Though the pair starred in four movies together, the “Grace and Frankie” star revealed Redford couldn’t stand love scenes while speaking on a panel at Cannes Film Festival on Friday.
“He did not like to kiss,” Fonda confessed, per Deadline.
The actor and activist remembered Redford being testy while on set, but said she never pressed him as to why.
“I never said anything,” she revealed. “And he’s always in a bad mood, and I always thought it was my fault.”
“He’s a very good person,” Fonda added. “He just has an issue with women.” Fonda did not elaborate further.
Robert Redford and Jane Fonda receive a Golden Lion For Lifetime Achievement Award during the 2017 Venice Film Festival.
Pascal Le Segretain via Getty Images
The celebrity said she learned not to take things personally by the time she and Redford worked together on 2017’s “Our Souls at Night.”
“The last movie I made with him was six years ago,” Fonda said. “What was I, about 80 years old or something like that. And I finally knew I had grown up. When he would come on the set three hours late in a bad mood, I knew it wasn’t my fault.”
Despite the delays, she said, “We always had a good time.”
Fonda and Redford first worked together in 1960’s “Tall Story” before collaborating again in 1966’s “The Chase” and 1967’s “Barefoot in the Park.” The pair also starred in 1979’s “The Electric Horseman,” which would be their last film together until 2017.
While Fonda talked up her chemistry with Redford at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, she told attendees he wasn’t as enthusiastic.
“I live for sex scenes with him,” she said. “He doesn’t like sex scenes, [but] he’s a great kisser.”
Redford was married to historian Lola Van Wagenen from 1958 until 1985. He wed artist Sibylle Szaggars in 2009.
Fonda has been married three times: first to French filmmaker Roger Vadim from 1965 to 1973, then to politician Tom Hayden from 1973 to 1990 and last, to media mogul Ted Turner, whom she married in 1991 and divorced in 2001.
“What’s this?” Jack Skellington sings excitedly when he first comes across Santa Claus’s snowy, colorful village in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” That’s also what Disney executives asked with concern about the idiosyncratic stop-motion animation musical when they saw a rough cut.
“Anytime you’re doing something like that, which was unknown: stop motion, the main character doesn’t have any eyeballs and it’s all music, what’s to feel comfortable about?” Burton said during a video call from London. “Of course they would be nervous about it.”
Burton’s “Nightmare,” currently back in theaters to commemorate its 30th anniversary, is now more popular than ever: This weekend the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles is holding a series of live concerts around the film, Disney theme parks feature seasonal attractions inspired by its characters, and merchandise, from board games to housewares, abounds.
But the eccentric and endearing movie wasn’t always a ubiquitous part of our holiday watch list. Back in October 1993, “Nightmare” was released not as a Disney title but under the studio’s more adult-oriented label Touchstone Pictures.
“They were afraid it might hurt their brand,” the director Henry Selick said in a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “If they had put the Disney name on it right then, it would’ve been much more successful, but I understand it just didn’t feel anything like their other animated films.”
Based on Burton’s original story and characters, the unusual picture was directed by Selick, by then a seasoned stop-motion artist with spots for MTV and a variety of commercials to his name. Burton’s frequent collaborators Michael McDowell and Caroline Thompson wrote the screenplay.
Over the course of its original run, “Nightmare” grossed $50 million at the domestic box office. And while that number is by no means dismal, it’s a far cry from Disney animated hits like “Aladdin,” which just a year earlier brought in $217 million from U.S. screens alone.
At the time, Disney couldn’t figure out how to market the operatic saga of Jack, a lanky, sharply dressed skeleton, infatuated with bringing the wonder of Christmas to his monstrous friends in uncanny Halloween Town.
Selick initially worried that the number of songs Danny Elfman had composed for the movie, a total of 10 tracks for the brisk 76-minute run time, would alienate viewers. In retrospect, he said, the memorable tunes were crucial to the film’s eventual success, once audiences connected with its unconventional rules of storytelling and design.
These days Selick can’t go a week without running into a fan wearing a sweater, hat or other apparel emblazoned with “Nightmare” imagery.
“This year there’s a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington you can buy at Home Depot, and people have them on their lawns,” Selick said. “I like that because it’s pretty bizarre and extreme. That’s not just a T-shirt, that’s a real commitment.”
For Burton, the character of Jack Skellington embodies a preoccupation common in his work over the years: the terrifying notion of being misunderstood. “The conception of it was based on those feelings growing up of people perceiving you as something dark or weird when actually you’re not,” he recalled.
Selick compared the skeletal antihero’s amusingly manic behavior to Mr. Toad from the animated classic “The Wind in the Willows,” one of his favorite Disney protagonists. “I’ve always been drawn to characters like Jack Skellington,” Selick said. “He gets carried away with something new and goes way overboard with his enthusiasm.”
Burton, who grew up in the Los Angeles area, where Latino culture has a strong presence, also holds a special affinity for Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that embraces mortality as a natural part of life’s cycle. That was among his many inspirations for “Nightmare. ”
“I always felt a connection to that celebration. People think of it as a dark sort of thing, but it’s quite light,” Burton said. “That’s where the juxtaposition of those feelings of dark imagery with more spiritual positive feelings connected with me very early in life.”
