent a personal mythology in line with his outsize ambitions.
“When you think of ‘Nic Cage,’ I wanted people to think you were going to see something just a little bit unpredictable, a little bit scary,” he told me last month on the balcony of a Beverly Hills hotel. “It’s not going to be the same old, same old.”
But at some point, that bigness is exactly what audiences came to predict from him. Over the last decade, YouTube supercuts emerged that combined Cage’s most go-for-broke moments into one marathon meltdown, while popular memes — like the “You Don’t Say” image that is based off his wide-eyed expression from “Vampire’s Kiss”— made it seem like pure outlandishness was his stock-in-trade. Cage could sense that shift but felt powerless to stop it: How should a star react when the public’s changing perception starts to turn like a tidal wave?
Cage sent up his persona by playing a heightened version of himself in last year’s “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” but found even more to mine in “Dream Scenario,” which has its limited release next Friday. The A24 film, which is produced by Ari Aster and written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, casts Cage as Paul Matthews, a mild-mannered college professor who inexplicably starts to turn up in people’s dreams. For Paul, who has spent years yearning for the same level of renown as his more published peers, this sudden surge of viral stardom is unexpected but not entirely unwelcome. Still, once those collective dreams become nightmares, the hapless professor is helpless against the public backlash.
“For me, this movie is an interesting analysis about the experience of fame,” said Cage, who called “Dream Scenario” one of the five best scripts he’s ever read. (The others are “Leaving Las Vegas,” which won him the Oscar for best actor, “Raising Arizona,” “Vampire’s Kiss” and “Adaptation.”) And though Paul is a well meaning but ineffectual academic — “Some folks would call him a ‘beta male,’” the actor said — this is Nicolas Cage we’re talking about: His version of boring can’t help but be fascinating, and it’s a hoot to watch Paul plod through his scenes in hiking boots and an oversized parka, meeting each new indignity with objections raised in a fussy, pinched voice.
The film earned strong reviews at its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, and taken in tandem with his praised lead performance in “Pig” (2021), the 59-year-old Cage certainly appears to be on a critical upswing. Just don’t call it a renaissance, as some pundits have: Yes, Cage’s career has zigged from Oscar-winning dramas to action tentpoles, with a recent zag to direct-to-video thrillers that helped pull him out of debt. But all along, he was making indies — like the hallucinogenic “Mandy” (2018) — that still allowed him unfettered access to the big swings he does best.
“I’m a little conflicted, because is it a renaissance?” Cage wondered. “I’m still approaching the material with the same process that I’ve always been approaching it with.” He thought about it for a moment. “Perhaps it’s more of a rediscovery,” he said.
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
How did you end up in “Dream Scenario”?
I was a huge admirer of Ari Aster, “Midsommar” and “Hereditary” in particular. I had wanted to work with him, and we were talking about maybe doing something episodic on television, but it wasn’t quite right for me. Then he sent me this script. I guess they had some other actors in mind at first, but I read it and right away, I responded to what I could inform Paul Matthews with.
And what was that?
All the feelings that I went through around 2008, 2009 when I stupidly Googled my name online and I saw, “Nicolas Cage Losing [It].” Somebody had cherry-picked all these freakout scenes and cobbled them together without any regard for how the character got to that level of crisis. And then it started going viral, exponentially growing, and became memes.
I was confused, I was frustrated and I was stimulated. I thought, “Maybe this will compel someone to go look at the actual movie and see how the character got to that moment,” but on the other hand, I was like, “This isn’t what I had in mind when I decided to become a film actor.” I had that feeling of weight for years, and when I read “Dream Scenario,” I said, “Finally I can do something with these feelings, and I can apply them to Paul Matthews.”
Paul isn’t sure why he’s gone viral in people’s dreams, but at first, he’s flattered by the attention. When you first started experiencing fame, was it that same sort of thrill?
Gosh, it’s been so long. I started acting professionally, I think, when I was 15. I wasn’t into film performance for fame or accolades, so the first few times it started to happen with autographs, I was confused how to receive it. I almost felt ashamed of being happy that someone wanted my autograph, like, “Well, that’s a pride thing. That’s not why I’m in it.”
What’s interesting is I don’t wake up in the morning and say to myself, “Oh, I’m famous.” I sometimes still meet people and they’re acting a bit different, and I think, “What’s wrong? What did I do?” And I go, “Oh, they saw me in a movie.” But more than ever, I know not to go out now if I’m not in a good mood. I just stay home. I don’t want to blow somebody’s day because I was in a bad mood and didn’t sign every autograph.
Paul isn’t necessarily looking for the limelight, but there is a part of him that wants to be published and validated. The desire to be recognized somehow motivates a lot of people — including actors, I would think.
