On 2 November, Lignan University of Hong Kong conferred upon me an honorary doctorate. My health situation kept me from attending, but I sent a statement of thanks. I’m grateful for the honor, and for Professor Darrell Davis for reading it at the ceremony (pictured above). Here it is.
I am deeply proud to receive an honorary doctorate from Lingnan University. It is one of the jewels in the crown of Hong Kong higher education. I have enjoyed my many visits to the campus and have made many friends during that time. Conversations with them have inspired me to improve my work.
I fell in love with Hong Kong film before I came to love Hong Kong. In the 1970s I was deeply moved by Bruce Lee’s films beyond their obvious visceral appeal, they showed a young Chinese man standing up for justice and righteousness. I now realize that Bruce Lee embodied the dignity and compassion for others that remain central to the spirit of Hong Kong itself. In the years that followed, my appreciation of Hong Kong cinema grew, and I was inspired to express my ideas in a book on it. As I became more acquainted with its many fine filmmakers and the craftspeople who supported them, I came to realize that the same spirit has continued in this film culture.
My admiration for Lingnan, therefore, is part of my overall respect for the excellence of Hong Kong cinema and of the community it represents.
I regret that my health situation does not allow me to participate more fully on today’s occasion, but remain assured that my heart is with Lingnan University, its students and faculty, as well as the people of Hong Kong.
My thanks to the University, to Professor Davis and Profesor Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu (below), and to Ginn Fung Kai Chun and Amy Pang Wing Sifor their kind assistance.
It’s a grand Hollywood tradition for an established star to play against the ambition and drive that makes a career – to play a loser, a weirdo, a shut-in. Or, at the very least, a debased and dysfunctional version of themselves (Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, all of Pete Davidson’s semi-autobiographical comedy). The new Hulu comedy Quiz Lady stars the comedian Awkwafina – AKA the dramatic actor Nora Lum, who stole scenes in Crazy Rich Asians and won accolades for her work as a grieving granddaughter in The Farewell – in loser drag as Annie Yum, a slouchy thirtysomething recluse long obsessed with a daily televised quiz show. The film’s hook is her pairing with Sandra Oh, playing against type as Annie’s brash Peter Pan of an older sister, Jenny.
Good premise, bumpy ride. Quiz Lady, directed by Jessica Yu from a screenplay by Jen D’Angelo, struggles to balance its discordant tonal registers, veering from heightened satire to heartfelt to absurd in swings more grating than humorous. The Yum sisters are broad sketches of childhood trauma played for laughs. A quick intro set in 1996 reveals that, to cope with a chaotic, dysfunctional household, Jenny acted out; Annie, 10 years younger, turned inward, latching on to the TV and her adopted pug, Mr Linguini. She develops a perfectionist attachment to the Jeopardy-style Can’t Stop the Quiz, more satire than homage, and its bumbling but reliable host Terry McTier (Will Ferrell, also a producer).
The nightly routine – quiz show alarm, turn on the TV, rapid-fire answers with a now-ancient Mr Linguini – continues into the present, where Annie works a dead-end accounting-ish job somewhere in Pennsylvania; her only social interactions are with her benevolently addled elderly neighbor Francine (Holland Taylor, doing more than she should in a small role). Annie’s minimalist life is disrupted by her mother’s disappearance from her senior living facility – she has a gambling problem and ran off to Macau. Enter Jenny to crash on Annie’s couch, more comic prop than person – we meet her as she’s hit by a car, only to immediately rebound and scream at its driver.
Both Annie and Jenny are played as overly childlike, beyond the natural regression that occurs whenever nuclear family are cooped up together – Annie marches in an exaggerated slouch, her face pulled in distended expressions of exasperation, anxiety and focus. Jenny has the fashion, heedlessness and impulse control of a teenager. Neither are well-equipped to pay off their mother’s gambling debts, owed to an animal-loving gangster (Jon Park) who kidnaps Mr Linguini for ransom. Jenny, a nascent life coach, hoodwinks Annie into a plan to take the quiz show to the bank, unseating its loathed long-running champion Ron Heacox (a convincingly smarmy Jason Schwartzman).
