This comfortingly familiar Irish underdog sports movie deviates for not one single second of its running time from the formula. You can tell exactly where it’s going the moment you catch a glimpse of a rowdy women’s rowing team downing shots to celebrate a rare victory – they don’t have a hope in hell’s chance of making it to the tournament final. It’s a film so predictable that you could probably leave the room for 15 minutes and not miss a beat, but it has a big heart and enough easygoing banter to make it watchable. (The dialogue is Irish, and the English subtitles contain plenty of entertaining Irishisms: “Jesus Christ, I’m not completely fucking banjaxed!”)
Kelly Gough plays Aoife, a successful management consultant who has come back home to small-town Kerry to visit her dad, Bear, (Lorcan Cranitch) after he had a heart attack. (“I almost have to die for you to come,” he says, more resigned than bitter.) Aoife is brittle and emotionally distant with Bear. Then, one evening, down the pub, almost by accident, she joins the local women’s rowing team. But can she steer this scrappy mob – an exhausted mother of three, a failed actor and troubled but gifted teenager – to a stirring victory?
You already know the answer to that. Still, the film is directed with a steady hand by Declan Recks, who sensibly sets as much action in the pub as the rowing boat. The team hasn’t won in years. Under Aoife’s new management, we watch their hopeless practice sessions, the team bonding, a surprise win in the semis and an epic final. It’s gentle going and reasonably engaging, and the family dysfunction theme is nicely underplayed. When Aoife and Bear finally heal old wounds, it’s not with a sentimental speech but on a boat, Bear calmly passing his daughter a Wagon Wheel as a peace offering.
Sherry Cola’s stage name originated in a pretty mundane way.
“My legal first name is Sherry,” she told me in a recent interview. “Around 2011, I was making a Yelp account. I was asking my friend Kim from college — I was like: ‘What should my username be for Yelp? I want it to be food related.’ Immediately, after three seconds, she was like, ‘What about Sherry Cola?’ I was like: ‘Oh, that’s catchy. That’s cool. OK.’ So I put that as my Yelp username.”
She never ended up posting any Yelp reviews, but the name stuck. She started using it as her handle on social media and when breaking into stand-up comedy. The first time she performed, “the producer asked me what I wanted on the lineup,” she recalled. “I was like: ‘You know what? Let’s use Sherry Cola.’ Just because it’s fun, it’s bubbly, and when you think about stand-up comedy, people are named Cedric the Entertainer, Lil Rel [Howery] — it’s very nickname-based.”
It also ended up capturing her persona fairly well. “It was never intentional to not use my Chinese last name, but it just works out because ‘Sherry Cola’ really said it all,” she explained. “It’s caffeinated, it wakes you up, it’s sweet — it’s just all of these things.”
Now, her name is on marquees as a star of not one but two movies this summer: the broad and raunchy road trip studio comedy “Joy Ride,” premiering July 7, and the more understated, walking-and-talking indie comedy “Shortcomings,” out Aug. 4.
From left: Stephanie Hsu, Cola, Ashley Park and Sabrina Wu in "Joy Ride."
Though the bar is low and it’s all extremely overdue, the fact that two very different movies featuring a lot of Asian talent — both in front of and behind the camera — can coexist and premiere in the same season does indicate something resembling progress.
“Joy Ride,” in which Cola stars alongside Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu and Sabrina Wu as a quartet of friends who encounter various shenanigans, marks the directorial debut of “Crazy Rich Asians” co-writer Adele Lim. “Shortcomings” is the feature directorial debut of “Fresh Off the Boat” and “Always Be My Maybe” star Randall Park, adapted from a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. Cola plays Alice, the best friend to protagonist Ben (Justin H. Min). Alice is the kind of friend who tells you that you’re being “a piece of shit,” as she says when Ben goes through a bit of an existential crisis accelerated by his girlfriend, Miko (Ally Maki), moving away for an internship.
Even as recently as five years ago, the rare movie or show starring Asian American actors carried an enormous weight and felt like a make-or-break moment. But now, as Asian Americans, we’ve got slightly more options to choose from and talk about, and each release no longer feels like it has to represent all things to all people. Perhaps we’re finally at a point where we can gradually let go of the scarcity mentality that comes with being excluded for so long. It’s a mindset that Cola is unlearning as well.
“I’m just over the moon. I could probably cry right now. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that I get to exist right now and tell these stories and make an impact and shift the narrative and unlearn scarcity and practice abundance, because that really is my energy,” she said. “The more the merrier. We don’t have to elbow each other to the top. We don’t have to compete. We’re all so different.”
Cola and Justin H. Min in "Shortcomings."
It’s not unlike the mentality that comes with being an immigrant. Cola and her family emigrated from China when she was 4. She was raised in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley, where her parents ran and still run a restaurant. Cola, now 33, said that although she grew up as a pop culture obsessive, she had internalized the idea that “Hollywood is for ‘Americans’” — not including people like herself.
She always loved performing and found ways to do it any way she could, like hosting her high school’s talent show and making videos for the film club. But it never felt attainable as an actual career.
“It was always like a hobby, realistically, because to actually pursue this as a career — as endgame — it felt like such a gamble because there was such a lack of representation,” she said. “I figured: ‘Oh, Jackie Chan exists, Lucy Liu exists. There couldn’t be room for me.’”
In a similar vein, when I kicked off our conversation by wanting to know what movies and shows influenced her, she asked, “Are we talking just in general or through the Asian lens?” After I clarified that I meant generally, since many of us did not grow up seeing our faces on screen, she remembered how she would take note when catching the rare Asian person on a major TV show, like “The Joy Luck Club” star Lauren Tom playing Ross’ girlfriend Julie on “Friends.”