If you want to be famous, make money, get an award, that’s OK, but that’s only going to get you so far. Sure, it’s nice to be regarded. Like Gary Oldman said, the sound of applause is never to be taken lightly, and gosh knows I’ve had enough tomatoes. But the point of it all is telling a story and having it connect with your audience, where they’re in on that secret with you, where they felt like they had an experience.
As Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, you grew up adjacent to fame. What was your impression of fame before you experienced it yourself?
I remember once going to the theater in San Francisco to see “All That Jazz” with my uncle. As he was walking down the street, I was lagging, and everyone was saying, “Francis Coppola. Francis Coppola. Francis Coppola.” I thought, “OK, that’s what’s fame is: People whisper your name when you pass.”
Do you still think fame is like that?
Well, when my first son was really little, he used to call me “Nicolas Cage,” so he must have heard it from people. He didn’t call me “Dad.”
Can you relate to Paul’s experience going to a restaurant, where he can sense that people are staring at him and trying to snap covert pictures?
I’ll take every picture. I wouldn’t go to a restaurant unless I was able to meet people well and be thankful that they liked the movie. I’m comfortable with it now, but when I was a kid, I had to learn how to get there.
People are eager to pull out their phones around Paul, hoping to catch a viral moment that could help them piggyback off his own notoriety. That’s a very new wrinkle on fame.
And very real. I’ve had things happen to me where I go to a bar in Sin City on a Saturday, and I have no idea that someone’s videotaping me and it goes on TikTok. It’s like, “OK, no more bars for me, man.” But it’s a new world. And that’s another reason I like this movie: It’s relevant. This is the way it is in the 21st century. This isn’t the way it was when Bogart was making movies.
I wonder if we aren’t accelerating toward a point where people say, “Look, there’s just too much information in too many of our heads at too many moments of the day.” Certainly, “Dream Scenario” is addressing that sort of collective subconsciousness, but the desire to unplug from it sometimes feels so overwhelming.
Alan Moore, the great graphic novelist, said we’re going to a place where information is going to be deployed so fast that eventually we’re all just going to become steam. But the thing is, Kyle, we have to evolve, we have to progress. This is the way it is, and it’s staying. I shudder to think what’s next. Is it going to be in a chip in our brains? I don’t know. But whatever it is, we’re evolving, and I want to find a way to work with it.
You’ve been working lately with a lot of emerging filmmakers, like Kristoffer Borgli and Michael Sarnoski, who directed “Pig.”
That, I am so grateful for. I always knew that it would take a young filmmaker who would have grown up with me in some way saying, “I want to try this,” and I have the humility to say, “You’re half my age and you’re twice as intelligent, I’m going to give you the controls.” But it’s interesting to be rediscovered by someone from a different generation. I think they haven’t had their dreams whipped out of them yet. They’re still full of potential and imagination of what they can accomplish, and that keeps me fertile.
When you were starring in blockbuster studio films, were your representatives keen to keep you there instead of indies?
That was the deal, that I was always going to go back to the well of independent drama, my roots. With the bigger movies, there’s too many cooks in the kitchen, too many people giving you notes. But with an experience like “Dream Scenario,” I’m with my director and we have the floor and we’re experimenting together. It’s important to have that intimacy to get to the really truthful expression of film performance. That’s harder to do on a big movie.
What did you get out of your blockbuster leading-man era?
It was a dream come true. I was told, “You can’t do it. You don’t look like one of those guys. What makes you think you can pull it off?” I said, “Well, I’m a student and I think I can try this and learn something from it. It’s going to be a challenge. Let’s see if it works.” Well, it worked maybe a little too well, and I got in that cycle. But at the time when I was doing these adventure films, it was considered not the done thing. My agent was saying, “You’re an actor’s actor. Why do you want to do that?” Because I never did it before! Keep it eclectic, keep it challenging.
Something you’re not keen to do, though, is engage with social media.
I’m not on any social media. I don’t want to tweet, I don’t want to be on Instagram or TikTok. That’s largely because I feel like that’s the only way I could stay close to a certain golden-age idea of what a film actor should maybe be, where you didn’t have that much access. Jack Nicholson refused to go on talk shows.
You’re not afraid of going on talk shows.
I personally think talk shows are a great interview, because you can get the tone, you can get the flavor, you can get the nuance expressed. You don’t have to worry that it’s going to be misinterpreted. That now is the danger, clickbait: You say something and then that gets transmogrified into something you didn’t say, and then suddenly that becomes your truth.
I don’t want to walk on eggshells and keep editing myself because I want to give you an authentic interview, and I want that to be enjoyable for your readers. But there’s a dance there. I know something’s going to get cherry-picked and cobbled together, and they’re going to take it and say I said something I didn’t say. But can you imagine if John Lennon gave an interview today, what would happen?