For stop motion as a technique, “Nightmare” represented a watershed right before the advent of computer-generated animation. Selick credited the director of photography, Pete Kozachik, for introducing the tools that set the production apart, namely designing and building the rigs that allowed the heavy Mitchell film cameras to move a frame at a time.
“That made the film so cinematic,” Selick said. “All the stop motion before had been done in lock shots or really simple little pans,” the mostly static visual language that limited other stories told in the same medium. But, Selick continued, “what Pete brought was this freedom of camera movement, which really turned it into a bigger movie.”
While there was talk of turning his concept for “Nightmare” into a TV special or realizing it in hand-drawn animation, Burton — who as a child adored Ray Harryhausen’s creations and Rankin/Bass tales like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” — held out until there was a team to do it in stop motion.
“If you’ve ever been on a stop motion set and you see its tactile beauty, it is like going back to the beginning of making movies in the sense that it’s all about artists making puppets, sets, there’s a feeling that’s unlike any kind of thing,” Burton said.
Decades before he directed the stop-motion features “Corpse Bride” (2005) and “Frankenweenie” (2012), both of which earned him Oscar nominations for best animated feature, Burton dove into the painstaking technique with a 1982 short film, “Vincent.”
“Other mediums are great, but for me that’s the most pure and beautiful one,” Burton added.
Selick admitted that for a while the general public’s lack of awareness that he had directed “Nightmare” upset him. He’s now made peace with the lack of credit because this milestone in his career wouldn’t have happened without “Tim’s brilliance and ideas.”
“I could still certainly win bar bets for the rest of my life,” he said with a cheeky smile. “‘For $20, who directed “The Nightmare Before Christmas”?’”
For Selick, one of the indicators that the movie had become a classic came a few years after the lukewarm reception to the theatrical release, but before Disney had fully embraced it. The director recalls children coming to his house trick-or-treating on Halloween night in homemade costumes of “Nightmare” characters before officially licensed versions existed.
“I’d sometimes bring them in with their parents and show them the original figure of Jack as Santa in his sled with the reindeer that I kept, and they would just scream with joy,” Selick recalled while pointing his camera to the fragile figure in a glass display case.
“It’s not really mine or Tim’s or Danny’s anymore,” Selick said. “It’s the world’s movie, and I kind of like that.”
Since 2001, the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland has been transformed every fall into a “Nightmare”-inspired attraction known as Haunted Mansion Holiday. And each year, from early September through October, Disneyland holds the Oogie Boogie Bash, a Halloween party three nights a week featuring and named after the movie’s rambunctious villain.
Burton believes these displays epitomize the film’s evolution from unclassifiable oddity to a uniquely beloved property. “When I see that, I go back to the early days when the film was first being done, and thinking of the journey that it’s taken, this symbolizes it in a very strange way,” said Burton.
Selick added that he was invited the first year of the Haunted Mansion Holiday. “They didn’t try to turn it into one of their other characters,” he said. “They really got the aesthetic of the designs just right.”
A sequel novel, “Long Live the Pumpkin Queen,” focused on Jack’s romantic partner, Sally, and a prequel comic, “The Battle for Pumpkin King,” were published in the last year. Yet three decades on, Burton maintained that the original animated film was a one-of-a-kind feat.
“In a certain way that’s the beautiful thing about it as it is. It’s one movie. It’s stop motion and it tells its story. And that helps make it special for me,” Burton explained. “It’s its own thing, there aren’t five sequels and there’s not a live-action reboot.”
A UK charity representing those with a disfigurement or visible difference has written to broadcasters including Netflix, Disney+ and the BBC asking that Halloween favourites such as A Nightmare on Elm Street run with warnings that the films contain negative stereotypes.
Changing Faces has sent the letter as part of its I Am Not Your Villain campaign, which aims to eradicate the common trope of feared characters being portrayed as people with a scar, mark or condition that makes them look different.
“We know that Halloween can be an anxious time for those with visible differences,” said Heather Blake, the chief executive of Changing Faces. “The film industry plays a role in this by reinforcing old-fashioned and harmful stereotypes. These carry through to everyday life for those with visible differences in ways that can have a lasting impact.”
The letter, which has also been sent to Amazon’s Prime Video, Apple TV, ITV and Channel 4, comes as viewers seek horror films and broadcasters promote and resurface dozens of titles in Halloween-themed seasons.
Villainous characters – such as the Joker, facially scarred murderers Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger from the Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises and Damien Thorn, the protagonist from 1970s horror film The Omen, whose birthmark on his scalp marks him out as the antichrist – are also frequently recreated in costume form by Halloween revellers.
“Harmful beliefs can be reinforced through instant access to decades of archived content without explanation of the impact,” said Blake.
The letter calls on broadcasters and streaming services to consider including text before content is played highlighting that a film contains negative portrayals of those with visible differences.
It also asks services to consider signposting support for those affected or seeking more information about the experiences of those with visible differences at the end of a film.
“Streaming platforms can help raise awareness and move the industry forward by acknowledging these film stereotypes,” said Blake. “For example, adding a caveat to content that explains that these are present and harmful to those with visible differences.”
