The Ringer: All Posts by Keith Phipps2024-03-08T08:17:50-05:00https://www.theringer.com/authors/keith-phipps/rss2024-03-08T08:17:50-05:002024-03-08T08:17:50-05:00The Eight Biggest Story Lines Heading Into the 2024 Oscars
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<p>Is ‘Oppenheimer’ invulnerable? What are the most likely upsets? And why is everyone being so weird about Bradley Cooper?</p> <p id="TvXCsh">Traditionally, the Oscars race begins in the fall, when one contender debuts after the other, resulting in a pileup of ambitious films vying to compete at the following spring’s Academy Awards. This time it was different. The seismic event known as <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/7/19/23800723/everything-you-need-to-know-about-barbenheimer">“Barbenheimer,”</a> the same-day release of <em>Barbie </em>and <em>Oppenheimer </em>on July 21, didn’t just prove that two remarkable, dramatically different movies could find success sharing the same multiplex—it announced two early entries in the award competition to come.</p>
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<p id="lRUWB5">In some respects, Barbenheimer never ended. The two movies’ presence on (or absence from) the list of nominees for the 96th Academy Awards has been a major part of the lead-up to Sunday’s ceremony. But they’re not the whole story. Though it was already obvious that <em>Barbie </em>and <em>Oppenheimer</em> would be major events this time last year, the latter months of 2023 weren’t short of surprises. A year ago, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was a respected character actress but hardly a household name. Her work in <em>The Holdovers </em>changed that, leading to a Supporting Actress nomination (and a likely win). Sandra Hüller likely won’t triumph in the Leading Actress category, but her work in <em>The Zone of Interest</em> and <em>Anatomy of a Fall</em> have raised the profile of a talented performer mostly unknown outside Germany. A year ago no one was talking about either of them. So what are we talking about <em>now</em> as the Oscars approach? Here are a few of the most intriguing narratives.</p>
<h4 id="byDvuk">Will <em>Oppenheimer</em> win everything?</h4>
<p id="XiEh8F">Only three films have ever made a clean sweep of the Academy Awards’ five top categories (Best Picture, Actress, Actor, Director, and Screenplay): <em>It Happened One Night</em>,<em> One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest</em>, and <em>Silence of the Lambs</em>. It’s not possible for <em>Oppenheimer </em>to repeat that,<em> </em>as Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the father of the atomic bomb did not score a Best Actress nod, but the film could very well win everything else, including Best Picture. And if <em>Oppenheimer</em> picks up awards in technical categories like Sound and Editing early in the night, its performance could start to feel like a sweep anyway.</p>
<p id="zn453P"><em>Oppenheimer</em>’s not invulnerable, however. Adapted from Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s 2005 biography, <em>American Prometheus</em>, it might encounter competition in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. The screenplay awards, both adapted and original, can be unpredictable. Eight of the past 10 Best Picture winners—<em>Everything Everywhere All at Once</em>, <em>Parasite</em>, <em>Green Book</em>,<em> Spotlight</em>, <em>Moonlight</em>, <em>Birdman</em>, <em>CODA</em>, and<em> 12 Years a Slave</em>—have picked up their corresponding screenplay award, but a curveball is never out of the question. </p>
<aside id="VoHbAD"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How Will the Soon-to-Be Oscar for Casting Work? Let This Year’s Films Explain.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2024/3/7/24093352/oscar-awards-best-casting-new-category"},{"title":"‘May December’ Found a Delicate Balance to Tell a Disturbing Tale","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2024/3/1/24086954/may-december-oscars-best-original-screenplay"},{"title":"Robert De Niro Continues to Evolve, Persevere, and Challenge Himself. He Should Win Another Oscar. ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/2/27/24084239/robert-de-niro-oscars-killers-of-the-flower-moon-supporting-actor"}]}'></div></aside><p id="143pOo"><em>Oppenheimer</em>’s competition includes <em>Barbie</em> (which was <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/awards/barbie-moved-adapted-screenplay-oscars-1235848136/">moved to the Adapted Screenplay category</a> despite campaigning for an Original slot), and <a href="https://www.vegasinsider.com/awards/odds/oscars/">Vegas</a><a href="https://www.oddschecker.com/awards/oscars"> oddsmakers</a> <a href="https://www.sportsbookreview.com/picks/more-sports/oscars-odds/">currently favor</a> Cord Jefferson’s script for <em>American Fiction</em>, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel <em>Erasure. </em>Either could win (and an especially <a href="https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/2/26/24083329/barbie-movie-oscars-snubs-nominations-best-adapted-screenplay">strong case</a> could be made for <em>Barbie</em>).<em> </em>Cillian Murphy remains the favorite to win Best Actor, but a Paul Giamatti win wouldn’t be particularly shocking. And, as suggested above, Randolph will take Best Supporting Actress, not <em>Oppenheimer</em>’s Emily Blunt. In short, <em>Oppenheimer</em> will win a lot, but not everything, and perhaps not every award it conceivably <em>could</em> win.</p>
<h4 id="PX2eJQ">Is any category more locked in than Best Supporting Actor?</h4>
<p id="3BfbG4">If there are any sure things, for <em>Oppenheimer</em> or any other movie, it’s Robert Downey Jr.’s win as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Lewis Strauss, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s main antagonist. Downey’s been campaigning heavily, and he’s already picked up numerous awards leading up to the Oscars, including a BAFTA and a Golden Globe (which for some reason we’re taking seriously again after its <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/1/9/23546045/golden-globes-2023-what-to-know-jerrod-carmichael">scandals and near collapse just a few years ago</a>). Above all, it’s a matter of timing. Downey’s lived a Hollywood-esque comeback story. His talent has never been in dispute, but he’s been virtually locked into Marvel movies for over a decade (and, to a lesser extent, Sherlock Holmes movies, with a disastrous attempt to play Dr. Dolittle thrown into the mix). <em>Oppenheimer</em> served as a reminder that he can still do some capital-A Acting in a role that played to his strengths portraying smart, verbose, not entirely trustworthy men. <a href="https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/2/28/24085156/robert-downey-jr-oppenheimer-oscars-best-supporting-actor">This one will belong to him</a>.</p>
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<br>Is the <em>Barbie</em> snub real (and how many times will it be referenced)?</h4>
<p id="2nghww">Like its Barbenheimer counterpart, <em>Barbie </em>picked up a bunch of nominations—eight in total—including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress, the latter for America Ferrera. But there were some conspicuous omissions, chief among them a Best Director nomination for Greta Gerwig and a Best Actress nomination for Margot Robbie. Whether that was just a matter of tough competition or an unwillingness to give <em>too </em>many nominations to a film directed by a woman that put feminist issues front and center has been a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/01/24/1226565927/barbie-oscar-snub-gerwig-robbie-gosling">matter</a> of<a href="https://www.theringer.com/2024/1/26/24051524/barbie-oscars-snub-tim-scott-al-sharpton-dei-airline-industry-colman-domingo-nwa"> discussion</a>. (Ryan Gosling’s nomination as Ken, however deserved, has only reinforced some of the film’s central points.) There’s no answering the question for sure, but don’t be surprised to hear about it a <em>lot</em> on Sunday. Ultimately, <em>Barbie</em> will probably walk away with at least one or two awards—look out for the aforementioned screenplay category, as well as production or costume design, and Best Original Song (more on this in a bit).</p>
<h4 id="ozQkrW">What are the most likely upsets?</h4>
<p id="4IYNBL">Lily Gladstone has seemed like a lock for Best Actress for her great work in <em>Killers of the Flower Moon </em>since the film’s debut<em>. </em>Gladstone becoming the first Native American to win an acting Oscar (apart from Wes Studi’s honorary award in 2020) for a film deeply concerned with the oppression of Native Americans and the way history has systematically ignored their stories would make for a remarkable moment. But what if it doesn’t happen? An Emma Stone win for <em>Poor Things</em> remains a possibility, and her emotionally rich, go-for-broke work as an intellectually curious Frankenstein-like creation would be something to celebrate—almost any other year.</p>
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<br>Why is everyone being so weird about Bradley Cooper (and will this be the end of it)?</h4>