If you reread magazine interviews from a few decades ago, it’s astonishing how candid celebrities were willing to be.
I do think people genuinely enjoy authenticity, just like they feel a connection with a performance that feels real to them. But again, we’re in this time where it will get repurposed. That sometimes happens to me, and we know the reason behind it: The clickbait sells. But I am going to choose to stay authentic, and I’m not going to let it get in the way of us having a conversation that is stimulating in some way. I just can’t let that happen. I don’t want to live in fear of that.
On 2 November, Lignan University of Hong Kong conferred upon me an honorary doctorate. My health situation kept me from attending, but I sent a statement of thanks. I’m grateful for the honor, and for Professor Darrell Davis for reading it at the ceremony (pictured above). Here it is.
I am deeply proud to receive an honorary doctorate from Lingnan University. It is one of the jewels in the crown of Hong Kong higher education. I have enjoyed my many visits to the campus and have made many friends during that time. Conversations with them have inspired me to improve my work.
I fell in love with Hong Kong film before I came to love Hong Kong. In the 1970s I was deeply moved by Bruce Lee’s films beyond their obvious visceral appeal, they showed a young Chinese man standing up for justice and righteousness. I now realize that Bruce Lee embodied the dignity and compassion for others that remain central to the spirit of Hong Kong itself. In the years that followed, my appreciation of Hong Kong cinema grew, and I was inspired to express my ideas in a book on it. As I became more acquainted with its many fine filmmakers and the craftspeople who supported them, I came to realize that the same spirit has continued in this film culture.
My admiration for Lingnan, therefore, is part of my overall respect for the excellence of Hong Kong cinema and of the community it represents.
I regret that my health situation does not allow me to participate more fully on today’s occasion, but remain assured that my heart is with Lingnan University, its students and faculty, as well as the people of Hong Kong.
My thanks to the University, to Professor Davis and Profesor Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu (below), and to Ginn Fung Kai Chun and Amy Pang Wing Sifor their kind assistance.
It’s a grand Hollywood tradition for an established star to play against the ambition and drive that makes a career – to play a loser, a weirdo, a shut-in. Or, at the very least, a debased and dysfunctional version of themselves (Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, all of Pete Davidson’s semi-autobiographical comedy). The new Hulu comedy Quiz Lady stars the comedian Awkwafina – AKA the dramatic actor Nora Lum, who stole scenes in Crazy Rich Asians and won accolades for her work as a grieving granddaughter in The Farewell – in loser drag as Annie Yum, a slouchy thirtysomething recluse long obsessed with a daily televised quiz show. The film’s hook is her pairing with Sandra Oh, playing against type as Annie’s brash Peter Pan of an older sister, Jenny.
Good premise, bumpy ride. Quiz Lady, directed by Jessica Yu from a screenplay by Jen D’Angelo, struggles to balance its discordant tonal registers, veering from heightened satire to heartfelt to absurd in swings more grating than humorous. The Yum sisters are broad sketches of childhood trauma played for laughs. A quick intro set in 1996 reveals that, to cope with a chaotic, dysfunctional household, Jenny acted out; Annie, 10 years younger, turned inward, latching on to the TV and her adopted pug, Mr Linguini. She develops a perfectionist attachment to the Jeopardy-style Can’t Stop the Quiz, more satire than homage, and its bumbling but reliable host Terry McTier (Will Ferrell, also a producer).
The nightly routine – quiz show alarm, turn on the TV, rapid-fire answers with a now-ancient Mr Linguini – continues into the present, where Annie works a dead-end accounting-ish job somewhere in Pennsylvania; her only social interactions are with her benevolently addled elderly neighbor Francine (Holland Taylor, doing more than she should in a small role). Annie’s minimalist life is disrupted by her mother’s disappearance from her senior living facility – she has a gambling problem and ran off to Macau. Enter Jenny to crash on Annie’s couch, more comic prop than person – we meet her as she’s hit by a car, only to immediately rebound and scream at its driver.
Both Annie and Jenny are played as overly childlike, beyond the natural regression that occurs whenever nuclear family are cooped up together – Annie marches in an exaggerated slouch, her face pulled in distended expressions of exasperation, anxiety and focus. Jenny has the fashion, heedlessness and impulse control of a teenager. Neither are well-equipped to pay off their mother’s gambling debts, owed to an animal-loving gangster (Jon Park) who kidnaps Mr Linguini for ransom. Jenny, a nascent life coach, hoodwinks Annie into a plan to take the quiz show to the bank, unseating its loathed long-running champion Ron Heacox (a convincingly smarmy Jason Schwartzman).
