The 20-something comedians Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy, who produce digital shorts for “Saturday Night Live” under the group name Please Don’t Destroy, owe a lot to their “S.N.L.” forebears Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone and Akiva Schaffer, whose troupe The Lonely Island laid the groundwork for Please Don’t Destroy’s distinctive style of two- to four-minute video skits that relish in juvenile absurdity.
The Lonely Island parlayed late-night stardom into feature films like “Hot Rod” and “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” And now the members of Please Don’t Destroy are here with a movie of their own: “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain,” which borrows the surreal gusto and madcap humor of “Hot Rod” and “Popstar” but shares little of Lonely Island’s originality and charm.
Marshall, Higgins and Herlihy star as lifelong friends stuck in dead-end jobs at a small-town outdoor-supply store owned by Marshall’s father, played by Conan O’Brien. A TikTok video leads them to a treasure map, which leads them on an adventure: sort of like “The Goonies,” though the story is really just a framework for jokes. The jokes have the mixed-bag quality of sketch comedy, and the director Paul Briganti doesn’t have a strong instinct for when bits are dragging on: An “S.N.L.” alum, he tends to treat the film like a string of interconnected skits, which makes its 90-minute run time feel twice that length. The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain Rated R for crass language, sexual innuendo and comic violence. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Peacock.
The Barbie movie directly contributed over £80m to the UK economy and created 685 jobs, its parent studio Warner Bros said, as part of its statement to a government inquiry.
The Hollywood studio was one of scores of organisations that submitted written evidence to a parliamentary committee inquiry into the British film and high-end television industry, which is designed to “investigate what needs to be done to maintain and enhance the UK as a global destination for production and how the independent film production sector can best be supported”.
In its submission, Warner Bros described Barbie, which was almost entirely shot in the UK at Leavesden studios in Hertfordshire, as its “most successful theatrical release of all time”. It added: “During its production in the UK, it contributed over £80m in direct spend to the local economy, created 685 jobs, involved over 6,000 extras, supported 754 local businesses, paid over £40m in local wages.”
Fulwell 73, a production company part-owned by James Corden, which is involved in a joint venture to build a 20-stage film studio in Sunderland, said that the UK faced “a shortage in studio space and a skills deficit that threatens its future growth” and that the high-end TV industry “could be a £10bn UK success story in the next few years, or it could rapidly decline as our competitors improve their offer – what we do now will determine which road we take”.
However, voices from the independent sector were less upbeat. Veteran producer Michael Kuhn, with films such as The Duchess, Suite Française and Florence Foster Jenkins among his credits, said that in the UK “the independent film sector is almost dead, and the UK studio sector is hostage to the fortunes of (mainly) US based entities … and the exhibition sector is in a death spiral because of the strategic decision of the studios to favour streaming over the interests of theatrical release”.
Another independent producer, Mike Goodridge, who has worked on films including Love & Friendship, The Florida Project and The Triangle of Sadness said that it was “incredibly hard” to operate as an independent in the UK. “Our government has historically encouraged US productions to shoot in the UK and employ our craftspeople, actors and technicians, rather than creating a sustainable domestic industry.” He added: “UK producers need help … I shake my head in sadness that all our talent is working on US movies and series and that our rich and wonderful UK movie tradition is collapsing so visibly on the world stage.”
The actor and new mother released her newest album on Friday, along with accompanying visuals written and directed by her.
“Big Boss” gives a look into Palmer’s experiences navigating a male-dominated music industry that pressured her to sacrifice more parts of herself than she was comfortable with. In the 10-track album, the 29-year-old explores her faith and the pressures of growing up “booked and bus.” She gives fans a peek into the personal struggles she has had to overcome in her 20-year career.
Palmer, an independent artist, said she “feels amazing” that this project is her directorial debut.
“It’s a huge thing for me in more ways than one, directing and writing for the first time as well as actually being able to tell my story,” she told HuffPost. In addition, she relished the fact that she “had the final say.”