<p id="8XBK5I">Seriously, why? His Leonard Bernstein biopic, <em>Maestro</em>, picked up a bunch of major nominations, including Best Picture, Actor (for Cooper), Actress (Carey Mulligan), and Original Screenplay (also for Cooper, who cowrote the script with Josh Singer), which are achievements people have mostly been making fun of. There’s no doubt Cooper’s been campaigning hard for the film. But you know who else campaigned hard for an Academy Award? Just about everyone who’s ever won one. An odd schadenfreude has followed Cooper and the project all year. Maybe it’s because he <a href="https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/2/29/24086231/bradley-cooper-best-actor-maestro-chances">so obviously wants to be considered a major filmmaker</a>. Maybe it’s because few consider the film a home run, even though it’s a big swing. Even so, it’s at least a solid single, maybe even a ground-rule double. Cooper’s quite talented at acting and directing, and it feels like he’s working toward making a truly great film, even if <em>Maestro</em> isn’t it. Why punish that?</p>
<h4 id="VUlxny">Will Billie Eilish earn half an EGOT with one song (again)?</h4>
<p id="XRDIwp">Probably! Eilish is nominated for her <em>Barbie </em>song, “What Was I Made For?,” which seems the likely winner despite competition from the same film’s “I’m Just Ken.” Cowritten with her brother, Finneas, it’s already won a Song of the Year prize at the Grammys. Eilish and Finneas won both a Grammy and an Oscar two years ago for their theme for <em>No Time to Die</em>, and a win on Sunday would make the 22-year-old Eilish the youngest two-time Oscar winner in history. That’s once again half an EGOT for a single song. But here’s a question: How will she win an Emmy and a Tony? The way her career is going, she’s got plenty of time to figure it out.</p>
<h4 id="BkOPOL">Will Jimmy Kimmel be a good host?</h4>
<p id="wADsmJ">There’s every reason to think he will. Kimmel has emerged as the best of the Oscars’ latter-day hosts: funny, professional, and just biting enough to give the night an edge. This will be Kimmel’s fourth go-round as host. He played the part in 2017, 2018, and again in 2023. The Oscars’ less-than-memorable years without a host makes him look even better by comparison. (Though it’s not really fair to factor in the COVID-plagued, Steven Soderbergh–produced <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/oscars-2021-steven-soderbergh-production">2021 Oscars</a>, and the combination of Regina Hall, Amy Schumer, and Wanda Sykes in 2022 worked relatively well, though no one remembers anything about that night except <a href="https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2022/3/28/22999430/2022-oscars-will-smith-chris-rock-slap-coda-best-picture">The Slap</a>.)</p>
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<h4 id="kP0qYP">How political will this year’s ceremony be?</h4>
<p class="c-end-para" id="qgAhc3">Kimmel has <a href="https://apnews.com/article/jimmy-kimmel-oscars-2024-host-ef1a2732842cd13ad286645409e1d382">said in interviews</a> that politics should not be the night’s focus, even if he’ll probably use it for a joke or two (as he’s done in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EpbzZ2N0dbQ">the</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUsvzH3-zMg"> past</a>). The X factor is, well, everyone else. And between the Israel-Hamas war, an upcoming election summoning memories of one of the candidate’s previous coup attempts, Ukraine, climate change, and everything else, the night should offer plenty of reasons for winners to use their moment in the spotlight to discuss urgent issues. The appropriateness has been a matter of debate since before <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/revisiting-sacheen-littlefeathers-shocking-appearance-at-the-1973-oscars">Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to the stage</a> in 1973, but consider this: Last year, <em>Navalny</em>, a film about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny,<em> </em>won in the the Best Documentary Feature category. Accepting the award, the subject’s wife, now widow, Yulia Navalny, told the audience that her husband was “in prison just for telling the truth … just for defending democracy.” Such moments can provide a stark reminder that there’s a world outside movies and awards, even if it’s easy to forget that for a few hours once a year.</p>
<p id="0xc5EO"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/3/8/24093916/oscars-2024-predictions-story-lines-nominations-upsets-best-pictureKeith Phipps2024-02-27T09:08:51-05:002024-02-27T09:08:51-05:00Robert De Niro Continues to Evolve, Persevere, and Challenge Himself. He Should Win Another Oscar.