The harebrained, often strained hijinks in this scheme include: a viral video branding Annie the “Quiz Lady”, a Philadelphia sports bar, an inn run by an anachronistic Ben Franklin impersonator (Tony Hale), several sisterly fights and, of course, one accidental drug trip (stressful, but the best showcase for Oh and Awkwafina’s comedic chemistry). (Also, a cameo from the late Paul Reubens, AKA Peewee Herman, in one of his final film roles.) Occasionally, Quiz Lady gestures at some kind of social commentary (“People don’t like when women are bad at things,” says Annie. “People don’t like when women are good at things either”) but functions marginally better when the characters play off woman-who-cried-racism assumptions for personal gain. (“Oh! Actual racism,” Jenny marvels when one character does takes a real racist jab.) The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.
Short, also, on believable, bankable characters. Much has been written about Oh’s overdue career breakout after a lack of opportunities for east Asian actors in Hollywood sidelined her into complementary roles. So it’s a delight, conceptually, to see Oh, who has specialized in salty, slightly neurotic, hyper-competent women (Killing Eve, Grey’s Anatomy) or nuanced empathy (Netflix’s short-lived The Chair) sink her teeth into a deliberately silly, unscrupulous character. But Jenny is a tonal mishmash, the natural heart and gravitas that Oh brings to any role at odds with a juvenile, singularly self-absorbed character too often played as dumb. Awkwafina, as Annie, fares better, though she’s still overdoing one note; the film immediately improves when she breaks out of Annie’s hard-charging vexation for a few moments of genuine connection between the sisters, including a swift, sweetly absurd quiz show conclusion.
Awkwafina and Oh do seem to have bonded in betting on two go-for-broke comic performances; what comedic engine Quiz Lady does have is thanks to their efforts, even if the performances strain at feature length. But this one’s not a winner.
While economic inequality may seem like an ever-mounting obstacle, more and more communities are experimenting with a long-tested, but often dismissed, idea to combat poverty.
Emmy-winning filmmaker Marc Levin and executive producer Michael Tubbs break down the deep history and complicated reality of guaranteed basic income in the documentary “It’s Basic,” which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year.
The concept, also called universal basic income, is based on the premise that working people understand their own needs better than government officials or bureaucracies, and low-income earners should receive a simple monthly check that comes without stipulations or strings.
The film follows participants in programs across five different cities, offering a nuanced look at how much an extra $500 to $1,000 per month can impact working people and families. It also examines why the idea still falls short in some areas.
“Put a little gas in my tank and I’ll show you how far I can go,” Lucille, a participant from St. Paul, Minnesota, told filmmakers.
The documentary "It's Basic" reveals the impact of a guaranteed basic income and why the programs are only a piece of overcoming inequality.
Advocates maintain that guaranteed income is an essential lifeline for low-income earners, especially as studies show that 60% of Americans across income brackets are living paycheck to paycheck.
Critics worry the funds only provide a temporary cushion for people. Others offer more patronizing excuses, suggesting low-income earners don’t know how to manage their money and that the checks incentivize people to stay out of the workforce.
But the subjects of “It’s Basic” reveal very different situations. Many, if not most, of the subjects are employed and use the funds to cover the difference between their wages and the rising cost of housing and living expenses. Others are full-time caretakers, stretching every last penny they have to keep their families safe and healthy.
Levin said breaking down these stereotypes was a key piece of the project.
“People have been inculcated with these myths about poverty and the undeserving poor,” he told HuffPost. “Part of the goal of the film is to convince people that the investment is worth it for everyone, for the good of the whole.”
"It's Basic" will screen at the DTLA Film Festival on Nov. 2 and is also part of a cross-country tour.
It's Basic/Blowback Productions
Tubbs saw the impact of a guaranteed income firsthand while mayor of Stockton, California, where he piloted the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, program in February 2019. For two years, 125 randomly selected low-income residents were given $500 a month without restrictions or work requirements.
Afterward, researchers saw participants’ full-time employment rates rise from 28% to 40%. They also found that 99% of funds were used on basic needs like food, clothes, utilities and auto care, and not vices like alcohol and tobacco, as opponents suggested.
In addition to that economic lift, Tubbs noticed how the programs gave participants a far more profound type of boost.
“They’ve been told that they’re failures their whole life,” he told HuffPost. “So when someone says, ‘Here’s $500,’ to be told, ‘You don’t have to prove anything to us. You don’t have to check in with us. We trust you’ ― it’s powerful and unlocks so much potential.”
Despite SEED’s successes, Tubbs lost his bid for reelection in 2020 amid public scrutiny of the program.
Undeterred, he leaned into his organization Mayors for Guaranteed Basic Income, a network of civic leaders he founded before being voted out of office. Since then, the organization has expanded to include 130 mayors and 40 county officials across the country.