She continued, “I didn’t budge on any aspect of putting this together. I really was fully sound and clear in my mind and what I wanted for this, and I followed through in a way that I never did before. I think it’s easy to just get sidetracked and just give up. And this time, I didn’t do that.”
The Robbins, Illinois, native released her first album, “So Uncool,” in 2007 under Atlantic Records. Since then, she’s released several other projects, including a two-part EP in 2020 called “Virgo Tendencies.”
In “Big Boss,” produced by Tricky Stewart, Palmer shines as she marries her two worlds of acting and singing in the film that follows her journey growing up as a child star. She was signed to three different labels at separate points in the past, worked on “Big Boss” for over a year, and filmed the visuals before meeting her partner.
She said doing it on her own terms was therapeutic. Though she didn’t go into great detail, Palmer recalls being in music business situations that didn’t feel right to her when pursuing music in the past. (One situation she’s been vocal about, however, has been when she accused Trey Songz of “sexual intimidation,” in which he tricked her into being a music video against her will.) She said she would feel like she had been knocked down after certain encounters, adding that her growth, spirituality and leaning into her “big boss energy” have carried her a long way.
“A lot of that stuff happened when I was like 19, 20, 21, 22. This is a collection of experiences that happened over the course of that time period of my life,” Palmer explained. She recalled feeling alone emotionally. Time and therapy helped her understand what she went through to find healing.
“I think a lot of it was like forgiving self. It’s not like I did something for me to be ashamed of, but it’s like self-betrayal. You don’t realize how it affects you until after the fact,” she said. “I think I had a lot of moments where I betrayed myself unknowingly, and the effects of this stuck with me. Coming to terms with a lot of that and being able to have compassion for myself is also what helped me to grow and move on.”
Palmer highlights her fellow former child stars in the visual album, including Skai Jackson, who plays a young Palmer, Robert Ri’card, and Kyle Massey, who both play creepy music producers. Palmer’s parents also make an appearance in the visuals. Her mom, Sharon Palmer, has an especially poignant scene in which she’s having a heart-to-heart with her daughter in the car about the weight she carries professionally. She said her parents and some introspection allowed her to have better work boundaries while staying true to her own uniqueness.
Musically, Palmer didn’t have a specific sound or inspiration she was aiming for. With “Big Boss,” she did what she felt was right and comfortable, working closely with Stewart. Palmer struts her vocals on upbeat bops like “Right Now,” “Frfr” and “Waiting” and reaches deep for “Lights Out” and “Standards.”
Palmer said “Big Boss” is her “setting the tone, writing the checks, going to the beat of my own drum.” After listening to the album, she hopes others are inspired to do the same.
“To get to this point, I didn’t just arrive here, and I didn’t always know what I know now. I had to go through things,” Palmer said. “When you’re going through stuff, and things aren’t going your way, know that there is something on the other side, and you’ll get through it. You can make it, and you can get the last laugh.”
Keke Palmer gets in her "Big Boss" bag on her new visual album.
Her album’s release isn’t the only thing Palmer has to look forward to. Palmer will be celebrating her first Mother’s Day two months after the birth of her son Leodis Andrellton Jackson. She called her son “the best blessing that I could have ever dreamed of.”
“I love being a mom,” she said. “My son gives me so much joy and so much strength, and it just makes me feel like I can really do the impossible. I just feel like it’s just really magical to be able to have experienced this. I’ve always wanted kids. I’ve always wanted to be a mom, and now the time is here, and I just feel like, honey, I am in the role. This is me. I’m going full method, honey.”
“Big Boss,” the visual album, is now streaming on Palmer’s streaming channel, KeyTV Network, on YouTube and Facebook. The album is also available on music streaming platforms.
In France, a robust appetite is a virtue if not a heroic trait.
Eating gratifies all the senses: We take in the aroma of a handsome dish, delight at the sound of a sizzling steak or crave the crunch of a crusty baguette. So to fully appreciate the various sensory dimensions of a fine French meal is, essentially, to express a sophisticated artistic judgment.