“We had such little representation in the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community on screen that when we saw it — Margaret Cho doing stand-up, Jet Li in ‘Romeo Must Die,’ Lucy Liu in ‘Charlie’s Angels’ — when we saw those faces, we held on even tighter,” Cola said, naming some of her pop culture heroes.
Like many kids in the ’90s and early 2000s, Cola devoured the sitcoms and teen soaps of the time, including “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “My Wife and Kids” and “Degrassi,” and she watched a lot of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. “One of my dreams is to play the live-action version of Phoebe from ‘Hey Arnold!’ How iconic would that be?” she said.
She watched stand-up specials as an adolescent, noticing the ways that trailblazing comedians could change people’s perceptions of themselves and puncture stereotypes.
“Margaret Cho was the vision board for the queer, female Asian American stand-up comic. That’s exactly what I am. So just watching her, I remember being so blown away by how outspoken she was. Everything that came out of her mouth proved someone wrong,” Cola said. “That’s the energy that I hope to carry as well, just because of all the boxes we’ve been forced in.”
Margaret Cho (right) has appeared as a guest star on "Good Trouble," Cola's show on Freeform.
Eric McCandless via Getty Images
In high school, she approached everything with a “you won’t know unless you try” enthusiasm and confidence, which still define her now.
“I’ve always been very passionate and very unafraid of rejection, to be honest. I remember running for [student body] president against someone who had been president for three years. I just thought: ‘Why not? Who knows? Let’s see what happens,’” she said.
“I tried out for the basketball team, the tennis team. I just went for it,” she added. “That’s still the energy I keep today: ‘Just go for it, because who knows? You won’t know unless you try.’ That is genuinely my mantra because I’ve always been very curious and I’ve always had, maybe, FOMO about the potential outcome. If I don’t get there, then how will I ever know?”
That continued in college at California State University, Fullerton, where she went through different phases and tried on many hats. It took her seven years to finish her degree, joking that she “was not your ‘model minority’ by any means” and that, in retrospect, this helped set modest expectations for her parents.
“My mom was so frustrated and so disappointed in my ‘careless lifestyle’ that the bar was set so low. Now in 2023, she is on cloud nine. She can’t believe her eyes,” Cola said. “That’s my trick. You got to set the bar low for the parents. One day, you’re in a big-studio, R-rated comedy in theaters everywhere this summer. One day, you can take Randall Park to her restaurant.”
Throughout college, Cola remembered, she was “this ball of fire that wanted to do the most, but just didn’t know how.” Out of curiosity, she joined the campus radio station, playing music and giving commentary on news and pop culture — and found that she had a knack for it.
After graduating, she got a job at 97.1 AMP Radio in Southern California, eventually becoming an on-air host. Among her mentors at the time was Carson Daly, who presented the station’s morning show from 2010 to 2017. Her work involved everything from “giving out T-shirts on a Tuesday, and then suddenly escorting Taylor Swift at the Forum [arena] on a Friday,” she said. “It was such a bizarre job.”
She also started doing stand-up, making viral videos and short films, and taking improv classes at the famed Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles — once again, trying to create whenever and wherever she could. She still thinks of herself as a comedian first, performing frequently as a stand-up and at UCB’s Asian AF variety show, a showcase of Asian American comics.
Cola at the Los Angeles premiere of the animated film "Elemental" at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on June 8.
JC Olivera/GA via Getty Images
In 2017, Cola started acting on TV, landing a breakout role on the Amazon Prime Video series “I Love Dick,” followed by a bigger part on TNT’s “Claws.” For five seasons, she has starred on Freeform’s “Good Trouble” as Alice Kwan, a character with some similarities to herself as a queer Asian American comedian. And now, with two movies about to premiere and several projects cooking, Cola still embraces the same curiosity and go-getter approach that she’s leaned into all her life.
“When people ask me, ‘Oh, is there a moment when you thought, “I made it”’ — the ‘I made it’ feeling never ends, because you’re constantly unlocking new levels to this video game. You’re constantly realizing, ’Oh, I can do this too,’” Cola said. “You’re constantly elevating and evolving and just being more unlimited. Reaching your capacity and then breaking through, and creating another capacity and breaking through again.”
Cola is currently putting the finishing touches on an upcoming stand-up special. She’s also one of the voices in the Paramount Animation film “The Tiger’s Apprentice” — featuring another all-star Asian cast, including Sandra Oh, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding and Bowen Yang — set for release in January. She hopes to direct someday, having shadowed a few of her directors on “Good Trouble.” And she’s developing a show called “Dead Air,” based on her time working in radio, saying it’s full of “friendship and fighting and tension” — which all happen to be ingredients for a juicy TV series.
“It was a rollercoaster of emotions because it was just a bunch of us in our 20s, messy love triangles, a lot of hustle. We all wanted to make it,” she said. “It was bananas, an absolutely unhinged chapter of my life while trying to pursue my dreams.”
These days, seeing her name and face on billboards is a reminder to unlearn the idea that Hollywood isn’t for people like her.
“For so long, we were defined by others. We were defined by Hollywood, we were defined by society, we were defined by this country. Now, we’re finally reclaiming our identities and redefining ourselves,” Cola said. “It feels really liberating: ‘Let me make fun of myself. I’m done being the punchline. We’ll tell the jokes.’”
“Well, Hollywood does hate gay people, even still,” he said. “I mean, they pretend that they don’t, but they do.”
Still, he hoped that Lane’s A24 hot streak indicates that a younger generation of people, raised on Lane’s performances, have more exciting ideas of what do with him than the old guard Lane initially encountered: “He’s so good at acting that now they’re like, ‘Maybe we should let a gay person be a star.’”
In the meantime, there’s “Dicks.” “Our little baby is going out to the real world where people can’t wait to be offended,” Lane said. “When I saw it, I just said, ‘Well, either it’s going to be this cult hit, or we’ll all be deported.’”