The harebrained, often strained hijinks in this scheme include: a viral video branding Annie the “Quiz Lady”, a Philadelphia sports bar, an inn run by an anachronistic Ben Franklin impersonator (Tony Hale), several sisterly fights and, of course, one accidental drug trip (stressful, but the best showcase for Oh and Awkwafina’s comedic chemistry). (Also, a cameo from the late Paul Reubens, AKA Peewee Herman, in one of his final film roles.) Occasionally, Quiz Lady gestures at some kind of social commentary (“People don’t like when women are bad at things,” says Annie. “People don’t like when women are good at things either”) but functions marginally better when the characters play off woman-who-cried-racism assumptions for personal gain. (“Oh! Actual racism,” Jenny marvels when one character does takes a real racist jab.) The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.
Short, also, on believable, bankable characters. Much has been written about Oh’s overdue career breakout after a lack of opportunities for east Asian actors in Hollywood sidelined her into complementary roles. So it’s a delight, conceptually, to see Oh, who has specialized in salty, slightly neurotic, hyper-competent women (Killing Eve, Grey’s Anatomy) or nuanced empathy (Netflix’s short-lived The Chair) sink her teeth into a deliberately silly, unscrupulous character. But Jenny is a tonal mishmash, the natural heart and gravitas that Oh brings to any role at odds with a juvenile, singularly self-absorbed character too often played as dumb. Awkwafina, as Annie, fares better, though she’s still overdoing one note; the film immediately improves when she breaks out of Annie’s hard-charging vexation for a few moments of genuine connection between the sisters, including a swift, sweetly absurd quiz show conclusion.
Awkwafina and Oh do seem to have bonded in betting on two go-for-broke comic performances; what comedic engine Quiz Lady does have is thanks to their efforts, even if the performances strain at feature length. But this one’s not a winner.
While economic inequality may seem like an ever-mounting obstacle, more and more communities are experimenting with a long-tested, but often dismissed, idea to combat poverty.
Emmy-winning filmmaker Marc Levin and executive producer Michael Tubbs break down the deep history and complicated reality of guaranteed basic income in the documentary “It’s Basic,” which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year.
The concept, also called universal basic income, is based on the premise that working people understand their own needs better than government officials or bureaucracies, and low-income earners should receive a simple monthly check that comes without stipulations or strings.
The film follows participants in programs across five different cities, offering a nuanced look at how much an extra $500 to $1,000 per month can impact working people and families. It also examines why the idea still falls short in some areas.
“Put a little gas in my tank and I’ll show you how far I can go,” Lucille, a participant from St. Paul, Minnesota, told filmmakers.
The documentary "It's Basic" reveals the impact of a guaranteed basic income and why the programs are only a piece of overcoming inequality.
Advocates maintain that guaranteed income is an essential lifeline for low-income earners, especially as studies show that 60% of Americans across income brackets are living paycheck to paycheck.
Critics worry the funds only provide a temporary cushion for people. Others offer more patronizing excuses, suggesting low-income earners don’t know how to manage their money and that the checks incentivize people to stay out of the workforce.
But the subjects of “It’s Basic” reveal very different situations. Many, if not most, of the subjects are employed and use the funds to cover the difference between their wages and the rising cost of housing and living expenses. Others are full-time caretakers, stretching every last penny they have to keep their families safe and healthy.
Levin said breaking down these stereotypes was a key piece of the project.
“People have been inculcated with these myths about poverty and the undeserving poor,” he told HuffPost. “Part of the goal of the film is to convince people that the investment is worth it for everyone, for the good of the whole.”
"It's Basic" will screen at the DTLA Film Festival on Nov. 2 and is also part of a cross-country tour.
It's Basic/Blowback Productions
Tubbs saw the impact of a guaranteed income firsthand while mayor of Stockton, California, where he piloted the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or SEED, program in February 2019. For two years, 125 randomly selected low-income residents were given $500 a month without restrictions or work requirements.