Changing Faces launched its I Am Not Your Villain campaign in 2018 with support from the British Film Institute, which said it will no longer fund films in which villains appear with facial scarring.
Of all the haunting images and disturbing sounds that permeate Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” none is more upsetting than the guttural cry from Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), a tortured wail of rage and grief that escapes her reserved visage when tragedy strikes. And it often does: “Killers” tells the true story, adapted from the book by David Grann, of how Mollie’s Osage community was decimated by murderous white men, who killed dozens of her tribe members for rights to their oil-rich land.
Mollie’s howl of pain is not quite like any sound heard before in a Scorsese film. But in many ways, Scorsese is emulating her jarring cry in the ominous aesthetics of “Killers of the Flower Moon” itself, and of his 2019 feature, “The Irishman.”
The movies have much in common: their creative teams, expansive running times, period settings, narrative density and epic scope. But what most keenly sets them apart from the rest of Scorsese’s work is the element by which the filmmaker is arguably most easily identified: their violence. In these films, the deaths, which are frequent, are hard and fast and blunt, a marked departure from the intricately stylized and ornately edited set pieces of his earlier work.
“The violence is different now, in these later movies,” Thelma Schoonmaker, his editor since 1980, noted recently. “And often it’s in a wide shot. It’s hardly ever a tight shot, which is very different from his earlier movies, right?”
It certainly is. Wide shots, for those unfamiliar with the lingo of cinematography, are spacious, open compositions, often full-body views of characters and their surroundings (frequently used for broad-scale action or establishing shots). Medium-wides are slightly closer, but still allow us to observe multiple characters and their surroundings. The “tight shots” that Schoonmaker references as more typical of Scorsese’s earlier work are the medium shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups that place the camera (and thus the viewer) right in the middle of the melee.
Take, as an example, one of Scorsese’s most effective sequences, the murder of Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) in his 1990 crime drama, “Goodfellas.” When Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) kill Batts, it’s dramatized in a flurry of setups and rapid-fire edits: from a three-shot of Tommy’s initial punch, to an overhead shot of Batts hitting the floor, a low-angle composition (from Batts’s point of view) of Tommy pummeling him with his fists, then an already-dollying camera that tracks Henry (Ray Liotta) as he goes to lock the bar’s front door. Scorsese cuts back to Tommy landing more punches, then cuts to Jimmy contributing a series of kicks, with a quick insert of a particularly nasty one landing on Batts’s brutalized face. We then see, briefly, Tommy holding a gun, Henry reacting to all of this in shock, more kicks from Jimmy and more punches from Tommy, as blood spurts from Batts’s face.
It’s a signature Scorsese scene, combining unflinching brutality, dark humor and incongruent music (the jukebox is blasting Donovan’s midtempo ballad “Atlantis”). It’s a tough, ugly bit of business — and it’s also pleasurable. There is, in this sequence and much of Scorsese’s crime filmography, a thrill to his staging and cutting that is often infectious.
He’s such an electrifying filmmaker that even when dramatizing upsetting and difficult events, we find ourselves swept into the visceral virtuosity of his mise-en-scène. It’s this duality, the discomfort of enjoying the actions of criminals or killers or vigilantes, that makes his pictures so potent: Jake LaMotta’s beatings in “Raging Bull,” the high-speed execution of Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets” and particularly the gun-toting rampage of Travis Bickle at the end of “Taxi Driver” are all the more disturbing because of the spell Scorsese casts.
That’s not how the violence works in “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” When people die in these films, it’s grim, nasty, divergent in every way from the dirty kicks of “Goodfellas” or “Casino” (1995). In “The Irishman,” Sally Bugs (Louis Cancelmi) is dispatched in two setups, one wide and one medium, bang bang bang; the deaths of Whispers DiTullio (Paul Herman) and Crazy Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco) are likewise framed wide, hard and fast — simple, bloody, done. One of the film’s most upsetting scenes, when Frank (De Niro) drags his young daughter to the corner grocery store so she can watch him beat up a shopkeeper, is staged with similar simplicity: Scorsese keeps the scene to a single wide shot as Frank goes in, drags the man over his counter, smashes him through the door, kicks him, beats him and stomps on his hand. Scorsese cuts away only once — to the little girl’s horrified reaction.
Scorsese carries this sparseness into “Killers of the Flower Moon.” An early montage of Osage people on their deathbeds concludes with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn (Anthony J. Harvey), who is killed in two cold, complementary medium-wides. Another character is hooded on the street, dragged into an alley and stabbed to death, with all of the action in two wide shots; a third is knocked down in one wide shot, then thrashed to death in a low-angle medium. The mayhem is over before it even starts.
“When I was growing up, I was in situations where everything was fine — and then, suddenly, violence broke out,” Scorsese told the film critic Richard Schickel in 2011. “You didn’t get a sense of where it was coming from, what was going to happen. You just knew that the atmosphere was charged, and, bang, it happened.”