Though he isn’t sure how the film will be received — “I’d like to show this to Mitch McConnell, then he’d really freeze” — Lane still offered some marketing suggestions. He told Sharp and Jackson they should record a video to warn that watching the film in a theater could make the audience gay, then ask a few willing football players to serve as the guinea pigs: “You send in Aaron Rodgers and a couple of others, and then they come out of there in caftans.”
The idea was vetoed when they heard that the recent comedy “Bottoms” might also be planning a turn-you-gay marketing angle, but Lane was just happy to have the company. “If you can get away with ‘Bottoms’ — if you can have a high-school comedy about teenage lesbians starting a fight club — you certainly can have ‘Dicks: The Musical,’” he said.
With that remark, our coffee date was over. And though we had met in the early morning, at an hour when some party-hearty A24 stars might finally be crawling into bed, Lane assured me it was no trouble at all.
“This was like therapy,” he said. “I cried, I laughed, I talked about ‘Dicks.’”
It’s funny how life works out. Liverpool-born actor Paul McGann had left school and was working in a shoe shop when he bumped into his old schoolteacher, Joe Hartley, who had given him the lead role in a school production of Antony and Cleopatra. Feeling McGann was wasting his talents fitting shoes, Hartley suggested he apply to Rada – which lead to a part in the snooker drama Give Us a Break opposite Robert Lindsay, then the lead role in Alan Bleasdale’s controversial first world war drama The Monocled Mutineer.
The rest is history. McGann went on to star as Marwood, the eponymous I to Richard E Grant’s Withnail in 1987 and then was cast as the eighth Doctor in the 1996 TV film, Doctor Who (the first attempt to relaunch the series following its 1989 cancellation).
McGann is now starring in a period gothic gangster thriller, The Undertaker, opposite Tara Fitzgerald and Lily Frazer, as a mild-mannered funeral director who gets caught up in a power-grab by a local gangster. To that end, McGann will be here to take your questions. Do ask about Withnail and Doctor Who, but don’t forget all his other roles. On TV he has been in everything from the ITV historical war drama Hornblower to Jonathan Creek, Holby City and Waking the Dead. In the theatre, he has done Much Ado About Nothing and The Seagull. And definitely ask him about Lesbian Vampire Killers from 2009. He’ll like that for sure. *wink emoji* Leave your questions in the comments belwo, and we’ll print his answers in Film & Music.
Jennifer Lawrence rose to fame as Katniss Everdeen in the “Hunger Games” film franchise, but her career could have taken a different path had she landed one big audition.
The Oscar winner recently revealed during an appearance on Spotify’s “The Rewatchables” podcast that she had auditioned for a role in “Twilight.”
“I auditioned for ‘Twilight,’” she said in the interview earlier this month. “They turned me down immediately. I didn’t even get a callback. But my life would’ve been totally different. I got ‘Hunger Games, ’ I think, like, a year later.”
But Lawrence said she almost didn’t accept the offer to play Katniss after witnessing the level of “fandom” surrounding the “Twilight” movies and its stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.
The first “Twilight” film premiered in 2008, and the final installment, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2,” was released in 2012. The first “Hunger Games” movie premiered in 2012.
“I almost didn’t do ‘Hunger Games’ because ‘Twilight’ had come out and that fandom had happened,” she said, adding that she was concerned that “Hunger Games” would bring a similar “level of fame.”
“I just assumed it was going to be like ‘Twilight’— the ‘Twilight’ level of fame, and that was just never something I had in mind,” she said. “I wanted to do indies, I wanted to do good films, but I didn’t want to be the most famous person on the planet. That’s a very different life than what I pictured for myself.”
Lawrence added that she would have been “miserable” had she endured the media frenzy and tabloid fodder the “Twilight” actors dealt with while making the vampire film saga.
Jennifer Lawrence at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" on Monday, Nov. 18, 2013.
Clearly, Lawrence’s casting in “The Hunger Games” film franchise was meant to be.
“If Katniss ever could ever come back into my life, 100 percent,” she said.
Lawrence starred in all four “Hunger Games” installments from 2012 to 2015. She will not appear in an upcoming sequel for the franchise, “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”
Pixar, once regarded by film critics and ticket buyers as a studio that could do no wrong, had misfired so immensely at the box office that its future as a cultural force was in doubt. Pixar’s creative spark had apparently blown out — poof.
An opposites-attract love story and parable about following your dreams, “Elemental” arrived to $29.6 million in domestic ticket sales in June — the worst opening in Pixar history, by a mile. Little by little, however, the $200 million film became a hit, collecting nearly $500 million worldwide. For the year to date, “Elemental” ranks No. 9 on the list of top-grossing films, ahead of Marvel’s latest “Ant-Man” sequel.
Moreover, “Elemental” has provided the Walt Disney Company, which owns Pixar, with one of the biggest streaming hits in its history. The movie arrived on Disney+ on Sept. 13 and had garnered 60 million views through Sunday, far surpassing results for Disney films like “The Little Mermaid” and “Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3” for the same periods of availability, according to the company.
“I had no idea what ‘Elemental’ was about, but we decided to watch it as a family because I kept hearing good things,” said Rahela Nayebzadah, who lives in suburban Vancouver, Canada, and has two sons, ages 7 and 4. “The kids have been watching it nonstop ever since.”
Disney also expects to sell about 800,000 “Elemental” DVDs worldwide. About 1.7 million people will buy a digital copy through iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other online stores.
Predictably, Pixar executives are doing cartwheels. But the “Elemental” turnaround does not vanquish questions about the studio as much as raise new ones.
In a postpandemic, streaming-oriented movie marketplace, is the box office ceiling for original animated films simply lower? Pixar originals used to reliably take in more than $500 million worldwide — sometimes a lot more, including “Coco,” which collected $1 billion in 2017, after adjusting for inflation, and “Inside Out,” which sold an inflation-adjusted $1.1 billion in 2015.