“The Taste of Things,” by the director Tran Anh Hung, is a 19th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. The feature opened in theaters Wednesday in France and will play on screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 10 before its Oscar-qualifying run in mid-December.
The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.
When I first watched “The Taste of Things” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surrounded by a delightfully vocal audience. The oohing and ahhing was ubiquitous and, apparently, a visceral response, similar to what is elicited by beholding Monet’s water lilies or being wrapped in the velvety textures of Whitney Houston’s voice. Savoring a tasty meal (or even just watching one come together on a big screen) brings a kind of joy that can’t be explained by logic or reason.
Reviews of the film in France have been mixed. Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre found its blissful atmosphere and near-absence of dramatic tension perplexing and boring. Olivier Lamm of Libération wrote that there’s much more to the film than its food-porn attractions — it’s also about the assault of junk food and globalization on French standards.
The country’s rich gastronomic tradition — and its long history of nationally regulating the quality and authenticity of its wines and produce — is a particular point of national pride, and French film industry leaders have embraced the gourmand label. This year, “The Taste of Things” was selected as the French submission for the Oscar’s best international film category over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”
The decision was met with objections from French critics, who said Triet was punished for the political charge of her acceptance speech at Cannes. However, the selection of Hung’s film isn’t all that surprising given the selection committee’s evident partiality to films commenting on the country’s national identity — or, from a more cynical standpoint, films that offer Oscar voters a tourist-friendly idea of France.
The French devotion to the culinary arts is a bit of an onscreen cliché, and Hollywood films like “Ratatouille” and “Chocolat” (the latter, also starring Binoche, made big money in the United States, but fared far less well in France) have relied on stereotypically French settings, like a rustic village and a Parisian bistro, to communicate lessons about food’s revolutionary and unifying powers.
More rewarding — and complex — is the 1956 French classic “La Traversée de Paris,” starring the Frenchest of all Frenchmen, Jean Gabin, as an artist-turned-black market courier in Nazi-occupied Paris. This black dramedy stars Gabin and the comedian Bourvil, who play a bickering duo who must transport four suitcases of contraband pork across the city while evading the authorities and a horde of hungry hounds.
Political instability not only cuts off access to revered foodstuffs, it drains the very spirit of those committed to the art of eating. In the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French chef, is forced to flee from her Parisian neighborhood when the Paris Commune, an insurrectionist government, seizes power in 1871.
Seeking refuge in the Danish countryside, Babette moves into a spartan Protestant household manned by two Protestant sisters accustomed to eating the same brown fish stew, which has a mudlike consistency. Fourteen years into her employment with the sisters, Babette miraculously wins the French lottery and, rather than fund her return to France, spends all her winnings on a multicourse dinner for the townspeople.
The feast — a turtle soup, stuffed quail, rum sponge cake and more — breaks the guests’ brains, while Babette, in the final scene, emerges as an emissary of the sublime. Her culinary gifts, her cooking’s ability to disrupt the very foundations of what her Danish friends perceived to be reality, make her angelic.
At the same time, isn’t fine dining — like certain kinds of music, literature and art — rather bourgeois? Nothing screams upper middle class like the prim and proper dinner scene. This is delightful in films by, say, Éric Rohmer, who was fond of depicting the natural choreography of mealtime, the mess of wine glasses and plates of fruit and cheese floating between guests in the middle of a meandering conversation.
In other films, dinnertime can seem ridiculous. Consider Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which three couples try over and over to enjoy a white tablecloth feast, but do not actually eat. Over the course of the film, their polite mannerisms and refined gestures become increasingly absurd.
Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe” plays like a glutton’s version of “Salo,” linking the pleasure of eating to consumerist society and the gross hedonism of the leisure class. In the film, four friends literally feed themselves to death, feasting on an endless parade of shrimp, turkey, pot roast and sausage while reading excerpts from canonical works of literature and, notably, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomical bible, “The Physiology of Taste.”
“La Grande Bouffe” is a nauseating showcase and a welcome retort to the glorification of tunnel-vision foodies like Brillat-Savarin. Ferreri was also a gourmand, and he reportedly had difficulties keeping himself from binge eating. His film points a finger at himself as well as society at large.