Even as the movement gains steam, “It’s Basic” shows how guaranteed income is far from a permanent solution, following what happens to families when the support ends.
To Levin, those stories revealed how much policy and public opinion must shift to make a sincere and lasting impact on people’s lives.
“We come from a very individualistic, materialistic, consumer-driven world and that paradigm shift is going to take a while,” he explained. “That’s something we’re all wrestling with.”
“It’s Basic” is currently on a national tour and will have its West Coast premiere at the DTLA Film Festival on Nov. 2.
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
The French film essayist Chris Marker (1921-2012) likely left his biggest pop-cultural footprint with “La Jetée,” a half-hour short whose time-travel conceit inspired Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys.” “But “Sans Soleil,” Marker’s unclassifiable 1983 feature, neither fiction nor nonfiction, shows that raw documentary materials can be rendered into something as disorienting and chronologically malleable as fantasy. (Marker credits himself with “conception and editing,” but not direction.) The film belongs on a list of movies that ought to be seen and debated even if you don’t comprehend them. Not that comprehension is the point. “Sans Soleil” is not only unrooted in time but also in place, as a quotation from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash-Wednesday” signals at the outset. The title is given in Russian, English and French. The confounding narration in the English-language version consists of the actress Alexandra Stewart reading letters from a nonexistent cinematographer named Sandor Krasna, whose images we appear to be watching.
The film begins with a shot of three children in Iceland. Soon, it travels to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, among other locales; it is fascinated, most of all, with Japan, particularly its surreal and futuristic aspects, its television screens and its video games. Pac-Man is held up as “the most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate.” Familiar Marker totems — pictures of cats and owls — are rendered into electronically tweaked images. A clip dated as February 1980, before the coup in Guinea-Bissau that November, can only be properly understood by moving forward in time, the narration insists.
Stewart describes Krasna’s having taken a trip to the San Francisco area and visiting the locations from “Vertigo,” including the tree cross-section that Kim Novak’s Madeleine touches, saying, “Here I was born, and there I died.” Less considered, the voice-over suggests, citing another film that quotes that scene from “Vertigo,” is the area to the side of the sequoia trunk, beyond what can be touched. What’s there, in the cosmology of “Sans Soleil,” exists outside of time.
“De Palma” opens with “Vertigo” — more specifically, with Brian De Palma’s recollection of seeing it the year it was released, 1958, at Radio City Music Hall. To him, it’s a film about what a director does: conjuring romantic illusions.
Brian De Palma has always been one of Hitchcock’s most direct imitators, and in the documentary “De Palma,” the filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow pay tribute to him with the cinematic equivalent of Hitch’s famous conversations with François Truffaut. They are apprentices learning from a master, and helping remind viewers of what an influential figure De Palma has been. He came up at the same time as his friends Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. “What we did in our generation will never be duplicated,” De Palma says. “We were able to get into the studio system and use all that stuff in order to make some pretty incredible movies, before the businessmen took over again.”
De Palma always divided critics; detractors variously saw him as derivative or as wasting his ingenious visual style on subpar material. In the documentary, a candid, detailed De Palma, going film by film through his career, could disabuse anyone of the notion that he isn’t brilliant at his job. There are films where he felt everything clicked, like “Dressed to Kill” (1980) and “The Untouchables” (1987). He remembers watching “Carlito’s Way” (1993) and thinking, “I can’t make a better picture than this.” There are other times when things didn’t come off as he thinks they should have. His widely panned adaptation of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1990) needed the toughness of “The Magnificent Ambersons” or “Sweet Smell of Success,” he says. It’s a relief, for those of us who find “Raising Cain” (1992) confusing, to hear De Palma talk about how he rearranged it in the editing process. “It has a particular oddness to it,” he says, “’cause it’s not put together the way it was conceived.”
He laments current trends like the previsualization of action sequences, because using computers to plan things out is inevitably going to lead to visual clichés. The special-effects work on “Mission to Mars” didn’t suit him. “You do one of those shots the first day and you’re seeing it every week, as they add one incremental thing to it,” he says. “That goes on for a year, basically,” adding that he was always amazed at filmmakers like Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis who had the patience for that endless repetition.
Is he a Hitchcock imitator? He suggests, in a way, that Hitchcock wasn’t enough of an influence on others, and that the visual storytelling vocabulary Hitchcock developed might die out. “I’ve never found too many people that followed after the Hitchcock school except for me,” De Palma says.