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<p>The legendary actor’s turn in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is singular, the result of decades of work across genres and sensibilities, even if the journey at times plunged him into the depths of mediocrity </p> <p id="hrwF1k">Robert De Niro has two Oscars and will likely never win another. His first, a Best Supporting Actor trophy for 1974’s <em>The Godfather Part II</em>, felt like the confirmation of an important new actor’s arrival. He picked up his second, Best Actor for <em>Raging Bull</em>, at the arguable peak of his career, though not in terms of great performances. Many more of those lay ahead of him. But in 1980—after <em>Taxi Driver</em>, <em>1900</em>, <em>The Deer Hunter</em>,<em> </em>and others—De Niro had become the actor who set the pace for everyone else. Each movie, even the ones that didn’t quite work, revealed new aspects of his craft.</p>
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<p id="dofPYW">But that was a long time ago, and much has happened since then. De Niro’s made numerous more movies, not all as venerated as his ’70s classics. He’s also changed as an actor, in both the sorts of films in which he appears and the performances he delivers, though his best can easily stand beside the work that made him a star. De Niro almost certainly won’t win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in <em>Killers of the Flower Moon</em>. (The smart money’s been on Robert Downey Jr. pretty much since <em>Oppenheimer</em>’s first screening, though a Ryan Gosling upset remains within the realm of possibility.) But De Niro <em>should</em> win, and not <em>just</em> for his work in that film, but also for persevering, evolving, and continuing to challenge himself—even if those challenges sometimes involved plunging into the depths of mediocrity.</p>
<p id="2TzbaN">I think it was the mid-1990s when I first heard someone posit that De Niro had “lost it,” citing, if I recall correctly, <em>Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein</em>. That’s not the worst movie on which to build that sort of argument. It’s a mostly wretched film that often plays like a vanity project for director and star Kenneth Branagh. But De Niro, who plays the monster billed in the film as “The Creation,” is never the problem. He delivers an intense, layered, psychologically complex interpretation of the familiar character. A mid-film (and Branagh-free) stretch in which the Creation explores the world, learning to speak, read, and otherwise be human by observing a family from a distance, is lovely and sad, as if cut-and-pasted from a better, more patient movie.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="16TIEd"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"‘Barbie’ Turned the Abstract Into a Cohesive Script. It Deserves the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.","url":"https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/2/26/24083329/barbie-movie-oscars-snubs-nominations-best-adapted-screenplay"},{"title":"Martin Scorsese’s 81 Greatest Movie Characters, Ranked ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/10/17/23920595/martin-scorsese-best-characters-ranked-killers-of-the-flower-moon"},{"title":"With ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ Scorsese Tells the Ultimate Gangster Story","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/5/25/23736768/killers-of-the-flower-moon-film-martin-scorsese-cannes-review"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="3UgIS8"><em>Heat</em>, <em>Casino</em>, <em>Jackie Brown</em>, <em>Ronin,</em> and other films put the “lost it” talk to bed for a few years, but it stirred again when De Niro made a swerve toward comedy with <em>Analyze This</em> and <em>Meet the Parents </em>(and, perhaps more relevantly, their lesser sequels). That this swerve coincided with his increasing inability to tell good scripts from bad—or at least to care one way or another—helped stoke such talk. The 2000s, in which De Niro starred in <em>15 Minutes</em>, <em>Righteous Kill</em>, <em>Showtime</em>, and other best-forgotten films (with only a few minor gems to offset them), weren’t kind to the actor. The ’10s weren’t much kinder, even if the right film—usually one made by a skilled director like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DicBrlK4pEU">David O. Russell</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii3baVUxIpc">Nancy Meyers</a>, who knew how to make good use of their star—could stir memories of better times.</p>