That feeling — that “bang, it happened” — is what makes the violence in “Killers” so upsetting. The most jarring and scary death comes early, with the murder of Sara Butler (Jennifer Rader) as she attends to her baby in a carriage; it’s all done in one medium wide shot, a pop and a burst of blood. A late-film courtroom flashback to an inciting murder is even more gutting, because we know it’s coming, so as the characters walk into the wide shot and arrange themselves, it’s more tense than any of Scorsese’s breathless montages could ever be.
In contrast to the constant needle drops of “Goodfellas” or “Casino,” the murders in “Killers” and “The Irishman” often occur without musical accompaniment, nothing to soften or smother the cold crack of a single gunshot. This is most haunting in the closing stretch of “The Irishman,” as Frank makes the long, sad trip to kill his friend Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It’s an order from on high, and Frank is merely a foot soldier, so he can’t do a thing about his pal’s fate but dwell. Scorsese makes us dwell with him, lingering on every detail, filling the soundtrack with the thick, heavy silence of surrender. And when the time comes, Scorsese stages one of the most famous unsolved murders of our time with a glum, doomed inevitability, as Frank stands behind Hoffa, puts two into him, drags him to the middle of the freshly laid carpet, and leaves.
In these films, Scorsese has stripped his violence of its flourishes and curlicues, boiling it down to its essence. Of the comparatively restrained violence of his “Gangs of New York” (2002), Scorsese told Schickel, “I don’t really want to do it anymore — after doing the killing of Joe Pesci and his brother in ‘Casino,’ in the cornfield. If you look at it, it isn’t shot in any special way. It doesn’t have any choreography to it. It doesn’t have any style to it, it’s just flat. It’s not pretty. There was nothing more to do than to show what that way of life leads to.”
Perhaps Scorsese was ready to dramatize violence as he remembered it, rather than how he’d seen it in the movies. Or perhaps, at age 80, he is acutely aware of his own mortality, and that awareness is affecting how he sees and presents death in his own work. Scorsese ends “The Irishman” with Frank literally picking out his own coffin and crypt; side characters are all introduced with onscreen text detailing their eventual deaths (“Frank Sindone — shot three times in an alley, 1980”). It’s coming for everyone, the director seems to insist, not in a razzle-dazzle set piece, but in a sudden moment of brutality, shrouded in a cold, endless silence.
As a longtime admirer of the hit song Hot Potato, a profoundly poetic if slightly repetitive celebration of simple cuisine and the temperature at which it can be served, I was excited to have its origins unpacked in a new film exploring its creators.
Early in, director Sally Aitken’s bubbly and quite well-made documentary about the Wiggles – the phenomenally successful troupe up there with Bluey and Bananas in Pyjamas as Australia’s biggest family friendly exports – we hear a sound bite of veteran interviewer Andrew Denton suggesting these barmy, toot-tooting, Shimmie Shaking entertainers ought to be taken seriously.
“Do not be fooled by their simplicity,” he says, “for their music is up there with the greatest.” So: Beethoven, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Wiggles? A refreshingly different perspective on musical greatness.
Thankfully, that early Denton grab notwithstanding, Hot Potato: The Story of the Wiggles doesn’t have the gushingly fawning tone of many docos about artists, such as this year’s enjoyable if idolatry John Farnham film Finding the Voice. It does, however, begin by addressing the big questions – big, at least, in the Wiggleverse: a bright world of catchy lyrics, costumed animals and a big red car. Including how the original members – Jeff Fatt, Anthony Field, Greg Page and Murray Cook – feel towards the colour with which their professional legacies would be forever associated.
In Quentin Tarantino’s heist drama Reservoir Dogs, a group of thieves were assigned the name of a colour but had no choice which one they got, Lawrence Tierney’s mob boss explaining that, “You get four guys all fighting over who’s gonna be Mr Black.” Conversely, in Hot Potato, we hear about the colour nobody wanted. Field (AKA the Blue Wiggle) drops a bomb (again, relative to the Wiggleverse) by reflecting on how, when Page got yellow, “all of us were glad”. After a quick pause he adds: “No offence to anybody who loves yellow.”
I found this moment rather cute: the suggestion some people are so besotted with yellow and the various Wiggles who have worn it (including Page, Emma Watkins and Tsehay Hawkins) that they might be personally offended by the comment. And to be fair, it’s an entirely reasonable assumption given the intense emotional connections the group has forged with many of its fans.
Like Finding the Voice, this film is an authorised work. But whereas Farnsy was occasionally heard but never seen in his doco, the Wiggles front the camera in theirs, sitting down for interviews and seeming to genuinely enjoy the process, coming across as down-to-earth and likable. While this is hardly an exposé filled with skeletons tumbling out of the closet, it does touch on issues that could’ve been minimised or ignored – from recollections of brutal feedback (one ABC producer for instance told them “your videos make us cringe”) to canvassing various personal and health issues, including Field’s struggle with depression and Page suffering a heart attack in 2020.
The wearers of bright skivvies have forged intense emotional connections with many of their fans. Photograph: Prime Video
When Fatt reflects on how, one day, he “had a blackout while I was driving and ran into a tree”, I realised I was emotionally invested in this story; these wearers of bright skivvies had wiggled their way to my heart. Hot Potato gets more convoluted and less affecting when it moves through latter-era Wiggles history, the originals substituted for various replacements who I lost track of.