And if that is the case — if Disney+ has eaten into Pixar’s theatrical audience — will Pixar need to spend substantially less? “Elemental” cost roughly $200 million to make, not including marketing. To compare, NBCUniversal’s competing Illumination Animation spent half as much to make its most-recent original movie, “Sing,” in 2016.
Pixar will know more in March, when it releases “Elio,” an original comedic adventure about an 11-year-old boy who gets inadvertently beamed into space and mistaken as Earth’s galactic ambassador. (Pixar’s sibling studio, Walt Disney Animation, will also provide clues later this year, when its “Wish,” an original musical, arrives in theaters.)
“I hope we can continue to be able to have budgets that allow our artists to do the best work of their lives,” Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, said in a Zoom interview. Hollywood as a whole needs to adjust its business models for the streaming era, he noted.
Pixar and Disney have spent a lot of time trying to understand the chilly initial response to “Elemental,” Mr. Docter said. For a start, he said, Disney had undercut Pixar as a big-screen force by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row online, bypassing theaters altogether. Those films were “Soul,” “Turning Red” and “Luca.”
“There has been an overall shift in viewing habits as a result of the pandemic, but it’s also specific to Disney+,” Mr. Docter said. “We’ve told people, ‘Hey, all of this is going to be available to you on Disney+!’”
Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.
In recent years, Pixar has allowed filmmakers like Peter Sohn, who made “Elemental,” to explore stories that are more personal. (Mr. Sohn’s immigrant parents inspired his film.) Yet many of Pixar’s biggest original successes, including “Toy Story” in 1995 and “Monsters, Inc.” in 2001, have grown from more universal concepts — “ideas that we all carried around as kids,” as Mr. Docter put it.
What if my toys come to life when I leave the room? What if there are monsters in my closet?
“I always felt that ‘Elemental’ would speak to a lot of people, and I’m so happy it has,” said Mr. Docter, whose credits as a director include “Inside Out,” “Up” and “Monsters, Inc.” “But we have also taken another look at the projects we’re working on now. What are the kinds of films we want to be making? I really think I want to double down on what allowed us to speak to audiences to begin with.”
There’s considerable competition of course, but Todd Haynes has a strong claim to be one of America’s greatest living auteurs, with a string of outstanding films to his name including the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol, Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, and Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven.
Haynes first made a name for himself with his Barbie-doll animated short film Superstar, about Karen Carpenter, and then acquired career momentum with his feature debut Poison in 1991, part of the early 90s New Queer Cinema movement. Safe, the creepy mid-90s fable about a woman afflicted by a mysterious allergy-like illness, marked his first collaboration with Julianne Moore; she would go on to appear in further films including the exquisitely art-directed Far From Heaven (as a woman whose picture-perfect marriage is undermined by her husband’s gay affairs), the YA fantasy Wonderstruck (as a silent movie star) and his new one, May December, as a woman who became a tabloid sensation decades earlier by marrying a much younger man.
Haynes’s other great collaborator, of course, is Cate Blanchett: she played one of multiple Bob Dylan personas in the tricksy I’m Not There, and then took the starring role in Carol, as a glamorous married woman who has an affair with Rooney Mara’s store assistant/photographer. And he furthered his interest in the music industry with, back in the day, the glam-rock fable Velvet Goldmine and a documentary about legendary art-rockers the Velvet Underground.
So what do you want to ask him? What does he think about Greta Gerwig’s Barbie? Did he anticipate Carol becoming one of the great Christmas films? Leave your questions in the comments below before Wednesday at 6pm, and we’ll print his replies in Film & Music.
On a late-spring day in 2018, when the New York Philharmonic was deep in rehearsals of a Strauss symphony, an unexpected visitor showed up at the stage door of David Geffen Hall, the Philharmonic’s home.
The visitor, Bradley Cooper, the actor and director, had come on a mission. He was preparing to direct and star in a film about Leonard Bernstein, the eminent conductor and composer who led the Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969. He was asking the orchestra’s leaders for help with the movie, “Maestro,” which has its North American premiere on Monday at the New York Film Festival.
The Philharmonic is accustomed to having luminaries at its concerts. But it was unusual for someone like Cooper to express such deep interest in classical music, a field often neglected in popular culture.
“How many top Hollywood stars can be genuine or interested in that way?” said Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s then-president and chief executive. “We were really impressed.”
Soon, Cooper was a regular at the Philharmonic’s concerts and rehearsals, sitting in the conductor’s box in the second tier and peppering musicians with questions. He visited the orchestra’s archives to examine Bernstein’s scores and batons. And he joined Philharmonic staff members on a trip to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, placing a stone on Bernstein’s grave, a Jewish rite.
“You could see that he was watching with a very special eye,” said Jaap van Zweden, the Philharmonic’s music director. “He wanted to get into Bernstein’s soul.”
Cooper’s time with the Philharmonic was the beginning of an intense five-year period in which he immersed himself in classical music to portray Bernstein, the most influential American maestro of the 20th century and a composer of renown, whose works include not just “West Side Story” but music for the concert hall.
He attended dozens of rehearsals and performances in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin and at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. And he befriended top maestros, including van Zweden; Michael Tilson Thomas, a protégé of Bernstein who led the San Francisco Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel, who leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who served as the film’s conducting consultant.
Cooper has portrayed musicians before: He took piano, guitar and voice lessons for his role as Jackson Maine, a folksy rock star, in the 2018 film “A Star Is Born,” which he also directed.
But “Maestro,” in theaters on Nov. 22 and on Netflix on Dec. 20, posed a new challenge. Bernstein was a larger-than-life figure with an exuberant style at the podium. Cooper needed to learn not only to conduct, but also to captivate and seduce like a great maestro.