“The Taste of Things” is an adaptation of the 1961 novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, which was itself inspired by none other than Brillat-Savarin. “The Physiology of Taste” is supposed to be about the science of eating, but it often veers off into discussions about sex, love and sensuality.
Brillat-Savarin’s passion for food is not unlike the passion he might develop for another person, a dynamic that Hung’s film depicts with a hypnotic warmth. When I see Binoche’s Eugénie, laboring away on a buttery risotto or a vegetable omelet, I’m overcome by the sense memory of something deliciously intimate, like being held tight or a loved one’s scent.In that moment, nothing else seems to matter.
A fourth collaboration between French funnyman Dany Boon and one-time music-hall sensation Line Renaud (who played his mother in 2008 Euro-hit Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’tis), this two-hander has a strong conceit: Madeleine (Renaud) relives her life in the backseat of the cab driving her through Paris to a nursing home, with troubled chauffeur Charles (Boon) as her confessor. The film’s gaze is fixed in the rear-view mirror far more than the Before Sunset-style dalliance it occasionally resembles, but it’s not straightforwardly nostalgic.
Madeleine’s tale starts off rose-tinted: played in flashback by Alice Isaaz, she has a wartime romance with an American soldier, which produces a son. But after her Yank beau heads back over the Atlantic, she takes up with wrong ’un Ray (Jérémie Laheurte), who resents the kid and wants her for himself. To Charles’s incredulity, she stomachs the beatings he hands out, until one day Ray backhands her child. Which is when this demure theatre-dresser goes unexpectedly medieval on his ass.
Tapping the common realisation that seemingly-benign little old ladies are storehouses of crazy life experience, Madeleine’s harrowing testimony offsets the cosier notes of golden-era nostalgia that director Christian Carion (Joyeux Noël) also likes to hit. It handily chimes with the current French debate about femicide, but the film’s own link to its present-day frame is a bit tenuous and conventional. Madeleine’s perseverance and twinkly wisdom wakes Charles from his beleaguered self-absorption in his drowning debt problems. Cue scenes of mild escapism, like when the pair enrage half of Paris by blocking a street so she can go pee.
Both of the leads keep it low-key, with 95-year-old Renaud’s unfussy reminiscences dotted with defiant irony, and the initially unforthcoming Boon opening up under her cajoling as naturally as a flower. “Know what you are? A huge romantic who hides it well,” she tells him. Driving Madeleine for its part doesn’t really hide much, wringing us for full hankie potential in a somewhat inevitable final twist. But like Charles’s €292 cab fare, it feels mostly well-earned thanks to the sincere performances.
Ben Affleck has officially convinced his toughest critic — and young daughter.
The Oscar-winning actor admitted Friday on the red carpet for his latest film, “Hypnotic,” that he’s finally gotten familial approval. Affleck, who shares three children with his ex-wife Jennifer Garner, said the thriller had garnered him the first positive review.
“My kids constantly make fun of me, and they won’t watch any of my movies, but I showed them some clips from this, and my daughter was like, ‘That actually looks kind of interesting!’” Affleck told ET. “So I thought that was the best review that I could get.”
Affleck added he hopes others are just as enthused and “come away from it having really enjoyed the movie.” The Robert Rodriguez film centers on a detective tracking his abducted daughter, only to uncover a secretive brainwashing project led by the government.
“He really wanted to do a kind of homage to [Alfred] Hitchcock,” Affleck told ET about Rodriguez. “He wanted to make this movie like the classic Hitchcock films — letting the concept and directing be the special effects, in a way.”
Rodriguez, who burst onto the scene as an independent filmmaker in the early 1990s, has since gone on to direct massive genre movies like “The Faculty” (1998), “Sin City” (2005), and the “Spy Kids” franchise. His films have reportedly grossed a total of over $1.5 billion.
Affleck shares three children with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.
“It was interesting for me to watch them watch the movie and see how different their childhood is from what my childhood looked like,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “and to wonder about what that must seem like to them and how distant from their life and reality.”