An early mention of Field, Cook and Page studying early childhood education in their pre-Wiggles life kickstarts the film’s most interesting element: a scattered series of brief insights into how the group channeled academic theory into an act that took its responsibility to children seriously. Despite this review’s slightly facetious introduction, it’s clear their knowledge of youngsters was thoughtfully applied to their work, at times in small but telling ways. Field, for instance, decided that whenever anybody was talking on stage, every member of the group needed to be looking at that person. This marked a shift in which they were “no longer a band” and “became a show”.
We also learn how the Wiggles encouraged “parallel play”, which essentially refers to a kind of disconnected form of dancing that encourages safe social interactions and boundaries. There’s quite a few interesting nuggets strewn across a 104-minute runtime that does feel a little chunky towards the end. Aitken nevertheless creates a nice ebb and flow; you might say the wheels of the film go round and round, round and round, round and round …
The trailer for Carrie Fisher’s final movie role was released Friday, nearly seven years after the actor’s death.
“Wonderwell” is a coming-of-age fantasy film that follows a young girl named Violet (Kiera Milward) living in Italy. When Violet wanders into the forest one day and tumbles through a magic portal, she meets Hazel, played by Fisher. The mysterious Hazel is described by the movie’s Instagram as “an extravagant and powerful witch of the forest.”
In the trailer, it’s clear that Hazel’s reputation precedes her.
“Are you the witch?” Violet asks the Fisher’s flame-haired character.
“The witch, or a witch?” Hazel coyly replies.
The movie’s release took longer than expected due to Fisher’s 2016 death and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We were challenged with COVID lockdowns and, of course, the passing of our wonderful Carrie Fisher,” director Vlad Marsavin said in a statement. “Now is the perfect time to share her magical on-screen moments as Hazel.”
The film, which also stars Rita Ora, is slated for a limited theatrical release on June 23 through AMC. It will also be released digitally.
Vincent Patrick, an author and screenwriter who set pins at a bowling alley, peddled Bibles door to door and helped start a mechanical engineering firm before finding critical success with his first novel, “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” at 44, died on Oct. 6 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, his son Richard said.
The son of a Bronx pool-hall owner and numbers runner, Mr. Patrick was raised in a milieu sprinkled with the grifters, hustlers and mobsters who would eventually become characters in his novels, which also included “Family Business” (1985) and “Smoke Screen” (1999).
In manner and accent, Mr. Patrick seemed like a character he might have dreamed up himself. A 1999 profile in The Los Angeles Times noted that “his voice has that subterranean rumble of an accent, a sound that good character actors try to emulate when playing retired cops or tough but fair patriarchs.”
“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of Charlie, the down-on-his-luck night manager of a Manhattan saloon, whose cousin Paulie sucks him and a locksmith friend into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.
“The connective thread is the sad state of their lives, their disenchantment and the curse of being dreamers,” Joe Flaherty wrote in a review in The New York Times. The novel, he added, “mines territory rarely encountered in fiction and, in the vernacular of his tough, streetwise characters, delivers a sweetheart of a book.”
“Family Business,” the tale of three generations of hustlers from an ethnically mixed New York family, also explored the psychological allure of the big score. Jessie McMullen, the con-man grandfather; Vito, his son, who is in the wholesale meat business; and Adam, his M.I.T.-educated grandson, all find themselves drawn into a risky caper to swipe a plant cell from a California laboratory and sell it to a rival genetic engineering company.
“Mr. Patrick could have drawn these characters with broad strokes, concentrating on the heist, and still have come up with a decent thriller,” Arthur Krystal wrote in The Times. “Instead he chose to provide them with interesting lives and, in the cases of Vito and Adam, with the intelligence and self-doubts of men uncomfortable with their moral upbringing.”
Mr. Patrick himself was quoted by The Times: “There’s a colorfulness about their value systems that makes them attractive to a writer,” he said, “a willingness to take risks and an ability to meet life sort of head-on and wrestle with it and not retreat into a very secure position.”
Some critics were less kind to the feature film versions of both books, which Mr. Patrick himself adapted. “The Pope of Greenwich Village” (1984), starring Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts, was “less a story than a display of acting mannerisms,” the critic Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.
Reviewing “Family Business” (1989), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman and Matthew Broderick, Mr. Canby found a paucity of wit. He also found the idea that three actors so physically dissimilar could be blood relatives to be a stretch.
Still, Mr. Patrick understood the compromises required to make it in Hollywood, his son Richard said in a phone interview. His father, he said convinced the producer Scott Rudin that he would not treat his novels as sacrosanct works of literature, telling him, “I have no compunction at all about cannibalizing my own work in order to bring it to the big screen.’”
“The Pope of Greenwich Village,” published in 1979, told the story of a down-on-his-luck saloon night manager who gets sucked into a perilous plot to crack a safe filled with what turns out to be mob money.Credit...Seaview Books
Vincent Francis Patrick was born on Jan. 19, 1935, in the Bronx, the middle of three children of Vincent and Angela (Hunt) Patrick. His mother was a legal secretary. Growing up, he dreamed of being a writer, and he churned out short stories during his teens.