Another disarmingly candid documentary, “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” finds the “Back to the Future” actor (who had the main role in De Palma’s “Casualties of War”) reflecting on his career and on his life with Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis that he revealed to the public in 1998. The director Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) takes full advantage of the fact that he’s working with someone who has spent a lot of time on camera. Certainly, Fox seems comfortable as an interview subject in the present day, answering questions with good humor and self-effacement. But Guggenheim also uses film clips of Fox to create a sort of visual archive of his life, so that whatever Fox is speaking about can be accompanied by footage of his younger self. The overall effect makes it feel like Fox had always been making his documentary about his life.
Guggenheim uses the verve of “Back to the Future” (and Alan Silvestri’s score) to help conjure the frenzy that engulfed Fox’s life at the time it was made, when the actor was shuttling between the sets of that film and the sitcom “Family Ties.” “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), in which Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, appeared, helps tell the story of their courtship. And when Fox talks about his early years of acting with Parkinson’s symptoms, and trying to time his medication so that he would peak at just the right moments, Guggenheim includes clips from “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993), which illustrate one of Fox’s hiding strategies: putting an object in his hand to mask its trembling.
While “Still” shows Fox poking fun at himself, as in a clip from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it is a serious movie when it ought to be. It doesn’t shy away from showing the struggles that Fox faces with injuries, for instance. “Gravity is real, even if you’re only falling from my height,” he says with a laugh, after a makeup artist has been shown working to conceal bruising on his face. Yet in spite of that, “Still” finds a way to be an optimistic film. A time machine in its own way — one very different from “Sans Soleil” — it brims with the wit and charisma that made Fox a star in the first place.
Dr Doug Ross from TV’s ER made it in the movies. Wisecracking, balding private detective David Addison from TV’s Moonlighting made it in the movies. West Philadelphia-born-and-raised-kid Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air made it in the movies.
So why not Chandler Bing? Why couldn’t Matthew Perry, that brilliant performer whose glorious TV character became everyone’s ideal friend and the very dating-app epitome of GSOH, have joined George Clooney, Bruce Willis and Will Smith in the cinema? Or as a shrewd, smart writer, could Perry have followed Richie Cunningham from TV’s Happy Days – director Ron Howard – for a career behind the camera?
Well, actually he could and did. Perry made plenty of interesting indie movies, did accomplished work on TV dramas by Aaron Sorkin and wrote a successful stage play for London’s West End and Broadway. But replicating his colossal TV success and legendary small-screen status in the cinema – cashing in that career capital and reinvesting it in Hollywood – didn’t happen.
Perhaps if he could have made a complete recovery from his addiction issues, or if these issues in an alternative universe had never existed. Yet that speculation is meaningless: his issues were arguably part of his personality ecosystem. Certainly, those troubles would have made insuring Perry for any big studio project very difficult: his post-Friends movie career was more about finding scripts he liked, getting attached to them and enabling the producers to get independent funding on the basis of his involvement. But even that thought doesn’t entirely hold water. Robert Downey Jr, whose drug history is legendary, wound up becoming a huge superhero name in the corporate studio world.
So yes. With a bit more luck, Perry could have had Jesse Eisenberg’s career, playing Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Luthor, writing witty stories for the New Yorker and McSweeney’s.
It has something to do with the addictive nature of TV fame, the dopamine rush of international small-screen brand identity, combined with the security of a regular big-paying gig in your 20s delivering the kind of money undreamt of by all but the biggest Hollywood A-listers. And Perry came of age at a time when television itself was assuming a new prestige and there wasn’t the same need to prove yourself outside. Certainly no one now would dream of patronising TV or Perry’s achievement on it.
All of the Friends cast were superb at delivering gags, playing physical comedy and getting studio audience laughs (as opposed to the echoing silence of a film studio, where an actor might in his or her eyeline glimpse the director’s thoughtfully unsmiling face reflected in the light of the video playback).
Monica, Joey, Ross, Rachel and Phoebe had faces, voices and personalities which popped deliciously on screen. And Chandler Bing even more so, because he was the one who was supposed to be funny, supposed to be making the others laugh as well as us at home – and Perry, who contributed script material to the show himself, was ultra-aware of his own supercharged comic success in the continuing TV role.
Movies are different. When Steven Spielberg first saw the young George Clooney he is supposed to have predicted a big movie career for him – if he could stop goofily waggling his head around. And that’s what Clooney did. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but mannerisms have to be controlled – very difficult if they become part of the electric zing of what’s made you a star up to that point. You’ve got to cultivate a certain stillness and centredness if you’re going to be plausible in many different roles as you grow into your 30s and 40s, like ex-Mouseketeer Ryan Gosling.
Perry made some palatable romantic comedies, such as the likable misadventure Three to Tango and the much-liked 17 Again which has a special piquant significance for Perry – who plays a disillusioned middle-aged guy who is reincarnated as a teenager played by Zac Efron.