While it remains unclear which daughter he showed “Hypnotic” to, Affleck told the THR that his young “Good Will Hunting” fans were “engaged and interested” in the coming-of-age drama — and that it was “probably the most gratifying experience of my life.”
On Friday, however, the former “Batman” star was focused on his latest film. Affleck, who said Rodriguez had a “bold style,” told ET the thriller exemplified “old-fashioned filmmaking” and “relied on the story.” Garner, meanwhile, recently said their kids are over their parents.
“They don’t mind watching their dad, but they kind of want me to be their mom,” Garner told Allure earlier this week. “They don’t want to see me upset, and women cry more in what we do. And they don’t really want to see me in a romantic thing.”
The union that represents movie and television actors said on Friday that its 76-member national board had voted with 86 percent support to send a tentative contract with studios to members for ratification.
The ratification process will start on Tuesday and end the first week in December. Actors can go back to work immediately, however.
Members are expected to approve the contract, which Fran Drescher, the union’s outspoken president, valued at more than $1 billion over three years. She highlighted the “extraordinary scope” of the agreement, noting that it included protections around the use of artificial intelligence, higher minimum pay, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, improved hair and makeup services on sets, and a requirement for intimacy coordinators for sex scenes, among other gains.
“They had to yield,” Ms. Drescher said at a news conference during a 28-minute monologue that touched on Veterans Day, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula costume, her parents, the Roman Empire, studio stubbornness, Buddhism, Frederick Douglass and her dog.
The union, SAG-AFTRA, which represents tens of thousands of actors, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, reached the tentative agreement on Wednesday. It followed a bitter standoff that contributed to a near-complete shutdown of production in the entertainment industry. At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history.
The tentative deal was also historic, according to the studio alliance, which said it reflected “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.” In a statement, the alliance said it was “pleased” that SAG-AFTRA’s board had recommended ratification.
“We are also grateful that the entire industry has enthusiastically returned to work,” the alliance said.
The actors’ strike, combined with a writers’ strike that started in May and was resolved in September, devastated the entertainment economy. Hundreds of thousands of crew members were idled, with some losing their homes and turning to food banks for groceries. Some small businesses that service studios — costume dry cleaners, prop warehouses, catering companies — may never recover.
The dual strikes caused roughly $10 billion in losses nationwide, according to Todd Holmes, an associate professor of entertainment media management at California State University, Northridge. While the big studios are based in Los Angeles, they also use soundstage complexes in Georgia, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.
Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist with the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, was more cautious with his estimate, putting losses at more than $6 billion. He said it “may take a while” to know the true size.
On Friday, the SAG-AFTRA board, which includes Sharon Stone, Sean Astin and Rosie O’Donnell, made public a summary of the tentative contract’s contents. While not receiving everything it asked for, the union achieved significant gains.
The final sticking point involved “synthetic fakes,” or the use of artificial intelligence to create an entirely fabricated character by melding together recognizable features from real actors. The union won consent and compensation guarantees.
“You could imagine prompting a generative A.I. system that’s been trained on a bunch of actors’ performances to create a digital performer, for example, who has Julia Roberts’s smile,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said in an interview. “Before this agreement, there wasn’t any contractual or legal basis to require consent or prohibit that. Now there will be.”
But this strike was never about stars. A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Brad Pitt negotiate their own contracts (or, more precisely, their agents do). The tentative contract covers minimums, or what actors who don’t have any clout get paid.
SAG-AFTRA had demanded an 11 percent raise for minimum pay in the first year of a contract. Studios had insisted that they could offer no more than 5 percent, the same as had recently been given (and agreed to) by unions for writers and directors. In the end, the union was able to win a 7 percent first-year raise.
“This is really important because it sends a very clear signal to other unions,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said. “I’m not aware of anyone ever being able to break the pattern before, because it’s always been that the A.M.P.T.P. establishes a number and everyone gets held to it.”