School, however, was another matter. He chafed at the strict discipline at the Roman Catholic schools he attended, and he dropped out of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx after his junior year. In order to make ends meet, he set pins at a Bronx bowling alley before taking a job selling Bibles door to door in Bronx apartment buildings.
As he recounted in a 1999 performance at the storytelling series staged by the Moth, he abandoned the job after watching his sales partner persuade a housewife to raid her 7-year-old daughter’s piggy bank for the $7 down payment on a fancy leather-embossed Bible. “I didn’t know yet who I was,” he told the audience. “But I knew who I was not.”
In 1954 he married Carole Unger, and the couple had two sons. With a family to support, Mr. Patrick earned his high school diploma and put himself through New York University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He and a partner then started a successful firm that designed, among other things, an assembly line for caskets.
By his mid-30s, however, the call of a literary career had become too loud to ignore, so he left engineering to take another stab at writing professionally. “I wasn’t really happy, and I knew if I didn’t begin to write something, it wasn’t going to be written,” he told People magazine in 1979.
Mr. Patrick hammered out a draft of his first book while working as a bartender at an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where his son said he drew inspiration by rubbing elbows with the underworld types from Little Italy who would hang out there.
While he was initially drawn to screenwriting as a means to adapt his own work, Richard Patrick said, it soon became a successful side career. Among other projects, he contributed to the script for “The Devil’s Own” (1997), starring Harrison Ford as a police officer and Brad Pitt as an Irish Republican Army member hiding out in Staten Island, and wrote the two-part television movie “To Serve and Protect” (1999).
In addition to his son Richard, Mr. Patrick is survived by his wife; another son, Glen; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Hollywood, Mr. Patrick once said, was both a fabled land of opportunity and a trap. “Once you start,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “it’s hard to get out.” Discussing his third novel, “Smoke Screen,” a thriller involving international terrorism and a deadly virus, he admitted that his screenwriting work had slowed his literary output.
“Yeah, this is my third novel in 20 years,” he said. “But I think when you look at it, from the point of sheer craft, I’ve gotten better. And that’s because, Hollywood or not, I write every day. It’s different writing, but it all boils down to plot and characters.”
One unintended consequence of this year’s Hollywood strikes is that we get a chance to see who the nice guys are. There are several levels to this. The bottom rung, obviously, are the outliers who choose the short-term personal gain of working on a project affected by strikes over the collective good. A step higher are the visible strikers, the performers and writers who are outside the studios picketing.
Then, another level up, are those who have found ways to fund their crews. This is important, since the crew members who are not in the striking unions are struggling to find work. Projects such as the recent Hollywood auction (where people could bid to have Natasha Lyonne help them complete a crossword) and Strike Force Five (in which the late-night talkshow hosts made a podcast designed to raise money for their crews) are perfect examples of this.
And then, right at the top of the tree, are those who have found work for their crews, keeping them employed without resorting to charity. Emblematic of this last group is Tom Cruise, who has chosen to put his resting Mission: Impossible crew to work making a music video for Rick Astley.
Astley has made his first album for five years, and a forthcoming single, Forever and More, needed a video. The video already had a director in Simon Pegg, and Pegg reportedly roped in Cruise to help fill out the crew. “Tom has worked with a number of them on many films so he wanted to be loyal and help out during tough times,” a source told the Sun newspaper. “After discussions with Simon and the label, he’s got them all to cross over and work on the video.”
Which is obviously very wonderful for everyone involved. The crew gets to make an honest day’s work during a situation that is out of their control. Pegg (who previously directed a music video where Pom Klementieff trash-talked the Avengers) gets a chance to showcase his skills. Astley gets a splashy new video for a song that nobody will care about during concerts because it isn’t Never Gonna Give You Up. And Cruise gets to bask in the continued glory of being the saviour of All Of Cinema During Uncertain Times.
Which isn’t to say that you should expect Cruise to appear in the video. He is a performer, and so he is prohibited from performing until Sag-Aftra reaches an agreement with the studios. But this absence means that Astley now has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to step the hell up. He is working with a crew that has grown used to fulfilling the death-defying whims of a man dedicated to total audience satisfaction. Tom Cruise has spent his entire career jumping off things, or riding motorbikes on things, or riding motorbikes on to things and then jumping off them. He has climbed skyscrapers. He has shattered bones. At one point he ate two full-sized curries in a row. And, as such, this is what his crew now expects from Rick Astley.
Pegg (far left) and Cruise, with Rebecca Ferguson and Ving Rhames, in Mission: Impossible – Fallout, from 2018. Photograph: Paramount Pictures/Allstar
As yet, nobody knows what the Forever and More video is actually like. For all anyone knows, it’s just Astley miming into an unplugged microphone on a soundstage somewhere. However, this would be a hugely wasted opportunity. If Pegg had any sense, he would utilise the talent of the M:I crew by strapping Astley to the bonnet of a car and then driving it off a bridge, or shoving him feet-first into a cannon and firing him through several panes of sheet glass, or any other of the madcap faux-Jackass stunts that people have come to expect of Tom Cruise.