Afterward, researchers saw participants’ full-time employment rates rise from 28% to 40%. They also found that 99% of funds were used on basic needs like food, clothes, utilities and auto care, and not vices like alcohol and tobacco, as opponents suggested.
In addition to that economic lift, Tubbs noticed how the programs gave participants a far more profound type of boost.
“They’ve been told that they’re failures their whole life,” he told HuffPost. “So when someone says, ‘Here’s $500,’ to be told, ‘You don’t have to prove anything to us. You don’t have to check in with us. We trust you’ ― it’s powerful and unlocks so much potential.”
Despite SEED’s successes, Tubbs lost his bid for reelection in 2020 amid public scrutiny of the program.
Undeterred, he leaned into his organization Mayors for Guaranteed Basic Income, a network of civic leaders he founded before being voted out of office. Since then, the organization has expanded to include 130 mayors and 40 county officials across the country.
Even as the movement gains steam, “It’s Basic” shows how guaranteed income is far from a permanent solution, following what happens to families when the support ends.
To Levin, those stories revealed how much policy and public opinion must shift to make a sincere and lasting impact on people’s lives.
“We come from a very individualistic, materialistic, consumer-driven world and that paradigm shift is going to take a while,” he explained. “That’s something we’re all wrestling with.”
“It’s Basic” is currently on a national tour and will have its West Coast premiere at the DTLA Film Festival on Nov. 2.
The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.
The French film essayist Chris Marker (1921-2012) likely left his biggest pop-cultural footprint with “La Jetée,” a half-hour short whose time-travel conceit inspired Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys.” “But “Sans Soleil,” Marker’s unclassifiable 1983 feature, neither fiction nor nonfiction, shows that raw documentary materials can be rendered into something as disorienting and chronologically malleable as fantasy. (Marker credits himself with “conception and editing,” but not direction.) The film belongs on a list of movies that ought to be seen and debated even if you don’t comprehend them. Not that comprehension is the point. “Sans Soleil” is not only unrooted in time but also in place, as a quotation from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Ash-Wednesday” signals at the outset. The title is given in Russian, English and French. The confounding narration in the English-language version consists of the actress Alexandra Stewart reading letters from a nonexistent cinematographer named Sandor Krasna, whose images we appear to be watching.
The film begins with a shot of three children in Iceland. Soon, it travels to Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, among other locales; it is fascinated, most of all, with Japan, particularly its surreal and futuristic aspects, its television screens and its video games. Pac-Man is held up as “the most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate.” Familiar Marker totems — pictures of cats and owls — are rendered into electronically tweaked images. A clip dated as February 1980, before the coup in Guinea-Bissau that November, can only be properly understood by moving forward in time, the narration insists.
Stewart describes Krasna’s having taken a trip to the San Francisco area and visiting the locations from “Vertigo,” including the tree cross-section that Kim Novak’s Madeleine touches, saying, “Here I was born, and there I died.” Less considered, the voice-over suggests, citing another film that quotes that scene from “Vertigo,” is the area to the side of the sequoia trunk, beyond what can be touched. What’s there, in the cosmology of “Sans Soleil,” exists outside of time.
“De Palma” opens with “Vertigo” — more specifically, with Brian De Palma’s recollection of seeing it the year it was released, 1958, at Radio City Music Hall. To him, it’s a film about what a director does: conjuring romantic illusions.
Brian De Palma has always been one of Hitchcock’s most direct imitators, and in the documentary “De Palma,” the filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow pay tribute to him with the cinematic equivalent of Hitch’s famous conversations with François Truffaut. They are apprentices learning from a master, and helping remind viewers of what an influential figure De Palma has been. He came up at the same time as his friends Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. “What we did in our generation will never be duplicated,” De Palma says. “We were able to get into the studio system and use all that stuff in order to make some pretty incredible movies, before the businessmen took over again.”