Cooper watched archival footage of Bernstein conducting, and Nézet-Séguin recorded dozens of videos on his phone in which he conducted in Bernstein’s manner. He also sent play-by-play voice-overs of Bernstein’s performances and assisted Cooper on set, sometimes guiding his conducting through an earpiece.
Nézet-Séguin said the biggest challenge for Cooper, as for many maestros, was “feeling unprotected” and “naked emotionally” on the podium. “He wouldn’t settle for anything less than what he had in mind.”
Cooper, who wrote “Maestro” with Josh Singer, declined to comment for this article because he belongs to the union representing striking actors, which has forbidden its members from promoting studio films. But in a discussion last year with Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional maestro Lydia Tár in “Tár” (2022), he described conducting as “the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.”
He said that people often ask: “What does a conductor even do? Aren’t you just up there doing this?” He waved his arms.
“My answer is it’s the absolute hardest thing you could possibly ever want to do,” he said. “It is impossible.”
Cooper grew up near Philadelphia surrounded by music. He played the double bass and showed an interest in conducting, inspired by portrayals of mischievous maestros in “Looney Tunes” and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. When he was 8, he asked Santa for a baton.
“I was obsessed with conducting classical music,” he told Stephen Colbert on the “Late Show” last year. “You know you put your 10,000 hours in for something you never do? I did it for conducting.”
Steven Spielberg, who had been planning to direct “Maestro,” was aware of Cooper’s obsession. He recalled Cooper telling him that “he’d conduct whatever came out of their hi-fi system at home.”
After a screening of “A Star Is Born,” Spielberg was so impressed that he decided to hand “Maestro” over to Cooper, with whom he shares a love of classical music.
“It only took me 15 minutes to realize this brilliant actor is equaled only by his skills as a filmmaker,” said Spielberg, who produced the film, along with Cooper and Martin Scorsese.
Cooper worked to win the trust of the Bernstein family, including his children, Jamie, Alexander and Nina, who gave the film permission to use their father’s music. (“Maestro” beat out a rival Bernstein project by the actor Jake Gyllenhaal.)
Jamie Bernstein said that Cooper seemed “keen to seek an essential authenticity about the story.” He asked questions about her relationship with her father, and he was adept at imitating his gestures, like placing his hand on his hip as he conducted.
Cooper visited the family home in Fairfield, Conn., admiring a Steinway piano that Bernstein used to play and examining his belongings: a bathrobe, a blue-striped djellaba, a bottle of German cough syrup that he brought back from a foreign tour.
“He was just like a sponge soaking up every detail about our family’s existence that he possibly could,” she said.
Cooper sent photos of himself in makeup and costumes, holding replicas of Bernstein’s batons, to his children. (They defended him recently when he drew criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of Bernstein, who was Jewish.)
At the gym, Cooper sometimes wore a shirt emblazoned with the words “Hunky Brute,” a nickname that Bernstein used for the New York Philharmonic’s brass players. (Bernstein also wore a version of the shirt.)
Bernstein’s musical career unfolds in the background in “Maestro”; much of the film focuses on his conflicted identity, including his marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) and his dalliances with men.
Cooper was eager to approach “Maestro” less as a biography and more as the story of a marriage, Spielberg recalled.
While Cooper understood Bernstein’s genius, Spielberg said, he also had “an understanding of the complexities of Felicia’s love for this man, whom she would certainly have to share not only with the world but also with his hungry heart.”
The film, shot largely on location, recreates several moments from Bernstein’s career, including his celebrated 1943 debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he filled in at the last minute for the ailing conductor Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall.
At Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, Cooper’s Bernstein is shown leading master classes and driving a sports car with the license plate MAESTRO1 across a pristine lawn as the real Bernstein had done. He visits his mentor, the Russian conductor and composer Serge Koussevitzky, who suggests he change his surname to Burns to avoid discrimination.
In his conducting studies, Cooper spent the most time with Dudamel and Nézet-Séguin. He visited Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, dressed and made up as Bernstein, for sessions with Dudamel. And he traveled to Germany, score in hand, to observe Dudamel as he rehearsed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. (Dudamel declined to comment because he is also a member of the actors’ union.)
Cooper stealthily watched Nézet-Séguin from the orchestra pit at the Met, including at a 2019 performance of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” Later that year, for Bernstein’s 100th birthday, Nézet-Séguin invited Cooper and Mulligan to narrate a staging of Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Nézet-Séguin said he didn’t set out to give Cooper conducting lessons but to refine his portrayals. “I had to take what he already did as an actor,” he said, “and make it into a frame that was believable.”
Nézet-Séguin, who also conducts the film’s soundtrack, helped him find the downbeat for Schumann’s “Manfred” overture, which opened the Carnegie program in 1943. And he assisted Cooper with dialogue for a rehearsal scene of “Candide,” during which he conducts with a cigarette in his mouth.
Last fall, Cooper and Nézet-Séguin traveled to Ely Cathedral in England to recreate a 1973 performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony by Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra, a climactic moment in the film.
Cooper, who chose the music in “Maestro,” had studied the piece intensely, watching Bernstein’s performance as well as videos in which Nézet-Séguin dissected Bernstein’s gestures and explained how to count beats.
“He would watch the videos,” Nézet-Séguin said, “and then text me and say, ‘Hey, can we talk about this or that moment?”
Inside an empty Ely Cathedral, Nézet-Séguin, wearing a sweater that had belonged to Bernstein, coached Cooper as he rehearsed an eight-minute section of the piece with a recording.
When the London Symphony Orchestra arrived, Cooper watched as Nézet-Séguin rehearsed in the style of Bernstein, who often broke the rules of conducting with his animated gestures. Sometimes, Cooper offered suggestions, such as adding tremolo in the strings.
When Cooper took the podium, Nézet-Séguin provided occasional direction through an earpiece, advising him to hold onto a moment or let go.
The musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra were startled by Cooper’s transformation. “It was uncanny,” said Sarah Quinn, a violinist in the orchestra. “It was just kind of a double take.”
Throughout his work on “Maestro,” Cooper maintained a connection to the New York Philharmonic, soliciting stories about Bernstein. Van Zweden, who worked with Bernstein in Amsterdam in the 1980s, told him how Bernstein had broken protocol and hugged Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, calling her “darling” and taking a sip of his drink at the same time.
Cooper visited Geffen Hall last fall after its $550 million renovation, attending a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and flipping through a Mahler score that had belonged to Bernstein. He returned in February when Dudamel was introduced as the Philharmonic’s next music director, embracing him and admiring a photo of Bernstein.
Over the summer, Cooper invited a few Philharmonic staff members and musicians to his Greenwich Village townhouse for screenings of “Maestro.” The orchestra presented him with a gift: a replica of Bernstein’s Carnegie debut program.
“From the beginning, he was intent on avoiding a broad burlesque of a personality, especially one as big as Bernstein’s,” said Carter Brey, the orchestra’s principal cellist, who attended a screening.
Cooper has compared playing Bernstein to “channeling a supernova.” He said in a recorded Zoom conversation with Jamie Bernstein last year that her father transmitted his soul through conducting.
“The pilot light never went out with him, which is incredible given everything that he saw, experienced, understood, comprehended, bore witness to, even within his own self,” he said in the video. “What a person. What a spirit.”
Men in uniform are milling around outside a cafe in Sloviansk. Military trucks trundle past every few seconds. The town, in the Donetsk region, is the rear echelon of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. A black armoured car pulls up, and out of it slips journalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov. With his black T-shirt and trousers, black sunglasses, and black med-kit strapped to his thigh, he looks every inch the conflict reporter. He is 38. When he finally takes off his sunglasses, the intense gaze of his pouchy, tired-looking eyes makes him seem older.
That is hardly surprising. The war visited on Ukraine by its eastern neighbour since 2014 has destroyed many existences and transformed countless others. One of its consequences has been the creation of a generation of young conflict reporters. “In a country at war, if you’re a good documentary photographer, or at least trying to be good” – as he was before the Russian-backed takeovers in the Donbas and of Crimea – “you automatically become a war photographer.” One of the Kharkiv-born journalist’s earliest jobs was filming the carnage of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash site in 2014. Later, he worked in Syria, Karabakh, Iraq and Kurdistan.
Then in February last year, he and his team – stills photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko – drove to Mariupol when everyone who could was getting out. They stayed inside the siege for nearly three weeks. For most of that time, theirs was the only news footage shot and broadcast – bringing to the world’s attention terrible images such as the bombing of the city’s Maternity Hospital No 3 on 9 March.
20 Days in Mariupol … The bombing of Maternity Hospital No 3 in a still from the documentary. Photograph: Mstyslav Chernov
Now, Chernov has shaped this material into a feature-length documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. It places the viewer right inside the nightmare that was Russia’s bombardment as the “circle tightened round the neck of the dying city,” as he put it. The film unfolds events day by day, punctuated by brief clips showing how footage was used in broadcast news, occasionally overlaid by Chernov’s quiet, restrained voiceover.
The full, jagged horror of war is illuminated unblinkingly in the film, which has just been chosen as Ukraine’s entry for the Oscars. It is tough to watch. Evangelina, aged 4, caught in an attack, dies on a hospital trolley. The doctors – who have urged Chernov to keep filming, “to show how these motherfuckers are killing children”, weep for her, and tenderly press her eyes shut. Kirill, 18 months old, is defibrillated, but the medics can’t save him. His mother wails: “Why? Why? Why?”
Conditions worsen, there is no power and barely a mobile connection. Chernov’s team struggles to find the breath of a phone signal with which to send their footage to their editors at the news agency Associated Press (AP). People loot shops, cook on fires in the streets. Hospitals run out of medicine. On a patch of waste ground a man heaves bodies into a trench. Asked how he feels, he replies: “If I start talking I’m going to cry ... I don’t know what I feel right now. What are people supposed to feel in this situation?” It is as if emotions have departed any recognisable register; they cannot be entertained, let alone expressed.
The mayor of the city has estimated that 21,000 civilians were killed in Mariupol. The AP team could have been among them. What drove them onwards? Chernov, after all, has two young daughters to whom he briefly alludes in his voiceover in the film: a moment in which the journalists’ own dilemmas and emotions are lightly signalled.
They made their decision sitting in a cafe in Bakhmut in February last year, he says, watching a Russian news broadcast: “Because that’s always a good indicator of what’s to come.” They realised that the full-scale invasion was about to begin, and talked about “where we would meet this new wave of escalation. Mariupol seemed to be a right place to do it.” The story’s importance outweighed the risk. “It felt like this was the beginning of the third world war,” he says. “It still kind of does.”
20 Days in Mariupol … An explosion erupts from an apartment building after a Russian tank fired on it. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Once inside the city, “it was just a matter of whether you had enough resources to keep working. And you keep going until you haven’t”. Even though they could have been killed at any time? Chernov answered as an air raid siren took up its regular, weary wail. “Every morning I’m there among the people lying on the floor of a hospital,” he says, recalling those grim days in Mariupol. “There are people without limbs and with heavy injuries. There are constant explosions. You don’t really know if you’re awake or if you’re asleep. You feel you have to force yourself to just start working. And then you look at all the people around you. The nurse comes who’s been there for two weeks and hasn’t slept, and the doctors come and start putting bandages on people, and another nurse comes with a bucket of snow and uses the melted snow to wash the floor.
“And you look at all of them and you think, ‘Why would I stop?’ So I don’t think it’s patriotism or a sense of duty at that moment, or even a kind of a journalistic impulse. It’s some kind of collective resistance to tragedy.” A rebellion, perhaps, against helplessness and impotence.