Because, if he does this, then Rick Astley would be able to write his own future. Impress Tom Cruise with unflinching devotion to physical peril, and the world is yours. Perhaps, once the strikes are over, Cruise might employ Astley in Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part Two. Maybe he’d be a new sidekick, or a hired goon. Perhaps, even, he could be the key to the film’s entire conclusion. After all, what better way to destroy a world-endangering AI program than by overloading its artificial brain with repeated performances of Never Gonna Give You Up? This is Rick Astley’s destiny – if only he’s willing to really, really hurt himself on camera.
A coming-of-age drama about a queer teen with a troubling passion for starting fires ― yes, literally ― will make its hotly anticipated North American premiere this weekend.
Written and directed by Mauricio Calderón Rico, “All the Fires” (or “Todos los Incendios”) will be screened Sunday as part of NewFest, New York’s premier LGBTQ+ film festival. The Spanish-language film, which is subtitled, will also be available to stream online through Oct. 24, the conclusion of the festival.
“All the Fires” follows Bruno (played by Sebastian Rojano), a Mexican teen who has developed an obsession with uploading internet videos of himself setting objects on fire after his father dies.
As his widowed mother is developing feelings for a new man, Bruno runs away from home in search of a girl, Dani (Natalia Quiroz), with whom he’s connected online.
Though Bruno imagines himself in a romantic relationship with Dani at first, his out-of-town journey prompts him to make a startling discovery about his own sexuality.
While it may be unusual to put a young character with pyromaniacal tendencies at the center of an otherwise heartfelt drama, Calderón Rico believes audiences will have no issue finding empathy for Bruno over the course of the movie.
“I think we have all felt vulnerable in some way, especially during adolescence, and we have to use an outlet to let out all our repressed desires,” the filmmaker told HuffPost in an interview. “In some cultures, fire represents carnality, desire, libido. They are those instincts that Bruno represses and lets out.”
The prevailing message of “All the Fires,” he added, can be summed up with just one word: acceptance.
Andrew Scott (left) and Paul Mescal in "All of Us Strangers," which screens Oct. 24 at NewFest.
“The character not only accepts his sexuality, but also accepts mourning and accepts adulthood in general,” he said.
“All the Fires” is one of many standout films that will be screened at NewFest, now in its 35th year. The festival opened Thursday with a starry screening of Netflix’s “Rustin,” which features Colman Domingo as civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin.
Other NewFest highlights include “Queen of New York,” a documentary about a drag artist turned New York political figure named Marti G. Cummings, and Todd Haynes’ “May December,” starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman.
The festival is set to close Oct. 24 with a screening of the romantic drama “All of Us Strangers,” starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott.
For more information on “All the Fires” and NewFest, head here.
A model of an X-wing fighter, which was used to film the climactic battle scene in the 1977 “Star Wars,” sold at auction on Sunday for $3,135,000, far exceeding the opening price of $400,000 and setting a record for a prop used onscreen in a “Star Wars” movie, according to Heritage Auctions.
Not bad for a model spaceship found buried in some packing peanuts in a cardboard box in a garage.
It was one of hundreds of props, scripts, costumes and other pieces of Hollywood memorabilia that Mr. Jein had collected over the decades, and had left scattered throughout two houses, two garages and two storage units in Los Angeles.
Heritage Auctions said the winning bidder did not want to be publicly identified. The buyer had been bidding on the floor of the auction house in Dallas, competing with another collector who was bidding over the phone.
Her collection included Marilyn Monroe’s billowing “subway dress” from the 1955 movie “The Seven Year Itch,” which sold for $4.6 million.
Mr. Jein’s collection reflected his passion for science fiction, comic books and fantasy.
It included a Stormtrooper costume from the original “Star Wars” movie, which sold for $645,000, a spacesuit from the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which sold for $447,000, and a utility belt from the 1960s “Batman” television series, starring Adam West, which sold for $36,250.
Mr. Jein also collected quirkier pieces, like a lace hairpiece that had been worn by William Shatner as Captain Kirk in the original “Star Trek” television series. It sold for $13,750.
But the X-wing drew by far the most attention.
Heritage Auctions said the 22-inch prop was used in scenes involving X-wings flown by three pilots in the Rebel Alliance’s final assault on the Death Star. The characters’ call signs were Red Leader, Red Two and Luke Skywalker’s own Red Five.
It had been built by Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects studio founded by George Lucas, with motorized wings, fiber-optic lights and other features for close-up shots.
But people in the visual effects industry had not seen the model in decades, according to Gene Kozicki, a visual-effects historian and archivist who worked with Mr. Jein on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” in the 1990s.
“It was like ‘Holy cow, we found an X-wing, a real, honest-to-goodness X-wing,’” Mr. Kozicki said last month, recalling the moment he and several others pulled the X-wing out of a box in Mr. Jein’s garage. “We were carrying on like kids on Christmas.”
Mr. Jein’s cousin, Jerry Chang, who attended the auction and spoke on a panel about his cousin’s life and career, said he appreciated that Heritage Auctions “made it a point to honor Greg in everything they did, not just the items up for sale.”
Mr. Kozicki said the collection was a testament to Mr. Jein’s love of collecting, which started with baseball cards when he was 5 years old.