De Palma always divided critics; detractors variously saw him as derivative or as wasting his ingenious visual style on subpar material. In the documentary, a candid, detailed De Palma, going film by film through his career, could disabuse anyone of the notion that he isn’t brilliant at his job. There are films where he felt everything clicked, like “Dressed to Kill” (1980) and “The Untouchables” (1987). He remembers watching “Carlito’s Way” (1993) and thinking, “I can’t make a better picture than this.” There are other times when things didn’t come off as he thinks they should have. His widely panned adaptation of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1990) needed the toughness of “The Magnificent Ambersons” or “Sweet Smell of Success,” he says. It’s a relief, for those of us who find “Raising Cain” (1992) confusing, to hear De Palma talk about how he rearranged it in the editing process. “It has a particular oddness to it,” he says, “’cause it’s not put together the way it was conceived.”
He laments current trends like the previsualization of action sequences, because using computers to plan things out is inevitably going to lead to visual clichés. The special-effects work on “Mission to Mars” didn’t suit him. “You do one of those shots the first day and you’re seeing it every week, as they add one incremental thing to it,” he says. “That goes on for a year, basically,” adding that he was always amazed at filmmakers like Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis who had the patience for that endless repetition.
Is he a Hitchcock imitator? He suggests, in a way, that Hitchcock wasn’t enough of an influence on others, and that the visual storytelling vocabulary Hitchcock developed might die out. “I’ve never found too many people that followed after the Hitchcock school except for me,” De Palma says.
Another disarmingly candid documentary, “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” finds the “Back to the Future” actor (who had the main role in De Palma’s “Casualties of War”) reflecting on his career and on his life with Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis that he revealed to the public in 1998. The director Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”) takes full advantage of the fact that he’s working with someone who has spent a lot of time on camera. Certainly, Fox seems comfortable as an interview subject in the present day, answering questions with good humor and self-effacement. But Guggenheim also uses film clips of Fox to create a sort of visual archive of his life, so that whatever Fox is speaking about can be accompanied by footage of his younger self. The overall effect makes it feel like Fox had always been making his documentary about his life.
Guggenheim uses the verve of “Back to the Future” (and Alan Silvestri’s score) to help conjure the frenzy that engulfed Fox’s life at the time it was made, when the actor was shuttling between the sets of that film and the sitcom “Family Ties.” “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), in which Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, appeared, helps tell the story of their courtship. And when Fox talks about his early years of acting with Parkinson’s symptoms, and trying to time his medication so that he would peak at just the right moments, Guggenheim includes clips from “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993), which illustrate one of Fox’s hiding strategies: putting an object in his hand to mask its trembling.
While “Still” shows Fox poking fun at himself, as in a clip from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it is a serious movie when it ought to be. It doesn’t shy away from showing the struggles that Fox faces with injuries, for instance. “Gravity is real, even if you’re only falling from my height,” he says with a laugh, after a makeup artist has been shown working to conceal bruising on his face. Yet in spite of that, “Still” finds a way to be an optimistic film. A time machine in its own way — one very different from “Sans Soleil” — it brims with the wit and charisma that made Fox a star in the first place.
Dr Doug Ross from TV’s ER made it in the movies. Wisecracking, balding private detective David Addison from TV’s Moonlighting made it in the movies. West Philadelphia-born-and-raised-kid Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air made it in the movies.
So why not Chandler Bing? Why couldn’t Matthew Perry, that brilliant performer whose glorious TV character became everyone’s ideal friend and the very dating-app epitome of GSOH, have joined George Clooney, Bruce Willis and Will Smith in the cinema? Or as a shrewd, smart writer, could Perry have followed Richie Cunningham from TV’s Happy Days – director Ron Howard – for a career behind the camera?
Well, actually he could and did. Perry made plenty of interesting indie movies, did accomplished work on TV dramas by Aaron Sorkin and wrote a successful stage play for London’s West End and Broadway. But replicating his colossal TV success and legendary small-screen status in the cinema – cashing in that career capital and reinvesting it in Hollywood – didn’t happen.