Perry was a tremendous performer who could have developed as a great character actor and writer in the movies if the industry wasn’t so hidebound by genre and expectations and IP. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so superb in Seinfeld and Veep, is now blossoming as a character player in the movies of Nicole Holofcener and others. It could have been Perry. But any one of the Friends episodes puts him in the hall of fame. It’s cinema’s loss.
On Thursday, a new trailer for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film about the iconic doll finally revealed the movie’s mysterious plot, which unfolds after Barbie (Margot Robbie) verbalizes a deep thought during a lavish dance party at her Dreamhouse: “You guys ever think about dying?”
A toy expressing this very human concern starts creating cracks in the fantastical world that Barbie inhabits. Suddenly, her showers aren’t hot anymore, a leap off her roof doesn’t feel like it’s being safely guided to the ground by a child’s hand, and — worst of all — her signature tiptoed feet have gone ... flat.
We know. We know! We’ll give you a moment to digest that last detail. (In the meantime, please feel free to to watch this video of puppies tirelessly pursuing a cat for a snuggle. It’s going to be OK!)
The “Barbie” trailer suggests that the beloved doll must learn how to live outside of the figurative box and venture into the real world, with Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow.
And despite earlier reporting that Aqua’s 1997 hit “Barbie Girl” would not appear in the film, the end of the trailer includes a brief snippet of the song — or at least a version of it.
According to details on Apple Music, the movie’s soundtrack features a track called “Barbie World” from Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice and Aqua. That’s an interesting move, considering that Mattel — the company behind the Barbie brand — once filed a lawsuit alleging trademark infringement after “Barbie Girl” was released in the ’90s.
“My earliest and most vivid encounter with sheer terror took place in a movie theater when I was 3 years old. It was at the Fresh Pond Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., not during a showing of ‘Cujo’ or ‘It,’ but another dog and clown horror classic (masquerading as a kids’ movie), ‘Air Bud.’ Still indelible in my memory is a particular scene in which the sottish, spiteful clown re-emerges intent on snatching Buddy, our endearing, basketball-dunking dog pal, away from his newfound, but kind, young companion. Even now, I’m not sure what was scarier: watching the clown reappear on the screen, or the deafening, collective cry of fear that erupted from me and the rest of the audience of toddlers.”
— Clare Goslant of Cambridge, Mass., on seeing “Air Bud” at age 3.
“The wicked witch was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. I screamed and shut my eyes every time she appeared. That same year, after I had watched ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ I was cast as a wicked witch in my second-grade play. I cried and cried when I came home. I had wanted to play the fairy princess. My mother taught me how to cackle. And she said I’d be the star of the show. She was right.”
— Cathy Arden of New York, on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 7.
“It was supposed to be a children’s movie, but the scene of Bambi’s mother dying in a forest was something I found terrifying!”
— Carter Bancroft of Huntington, N.Y., on seeing “Bambi” at age 5.
“My older sister and I were dropped off at the big movie theater for the Saturday matinee. She left me all by myself and went off with her girlfriends. This was before parental helicopter-ing. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would later be broadcast annually on TV. Kids were able to cuddle with grown-ups in the safety of their own home, with the happy songs, cute little Munchkins and Dorothy’s funny friends. There’s no place like home. That’s a whole different process than I experienced, and it was a whole different picture for me. It was not so much my young age, but watching a family movie in that wild setting, having such a powerful effect on my senses, made it my first scary movie. I was scarred for life.”
— Don Feiler of Mattituck, N.Y., on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 5.
In the years following the release of his Oscar-nominated anti-fracking documentary Gasland, Josh Fox felt the full weight of the fossil fuel industry bearing down on him.
“I was public enemy number one for five or six years,” he says. “They followed me all around the country. There were arson [threats] and constant death threats. There were huge PR campaigns against the film, very, very much targeted at me.”
In 2008 Fox received a letter at the home his father had built in the upper Delaware River Basin in the United States. It was a natural gas mining company, offering him $100,000 to lease 19.5 acres of land.
Instead of taking the money, Fox travelled across the US with a camera to see how drilling for shale gas had affected other communities – and found himself in the fight of his life. People showed him water that fizzed and bubbled, water they could light on fire. In his 2010 film Gasland, Fox showed how hydraulic fracturing – fracking – was poisoning the air, contaminating groundwater, chemically burning animals and making people sick.
The documentary was critically acclaimed and ignited the anti-fracking movement worldwide. The sequel, 2013’s Gasland Part II, included the Bentley blockade, which succeeded in blocking gas drilling in Australia’s northern rivers region.
Fox is now in Australia, although not for reasons connected to his indefatigable climate activism (although that is never far away). He is here for the premiere of his new documentary, The Edge of Nature, which opened the Byron Bay international film festival. He is a fast-talking New Yorker, imparting information with urgency while wearing a straw hat, his banjo laid lovingly on his hotel bed.