As his collection spread to Hollywood memorabilia, he was drawn to props and costumes that were made by artisans and craftspeople before the advent of digital special effects, Mr. Kozicki said.
“Greg famously said ‘I have a hard time throwing anything away,’ and I think in a way he kept the collection going so the recognition of those craftspeople wouldn’t be discarded like a prop,” Mr. Kozicki said in an email on Monday. “I can only hope that the new owners keep that spirit going.”
There’s a rich mix of ingredients in this heartfelt and likably acted film from co-directors Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, set in a chaotic, favela-type London housing estate of the near future, nicknamed “the Kitchen”. It takes something from the French banlieue movies of Mathieu Kassovitz and Ladj Ly, while running a seedier and more downbeat version of the postmodern alienation of Total Recall or Blade Runner. But it is also a slightly sentimental-realist family drama, and I felt that for all its high-energy pyrotechnics, in its final moments The Kitchen paints itself into a bit of a narrative corner.
The Kitchen setting itself is tremendously fabricated on screen, with top-notch special effects work; it is a spectacularly rundown housing block surrounded on all sides by glitzy new apartment buildings for the heartless better off. The city authorities have in fact decided on the Kitchen’s demolition and high-handedly ordered residents to leave, but the people are refusing on the grounds that this is where they have built their community and homes – for all its poverty, there is a bustling, vivid atmosphere.
Izi (played by actor and musician Kane Robinson) is a hardworking guy, employed by a rather creepy eco-funeral business called Life After Life; it offers to mix post-cremation remains with seedlings and create a memorial plant. Izi is under no illusions as to what it’s actually like living in the Kitchen, and he is saving up for a brand-new modern flat, part of precisely that sprawling property development which is putting pressure on the Kitchen. And here the film cleverly allows you to notice the living-death quality in both these apartments and the funeral plant gardens.
At work one day, Izi notices that one of the soulless services routinely taking place in the facility’s antiseptic chapel-style memorial zones is for a woman that he used to date. This woman’s troubled teen son Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman) is there too, the only mourner, and a fellow Kitchen resident. Izi and Benji strike up an uneasy cross-generational friendship, each aware of a certain possibility that can hardly be said out loud. And back in the Kitchen itself, where armed police are getting ready to move in with tyrannical force, Benji has to decide if he wants to hang out with radical hoodlums or with caring, flawed Izi. But then Izi, too, must decide if he can imagine a future with Benji.
There are some big-ticket action sequences: the robbing of an online food delivery van and a smash-and-grab raid on a jeweller in a posh part of town. They are impressive setpieces, not precisely exciting in the way they would be in a more generic thriller, but fiercely presented as symptoms of inequality. It is with the actual relationship between Izi and Benji that I felt that the movie moved with a heavier tread, though there are also some sharp notes of humour – the film providing a big laugh when Izi has to answer the flat-rental company’s infuriatingly bland auto-generated voice prompts when he arrives to pay his deposit. A worthwhile, engaged film.
After weighing whether to retire, Michael Caine says he’s officially hanging it up.
The 90-year-old actor proclaimed as much Saturday following the recent release of “The Great Escaper,” a drama about a real-life British Royal Navy veteran escaping his nursing home to attend a D-Day parade. Caine, who has acted since the mid-20th century, said he’s made up his mind for good.
“I keep saying I’m going to retire. Well, I am now,” he said on a BBC Radio 4 program.
“I’ve figured, I’ve had a picture where I’ve played the lead and it’s got incredible reviews,” he continued. “The only parts I’m likely to get now are old men. … And I thought, well I might as well leave with all this — what have I got to do to beat this?”
“If you’re the star of the movie, you have to get the girl but then they started making pictures which was great for me and people my age, where you didn’t get the girl but you got the part,” he said on “The Jonathan Ross Show” in 2016.
“So I didn’t get the girl,” he continued, “I then won two Academy Awards.”
Caine won Oscars for “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) and “The Cider House Rules” (1999). He continued to serve major productions as a supporting actor in films like “Children of Men” (2006) and “Harry Brown” (2009), as well as in Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy.
Caine has left an undeniable mark on cinema.
His first film role was uncredited, but he eventually found major parts in acclaimed movies like “Alfie” (1966), “The Italian Job” (1969) and “Get Carter” (1971), helping to establish British crime films as a genre.
Michael Caine is retiring after acting in film for decades.
Vianney Le Caer/Invision/Associated Press
Caine told BBC Radio 4 that he will spend his retirement focused on writing. He noted that he’s already “written several biographies” and one novel — which he was “quite amazed” was actually published.
“The thing about moviemaking is that you have to get up at 6:30 in the morning, learn your lines in the bloody car and then get there and work until 10 at night,” he told BBC Radio 4. “With writing you don’t have to get out of bed — all you need is a pencil and paper.”
Caine, who has two adult children between first wife Patricia Haines and current spouse Shakira Caine, said he’s “very happy” with his life and “adores” his grandkids. He previously told People that he’s “one of the most family-oriented men you’ll ever meet.”
After more than seven decades on the big screen, Caine surely deserves to sleep in and spend his time at home.