Perhaps if he could have made a complete recovery from his addiction issues, or if these issues in an alternative universe had never existed. Yet that speculation is meaningless: his issues were arguably part of his personality ecosystem. Certainly, those troubles would have made insuring Perry for any big studio project very difficult: his post-Friends movie career was more about finding scripts he liked, getting attached to them and enabling the producers to get independent funding on the basis of his involvement. But even that thought doesn’t entirely hold water. Robert Downey Jr, whose drug history is legendary, wound up becoming a huge superhero name in the corporate studio world.
So yes. With a bit more luck, Perry could have had Jesse Eisenberg’s career, playing Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Luthor, writing witty stories for the New Yorker and McSweeney’s.
It has something to do with the addictive nature of TV fame, the dopamine rush of international small-screen brand identity, combined with the security of a regular big-paying gig in your 20s delivering the kind of money undreamt of by all but the biggest Hollywood A-listers. And Perry came of age at a time when television itself was assuming a new prestige and there wasn’t the same need to prove yourself outside. Certainly no one now would dream of patronising TV or Perry’s achievement on it.
All of the Friends cast were superb at delivering gags, playing physical comedy and getting studio audience laughs (as opposed to the echoing silence of a film studio, where an actor might in his or her eyeline glimpse the director’s thoughtfully unsmiling face reflected in the light of the video playback).
Monica, Joey, Ross, Rachel and Phoebe had faces, voices and personalities which popped deliciously on screen. And Chandler Bing even more so, because he was the one who was supposed to be funny, supposed to be making the others laugh as well as us at home – and Perry, who contributed script material to the show himself, was ultra-aware of his own supercharged comic success in the continuing TV role.
Movies are different. When Steven Spielberg first saw the young George Clooney he is supposed to have predicted a big movie career for him – if he could stop goofily waggling his head around. And that’s what Clooney did. It’s not as simple as that, of course, but mannerisms have to be controlled – very difficult if they become part of the electric zing of what’s made you a star up to that point. You’ve got to cultivate a certain stillness and centredness if you’re going to be plausible in many different roles as you grow into your 30s and 40s, like ex-Mouseketeer Ryan Gosling.
Perry made some palatable romantic comedies, such as the likable misadventure Three to Tango and the much-liked 17 Again which has a special piquant significance for Perry – who plays a disillusioned middle-aged guy who is reincarnated as a teenager played by Zac Efron.
Perry was a tremendous performer who could have developed as a great character actor and writer in the movies if the industry wasn’t so hidebound by genre and expectations and IP. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so superb in Seinfeld and Veep, is now blossoming as a character player in the movies of Nicole Holofcener and others. It could have been Perry. But any one of the Friends episodes puts him in the hall of fame. It’s cinema’s loss.
On Thursday, a new trailer for Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film about the iconic doll finally revealed the movie’s mysterious plot, which unfolds after Barbie (Margot Robbie) verbalizes a deep thought during a lavish dance party at her Dreamhouse: “You guys ever think about dying?”
A toy expressing this very human concern starts creating cracks in the fantastical world that Barbie inhabits. Suddenly, her showers aren’t hot anymore, a leap off her roof doesn’t feel like it’s being safely guided to the ground by a child’s hand, and — worst of all — her signature tiptoed feet have gone ... flat.
We know. We know! We’ll give you a moment to digest that last detail. (In the meantime, please feel free to to watch this video of puppies tirelessly pursuing a cat for a snuggle. It’s going to be OK!)
The “Barbie” trailer suggests that the beloved doll must learn how to live outside of the figurative box and venture into the real world, with Ken (Ryan Gosling) in tow.
And despite earlier reporting that Aqua’s 1997 hit “Barbie Girl” would not appear in the film, the end of the trailer includes a brief snippet of the song — or at least a version of it.
According to details on Apple Music, the movie’s soundtrack features a track called “Barbie World” from Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice and Aqua. That’s an interesting move, considering that Mattel — the company behind the Barbie brand — once filed a lawsuit alleging trademark infringement after “Barbie Girl” was released in the ’90s.