In the film a policeman named Volodymyr addresses the camera directly from the bombed maternity hospital, certain that if the world could only see the atrocity, the war would end. (This valiant man, who helped the AP journalists evacuate from Mariupol, and got himself and his family out too, was badly hurt in a double-tap missile attack this summer in the city of Pokrovsk.) The crew’s pictures did have an immense impact. But of course the war did not stop – and Russians claimed that the maternity hospital footage had been faked using actors.
Chernov remembers a similar pattern after his reporting at the crash site of MH17, the airliner shot down by Russian separatists over the Donetsk region in 2014. It was his second day in his career as a conflict reporter. Younger, more naive, he felt sure his footage would stop the war. On the ground it was beyond doubt that separatists were responsible, as has been subsequently proved in the courts. But, he says, the next day he turned on his TV and saw his images used to illustrate entirely opposite narratives, the Russians blaming the Ukrainians for the tragedy. “A lot of illusions were destroyed that day.”
Part of the point of taking his material to make 20 Days in Mariupol he says, was to use his footage at greater length. To give it more context. To go deeper, and ask more questions – and perhaps to take more control. He feels, he says, at a turning-point in his career, in which shooting for news is no longer satisfying. He is now working to chart the Ukrainian counter-offensive here in the Donbas, following the lives of a number of characters in the military. It’s difficult, he says, to get under the skin of soldiers. And liberation of villages often means liberating “ruins, and graves without names”.
I sense Chernov believes that it is in the extremity of conflict in which answers to the most essential questions about human life and death are to be found. Homer’s Iliad and much of Greek tragedy tells us he is right, but I’m not sure: is a war really the best place to seek the truth about human nature? “In a war zone, you do see very primal drives ... [But] I found it astonishing how much support and care you see in a crisis where you think that everyone would just fight for their own lives,” he says. “That was an amazing discovery. That made it valuable.”
I wonder how audiences have reacted after seeing the world through his eyes, stripped brutally bare. “When people say it’s difficult to watch 20 Days in Mariupol, it’s not because there’s a lot of blood,” he says. No, I say: it’s because you see children dying. “But when you think about the people who live through these tragedies on the screen, there are always people supporting them. However traumatising and painful are the events that we are going through in Ukraine, we never go through them alone. We always have someone to hold our hands, to embrace us, whether it’s a volunteer or a firefighter or a policeman or a doctor or just your neighbour. I find that extraordinarily hopeful.”
It was this sliver of hope amid the violence that won it the audience award winner at the Sundance film festival in January, he thinks. His main fear, in fact, was that the film might retraumatise those from Mariupol, the people who lived through these terrible events. “But it actually doesn’t. Having unified experiences that are formed into stories is how we process our collective trauma,” he says. “Being a part of a society that processes its tragedies and histories and tries to go forward – that’s what keeps me going forward.”
Not only is the buff 25-year-old pursuing acting, but he’s also repeating his father’s “I’ll be back” line from “The Terminator” in a new movie, TMZ reported on Saturday.
Baena plays a Navy pilot in “Called to Duty,” a “Top Gun”-like adventure released Saturday, according to IMDB.
In a clip shared by TMZ, Baena’s jet jockey tells the squadron, “In 1984, there was an actor who gave one of the greatest lines of all-time.” To which a fellow pilot replies, “And what would that be?”
“I’ll be back!” Baena’s character says as he steers the aircraft away.
Oddly enough, Baena’s dad fought an on-set battle before grudgingly saying what became an iconic movie catchphrase.
In his new Netflix documentary, Schwarzenegger said he balked at saying, “I’ll be back,” but “Terminator” director James Cameron insisted. “Don’t tell me how to fucking write,” Cameron snapped at him, the actor recalled.
Beana has other dialogue in his new movie. In a recent “Called to Duty” trailer, Beana says from a podium, “You may serve under two branches, but you fly under one flag.”
Baena’s mother is Mildred Baena, the family housekeeper with whom the action star had an affair while married to Maria Shriver.
“I think that I have caused enough pain for my family because of my fuck-up,” Schwarzenegger said in the documentary. “Everyone had to suffer. Maria had to suffer. The kids had to suffer. Joseph. His mother. Everyone.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Joseph Baena go for a bike ride in 2020.
The near-entirety of an art collection belonging to Gérard Depardieu, the prolific French actor whose career was clouded in recent years by accusations of sexual assault and harassment, was sold at a two-day Paris auction this week that brought in 4 million euros, including fees, or about $4.2 million.
Over 230 items went under the hammer on Tuesday and Wednesday at a sale organized at the Hôtel Drouot by the Ader auction house, including paintings by Alexander Calder and sculptures by Auguste Rodin, whom Depardieu played in the 1988 movie “Camille Claudel.”
About 100 people crammed into the auction room on Tuesday night for the sale of the collection's most prominent items, including a small oil painting of a flower vase by Odile Redon, which sold for €50,000, and the threesmallRodin sculptures, which sold for €15,000 to €65,000.
The star of the night seemed to be a 4.5-foot enlargement of “Walking Man,” a bronze sculpture originally made by Germaine Richier in 1945. The enlargement, which used to dominate Depardieu’s living room, was hammered up to €510,000 — but the auction house said in a statement Wednesday that the actor decided at the last minute not to sell the sculpture, and withdrew the lot.
“This is a serious collection,” David Nordmann, one of the two auctioneers at Ader in charge of the sale, said in an interview. “This is not the collection of a celebrity who bought artwork just to show off.”
Nordmann had previously worked with Depardieu when the actor sold off the contents of a Parisian fine dining restaurant that he owned. The two men stayed in touch and discussed the sale his art collection. Depardieu gave the go-ahead in early 2023, and let the auctioneer pick the pieces and set the prices.