SAG-AFTRA failed in one regard. It had gone into negotiations demanding a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Ms. Drescher had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”
Instead, the studio alliance proposed a new residual (a type of royalty) for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take. It is similar to what the Writers Guild of America achieved in its negotiations: Actors in streaming shows that attract at least 20 percent of subscribers will receive a bonus.
Unlike the Writers Guild, however, SAG-AFTRA also got the studio alliance to agree to a system in which 25 percent of the bonus money will go into a fund that will be distributed to actors in less successful streaming shows.
“I felt like, is this a win or a loss?” Ms. Drescher said. “But we’re getting the money. We opened a new revenue stream. What matters is that we got into another pocket.”
The end of the Sag-Aftra strike is undoubtedly a good thing for the film industry. With all its component parts pushing in the same direction for the first time in several months, Hollywood can once again try to restore some of its pre-pandemic glory. But it’s also good for the actors.
With the strike over, actors can at last discuss their work. For example, In the last few hours Lily Gladstone has just written an 11-tweet thread warning Native American women and youth about the amount of generational grief they might have to notice watching Killers of the Flower Moon; something she has clearly been aching to do for several months.
Most importantly, however, the end of the strike means that Jared Leto can start doing normal interviews again, instead of having to literally climb the Empire State Building for attention. I am telling you this because Leto has just literally climbed the Empire State Building for attention.
‘Fascinated with the incredible landmark since he was a child’ … Leto in action. Photograph: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Empire State Realty Trust
At this point you may be asking yourself a number of questions. The short answer to all of them is “for attention”. But the longer answers are as follows: on Thursday Leto climbed the Empire State Building, apparently becoming the first person ever to do it, because his band is going on tour soon. A real line from an actual press release that was genuinely sent out by Live Nation said: “Having always been fascinated with the incredible landmark since he was a child, [Leto] said ‘The building is a testament of all the things that can be done in the world if we put our minds to it, which is largely the inspiration behind our most recent album, It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day.’”
Which does make some degree of sense. I haven’t heard It’s the End of the World But It’s a Beautiful Day, but from this statement I can reasonably assume that it is either a concept album about the strength of collective achievement, or a stroppy little tantrum about how terrible it is when nobody looks at you for five minutes.
But maybe there’s something else going on here. After all, his band Thirty Seconds to Mars has plenty of fans, so they would have probably sold the same amount of tickets by sending out an email. And let’s not forget that Leto is a perennial fan of high-concept nonsense, so let’s run through the options.
Was anybody watching? … Leto tops out. Photograph: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Empire State Realty Trust
Option one: Leto is going to play King Kong. Don’t rule this out. Over the years Leto has gained notoriety for indulging all the most obnoxious quirks of the method acting process. So the obvious rationale for the Empire State Building stunt is that he’s going to play King Kong in an upcoming Oscar-bait drama called Monkey Trauma or something. Look out for other telltale signs that this is the case. Is Leto hairier than usual? Has he started a zero-sum feud with a giant atomic lizard? Has he kidnapped any girls? These are all important clues.
Option two: Leto wants to be in a Mission: Impossible film. This is plausible. Your first thought upon seeing Leto climb the Empire State Building was likely to be: “Give it a rest mate, you’re not Tom Cruise.” Because if anyone was ever going to climb the Empire State Building, it’s Cruise, except Cruise would do it without a harness and on fire. But perhaps this is part of the plan. Everyone knows that the last Mission: Impossible film didn’t do as well as expected in cinemas. And the last time this happened (with Mission: Impossible III) Paramount reacted by drafting in Jeremy Renner for Mission: Impossible IV as a potential replacement for Cruise. Perhaps this stunt is Leto’s way of showing Hollywood that he is Cruise’s true successor and as such deserves a role in the next Mission: Impossible film. Hopefully this isn’t true, though, on account of the fact that it is easily the worst idea of all time.
Option three: Leto is just doing this for attention. Ah, you’re right, it is this one, isn’t it. Leto climbed the Empire State Building because he starts freaking out if people don’t look at him for a while. Someone get the poor love on a talkshow, stat.
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.