“My earliest and most vivid encounter with sheer terror took place in a movie theater when I was 3 years old. It was at the Fresh Pond Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., not during a showing of ‘Cujo’ or ‘It,’ but another dog and clown horror classic (masquerading as a kids’ movie), ‘Air Bud.’ Still indelible in my memory is a particular scene in which the sottish, spiteful clown re-emerges intent on snatching Buddy, our endearing, basketball-dunking dog pal, away from his newfound, but kind, young companion. Even now, I’m not sure what was scarier: watching the clown reappear on the screen, or the deafening, collective cry of fear that erupted from me and the rest of the audience of toddlers.”
— Clare Goslant of Cambridge, Mass., on seeing “Air Bud” at age 3.
“The wicked witch was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. I screamed and shut my eyes every time she appeared. That same year, after I had watched ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ I was cast as a wicked witch in my second-grade play. I cried and cried when I came home. I had wanted to play the fairy princess. My mother taught me how to cackle. And she said I’d be the star of the show. She was right.”
— Cathy Arden of New York, on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 7.
“It was supposed to be a children’s movie, but the scene of Bambi’s mother dying in a forest was something I found terrifying!”
— Carter Bancroft of Huntington, N.Y., on seeing “Bambi” at age 5.
“My older sister and I were dropped off at the big movie theater for the Saturday matinee. She left me all by myself and went off with her girlfriends. This was before parental helicopter-ing. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would later be broadcast annually on TV. Kids were able to cuddle with grown-ups in the safety of their own home, with the happy songs, cute little Munchkins and Dorothy’s funny friends. There’s no place like home. That’s a whole different process than I experienced, and it was a whole different picture for me. It was not so much my young age, but watching a family movie in that wild setting, having such a powerful effect on my senses, made it my first scary movie. I was scarred for life.”
— Don Feiler of Mattituck, N.Y., on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 5.
In the years following the release of his Oscar-nominated anti-fracking documentary Gasland, Josh Fox felt the full weight of the fossil fuel industry bearing down on him.
“I was public enemy number one for five or six years,” he says. “They followed me all around the country. There were arson [threats] and constant death threats. There were huge PR campaigns against the film, very, very much targeted at me.”
In 2008 Fox received a letter at the home his father had built in the upper Delaware River Basin in the United States. It was a natural gas mining company, offering him $100,000 to lease 19.5 acres of land.
Instead of taking the money, Fox travelled across the US with a camera to see how drilling for shale gas had affected other communities – and found himself in the fight of his life. People showed him water that fizzed and bubbled, water they could light on fire. In his 2010 film Gasland, Fox showed how hydraulic fracturing – fracking – was poisoning the air, contaminating groundwater, chemically burning animals and making people sick.
The documentary was critically acclaimed and ignited the anti-fracking movement worldwide. The sequel, 2013’s Gasland Part II, included the Bentley blockade, which succeeded in blocking gas drilling in Australia’s northern rivers region.
Fox is now in Australia, although not for reasons connected to his indefatigable climate activism (although that is never far away). He is here for the premiere of his new documentary, The Edge of Nature, which opened the Byron Bay international film festival. He is a fast-talking New Yorker, imparting information with urgency while wearing a straw hat, his banjo laid lovingly on his hotel bed.
The trailer for The Edge of Nature
The banjo was practically all Fox had with him when he retreated to a tiny shack in a Pennsylvanian forest, where he had grown up, during the pandemic in 2020. Suffering alarming neurological symptoms from long Covid, he lived in nature for nine months with no phone signal and only a battery and a small solar panel for power as he recovered. “Why won’t my brain work?” he beseeches his camera on one long, dark night.
The film begins with a rush of images and a startling monologue about the state of the world in 2019, before the “anthropause” of lockdowns: “2.09 billion birds mysteriously vanished, a third of all animals endangered, 17% of wildlife on the planet has disappeared, climate emissions through the roof.” As shocking as it was, the distress of the environmental crisis was soon to be compounded by the arrival of a deadly and disabling virus. “We did not know how good we had it,” he says. The juxtaposition with his self-imposed exile is profound.