“He loved to collect,” Nordmann said, recalling how Depardieu spent hours telling him about Matisse’s superiority to Picasso the first time he entered the actor’s home. But “at some point,” he added, “he reached the end of that process.”
He has also faced a growing number of sexual abuse accusations. In interviews in April with Mediapart, an investigative news site, 13 women — actresses, makeup artists and production staff — accused Depardieu of making inappropriate sexual comments or gestures during the shooting of films released between 2004 and 2022. Two other women made similar accusations against him in interviews thissummer with France Inter, a radio station. Depardieu declined to be interviewed for this article, but has always denied any criminal behavior.
The turmoil in his personal life might have factored into his decision to sell, Nordmann said, “but not in the sense that he is trying to prove a point” or distract from the accusations.
“He wants to move on,” he said.
Some items sold at prices much higher than expected, including a 1928 portrait by Christian Jacques Bérard that sold for €55,000 euros, 11 times the low estimate, and a monochromatic ink composition by Jean Arp that sold for €20,000. But most pieces sold within the estimated range.
The collection, which skews heavily toward postwar abstraction and contemporary art, includes widely recognizable names — a Duchamp collage; several pieces by Miró. Depardieu appears to have favored rugged compositions, bold colors, thick brushstrokes and raw materials, in keeping with his larger-than-life personality, Nordmann said.
He refused to lend pieces for shows, Nordmann said, including the Richier sculpture, which was recently requested for a show at the Centre Pompidou.
The sale did not include any Depardieu memorabilia. But it attracted unusually large crowds, both during the sale and beforehand, as thousands of curious visitors crowded the Hôtel Drouot to get a peek at the actor’s collection before it was snapped up.
Depardieu is one of France’s most prominent and prolific lead actors, an internationally recognized figure who has played in the last 50 years in more than 250 movies, including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Man in the Iron Mask,” and in TV shows like “Marseille.”
Over the past decade, though, Depardieu’s popularity has waned as personal scandals overtook his acting career. He became a Russian citizen in 2013 to avoid taxes in France, and has expressed a strong friendship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, although last year he denounced the invasion of Ukraine.
But the accusations of sexual abuse against Depardieu have been more damaging.He has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations.
But Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault in a case involving Charlotte Arnould, a French actress who has accused him of sexually assaulting her in Paris in 2018, when she was 22, during informal rehearsals for a theater production. Prosecutors had initially dropped that investigation in 2019, citing of a lack of incriminating evidence, but it was reopened in 2020.
The French movie industry has grappled with several high-profile accusations of sexual abuse in recent years and taken steps to address them. But mixed reactions to the #MeToo movement in France — which has also given a warm reception to artists accused of abuse — exposed sharp cultural divides between France and the United States.
This colossal sci-fi thriller from Gareth Edwards features John David Washington and Gemma Chan in vast mysterious panoramas and vertiginous vistas which deserve to be shown at Imax-plus scale; it also shows that Christopher Nolan isn’t the only British director in Hollywood thinking (and acting) big. After a stint making franchise movies such as Godzilla and the enjoyable and underrated Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Edwards has now crafted this ambitious original picture, co-written with Chris Weitz, which is closer in spirit to his ingenious 2010 debut Monsters.
The Creator is an old-fashioned science-fiction actioner with some ideas to match to state-of-the-art digital effects, in the tradition of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, with a creeping colonialist’s fear of the unknown to match that in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. And given that Edwards has served some time aboard the Star Wars mother ship, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find some holograms in the mix and a certain dustbin-sized droid which whimpers something poignant about what an honour it’s been to serve his comrades before lumbering out to face the enemy on a kamikaze mission.
Washington shows us some more of that distinctive self-possession and even slight hauteur as a performer, in playing Josh, a US army special forces undercover officer, fighting a strange, dirty war in a postnuclear world upended by the dominance of artificial intelligence. Some time from now, a rogue piece of AI software dropped a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles; since then, America and its allies banned all AI. But the Asian countries stayed loyal to AI, and the number of self-replicating bots there has created what amounts to a posthuman population, for whom AI is part of their cultural and spiritual identity. This has caused a tepid war between them and the United States, which now deploys a gigantic mother ship-slash-attack-vessel called NOMAD capable of delivering nuclear war from above. (I like to think NOMAD is inspired by Jonathan Swift’s sinister floating island Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels.) Its columns of laser-surveillance light tracking across the various terrains create some unforgettable images.
Josh is now behind enemy lines where he has fallen deeply in love with and married Maya (Gemma Chan), who is now pregnant; he has to all intents and purposes gone native. He is devastated when a sudden US attack sweeps in, on the hunt for the AI controlling intelligence which is effectively the enemy’s operating system; they exfiltrate Josh and appear to kill Maya. Back with the Americans, who are reluctant to forgive his apparent disloyalty, Josh is curtly informed by his commanding officer Andrews (Ralph Ineson) and a fiercely anti-AI operative Howell (Allison Janney) that Maya is still alive and is the embodiment of the enemy’s AI – and it is his patriotic duty to help them hunt her down and kill her.
But there appears to be a child now, called Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Is Josh the father? The child is developing a telekinetic control, a mastery of what in another franchise universe would be called the Force; she is a veritable tiny Dalai Lama, a creator, or even a Christ child of the new AI peoples with Maya as the Blessed Virgin and Josh the bewildered Joseph. As Joseph leads the American military into the hostile territory, he comes to believe it is destiny to protect them, no matter what.
It’s an intriguing, stimulating, exhilarating movie, which really does address – with both head and heart – the great issue of our age, AI. I have to say that the splurge of action spectacle towards the very end means that some of the narrative tendons slacken a bit and the film loses focus on specific jeopardy. But there’s a tremendous boldness here and a readiness to conjure up an entire created universe.