The trailer for The Edge of Nature
The banjo was practically all Fox had with him when he retreated to a tiny shack in a Pennsylvanian forest, where he had grown up, during the pandemic in 2020. Suffering alarming neurological symptoms from long Covid, he lived in nature for nine months with no phone signal and only a battery and a small solar panel for power as he recovered. “Why won’t my brain work?” he beseeches his camera on one long, dark night.
The film begins with a rush of images and a startling monologue about the state of the world in 2019, before the “anthropause” of lockdowns: “2.09 billion birds mysteriously vanished, a third of all animals endangered, 17% of wildlife on the planet has disappeared, climate emissions through the roof.” As shocking as it was, the distress of the environmental crisis was soon to be compounded by the arrival of a deadly and disabling virus. “We did not know how good we had it,” he says. The juxtaposition with his self-imposed exile is profound.
In the forest he lived in a “squalid state of fever dreams”, as he says in the film: “The virus ripped through my brain, mixed and matched synapsis that didn’t seem to go together.” Fox struggled with breathing, couldn’t stop blinking. Doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him.
Living alongside an industrious family of beavers (“I love those beavers”), among other wild animals in nature, “away from the noise and the violence that made my brain fog worse”, he set out to heal himself “enough to keep fighting”.
A still from Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary Gasland. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
While Gasland made Fox an accidental ecowarrior as he took on the political power of big oil companies, The Edge of Nature captures a totally different fight. “The frontlines were inside my head, inside my body, both psychological and physical. They were spiritual, they were emotional.”
Fox never felt alone in the forest – because he wasn’t. He was living and breathing with nature. “I found companionship in talking to the stars, talking to the frogs, listening to them trying to find a mate, the song of the species trying to continue itself.” He came to a new personal understanding of the seasons: “You realise that there are many more than four – I have at least 12 seasons in my head.”
One night he hears the rattle of gunshots and is frightened. “This was sending a message to everyone in earshot,” he tells the camera. “This is what a bear hears, this is what a deer hears, this is what the hunted hear and run from.” The guns make him contemplate human violence and the “scars of generations past deep inside me”: his grandmother, the only one of nine children to survive the Holocaust; his grandfather, who was left with no family.
He mulls over the violence of history (“America is built on genocide and slavery”). And then there is the death to come. “The genocide of climate change, this is the biggest one yet,” he says to me. “And not just us, it is every living thing on the planet. We are looking at an extinction event.”
His conclusion from his time spent in the forest is that “we cannot heal ourselves if we are also ignoring the planet”. “The planet has to factor into every decision we make. We need to understand that nature heals us just as we heal it – it is a symbiotic relationship. What is good for the garden is good for us.”
Although Fox still suffers symptoms from time to time, he says he is now feeling much healthier. “I don’t know what made my symptoms better exactly; it is still a mystery. I suffered these symptoms for 16 months. I do know that spending time in nature helped me enormously to overcome the PTSD and other symptoms of long Covid. What heals me is my activism for planet Earth. The film is a call for much more attention, funding and research on long Covid, which afflicts so many.”
During his time in the forest, he came to understand humanity’s ultimate purpose as caretakers of the planet. “The forest needs us. We are the only species that understands how we can help biodiversity, how we can help ecosystems.”
He looks up at Byron’s clear blue sky with a kind of wonder. “In the US you don’t see blue skies like this, except during that moment of pandemic,” he says. “Covid is the only time in our history as a human race that we reduced emissions enough to meet the climate change goals of Paris. There are lessons from that time that we desperately need to learn. The planet was trying to speak to us and breathe and we need to listen to that. Nature told all of humanity to go to your room and think about what you have done.”
‘There are lessons from that time that we desperately need to learn’ … Josh Fox. Photograph: Natalie Grono/The Guardian
Fox says Gasland, which premiered on HBO, would not be picked up for US television now. “It is the most repressive media landscape I’ve ever experienced,” he says. But he has also taken on the most formidable enemies possible, and remains undaunted, if traumatised; relishing, you suspect, the fight. It is never insurmountable, he believes. Fox has the might of right on his side. “We found that if we organise, we have collective power,” he says. “We have to have faith in our collective power.”
Fox doesn’t claim to have all the answers. He is motivated by questions, the biggest one being: “Can we do this?”
“The only thing I know is that movements are what create power,” he says. “We are beat up and suffering right now. This movie is a love letter to those movements, saying: we have to heal ourselves and walk forward. We can connect with the planet that takes all of our death and turns it back into life somehow. We can connect with that reality – or we can ignore it, and put more fuel into Elon Musk’s rockets and more fuel into our SUVs and spend more time behind screens.”
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