In the forest he lived in a “squalid state of fever dreams”, as he says in the film: “The virus ripped through my brain, mixed and matched synapsis that didn’t seem to go together.” Fox struggled with breathing, couldn’t stop blinking. Doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him.
Living alongside an industrious family of beavers (“I love those beavers”), among other wild animals in nature, “away from the noise and the violence that made my brain fog worse”, he set out to heal himself “enough to keep fighting”.
A still from Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary Gasland. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy
While Gasland made Fox an accidental ecowarrior as he took on the political power of big oil companies, The Edge of Nature captures a totally different fight. “The frontlines were inside my head, inside my body, both psychological and physical. They were spiritual, they were emotional.”
Fox never felt alone in the forest – because he wasn’t. He was living and breathing with nature. “I found companionship in talking to the stars, talking to the frogs, listening to them trying to find a mate, the song of the species trying to continue itself.” He came to a new personal understanding of the seasons: “You realise that there are many more than four – I have at least 12 seasons in my head.”
One night he hears the rattle of gunshots and is frightened. “This was sending a message to everyone in earshot,” he tells the camera. “This is what a bear hears, this is what a deer hears, this is what the hunted hear and run from.” The guns make him contemplate human violence and the “scars of generations past deep inside me”: his grandmother, the only one of nine children to survive the Holocaust; his grandfather, who was left with no family.
He mulls over the violence of history (“America is built on genocide and slavery”). And then there is the death to come. “The genocide of climate change, this is the biggest one yet,” he says to me. “And not just us, it is every living thing on the planet. We are looking at an extinction event.”
His conclusion from his time spent in the forest is that “we cannot heal ourselves if we are also ignoring the planet”. “The planet has to factor into every decision we make. We need to understand that nature heals us just as we heal it – it is a symbiotic relationship. What is good for the garden is good for us.”
Although Fox still suffers symptoms from time to time, he says he is now feeling much healthier. “I don’t know what made my symptoms better exactly; it is still a mystery. I suffered these symptoms for 16 months. I do know that spending time in nature helped me enormously to overcome the PTSD and other symptoms of long Covid. What heals me is my activism for planet Earth. The film is a call for much more attention, funding and research on long Covid, which afflicts so many.”
During his time in the forest, he came to understand humanity’s ultimate purpose as caretakers of the planet. “The forest needs us. We are the only species that understands how we can help biodiversity, how we can help ecosystems.”
He looks up at Byron’s clear blue sky with a kind of wonder. “In the US you don’t see blue skies like this, except during that moment of pandemic,” he says. “Covid is the only time in our history as a human race that we reduced emissions enough to meet the climate change goals of Paris. There are lessons from that time that we desperately need to learn. The planet was trying to speak to us and breathe and we need to listen to that. Nature told all of humanity to go to your room and think about what you have done.”
‘There are lessons from that time that we desperately need to learn’ … Josh Fox. Photograph: Natalie Grono/The Guardian
Fox says Gasland, which premiered on HBO, would not be picked up for US television now. “It is the most repressive media landscape I’ve ever experienced,” he says. But he has also taken on the most formidable enemies possible, and remains undaunted, if traumatised; relishing, you suspect, the fight. It is never insurmountable, he believes. Fox has the might of right on his side. “We found that if we organise, we have collective power,” he says. “We have to have faith in our collective power.”
Fox doesn’t claim to have all the answers. He is motivated by questions, the biggest one being: “Can we do this?”
“The only thing I know is that movements are what create power,” he says. “We are beat up and suffering right now. This movie is a love letter to those movements, saying: we have to heal ourselves and walk forward. We can connect with the planet that takes all of our death and turns it back into life somehow. We can connect with that reality – or we can ignore it, and put more fuel into Elon Musk’s rockets and more fuel into our SUVs and spend more time behind screens.”
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.
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