<p id="LxP2Nr">It was in the middle of this ’10s stretch that Anne Helen Petersen wrote the <em>BuzzFeed</em> article “<a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/the-shaming-of-robert-de-niro">The Shaming of Robert De Niro</a>,” which sought to understand what had happened to De Niro, and why so many had soured on the once-revered actor. The short version of Petersen’s argument: De Niro likes to work, there are only so many parts available for actors of his age and price range, and he takes what he can get. Also, times had changed and the low- to mid-budget dramas in which he excelled just didn’t get made anymore. De Niro might have wanted to make another <em>Awakenings</em> or <em>The Mission</em> or better-crafted genre movies like <em>Midnight Run</em> or <em>Backdraft</em>, but he had to settle for <em>Last Vegas</em> and <em>Red Lights </em>instead.</p>
<p id="tq2PG3">There’s a bit more to the story, however. The De Niro of the 2010s was not the De Niro of the 1970s, ’80s, or ’90s. Christopher Frayling’s biography of Sergio Leone, <em>Something to Do With Death</em>, details De Niro’s decision-making process before signing on as the Jewish gangster “Noodles” Aaronson in <em>Once Upon a Time in America</em>. The actor spent two months researching the role and traveled with Leone to Rome, where the bulk of the film would be shot. Then he gave it some more thought before saying yes, hesitating not because he had doubts about the movie, but because he knew his preparation work and the shooting of the film would take two years of his life. This wasn’t unusual at the time, an era in which De Niro regularly turned out one, maybe two, films a year. But that pace accelerated, and De Niro’s approach started to change, as well. He hadn’t stopped being good, but his performances largely stopped being surprising.</p>
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<p id="YVUTxp"><br>In this he wasn’t alone. As with many of his contemporaries, history and familiarity made it hard for De Niro to disappear into parts like he used to. At a certain point, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and other actors of that ilk stopped sinking into characters and started playing variations of their established screen personas (often brilliantly, it’s worth noting). That never really happened to De Niro, but he did tend to rely on a few familiar tools, simmering quietly in dramatic roles and mugging freely in comic parts. But even in a film like last year’s <em>About</em> <em>My Father</em>, a broad, sentimental comedy costarring stand-up comic Sebastian Maniscalco, De Niro never discards his gravity and integrity no matter how gross the indignities the film puts him through are. It says everything that needs saying about De Niro’s late-career skills that the 2020 comedy <em>The War With Grandpa</em> contains a scene in which De Niro <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dalRiAH-Dkg">plays trampoline dodgeball</a> (alongside Cheech Marin and Christopher Walken) <em>and</em> a genuinely moving scene between De Niro’s grandpa and the boy with whom he’s at war. We are tearing up at <em>The War With Grandpa? </em>What the hell?</p>
<p id="8U8q2C">If any film should have settled the “lost it” questions forever, it was <em>The Irishman</em>, a long-awaited reunion with director Martin Scorsese. De Niro delivers an extraordinary performance as Frank Sheeran, a union rep and mob hit man who served as witness to (and sometimes instigator of) some of the late 20th century’s most pivotal moments. The film’s breathtaking final stretch features some of the best work of both De Niro’s and Scorsese’s careers, though maybe not the most unexpected. It’s reflective, mournful, elegiac, the sort of final statement made by artists who know they’re far closer to the end than the beginning.</p>
<p id="9pFtpg">Which brings us to <em>Killers of the Flower Moon</em>, in which De Niro, as Oklahoma patriarch, cattleman, crime boss, and mass murder orchestrator William King Hale, delivers a performance nothing like his work in <em>The Irishman</em>. In fact, it’s at once nothing like anything he’s ever done before and a synthesis of lessons learned over the past few decades of appearing in comedies. It’s intense, scary, ridiculous, magnetic work that could be created only by an actor who’d done time in both <em>Raging Bull</em> and <em>Dirty Grandpa</em>.</p>
<p id="cBihhF">Like the David Grann book it adapts—and, for that matter, the actual historical event it depicts—<em>Killers of the Flower Moon</em> hinges on Hale’s ability to play the part of the genial, sympathetic friend to members of the Osage tribe while simultaneously exploiting and killing them, in a series of schemes to claim their wealth as his own. Hale’s good at playing the part of the smiling, supportive white ally, speaking the Osage language publicly and treating the Osage like he treats everyone else: with warmth, affection, and good humor. </p>
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<p id="y3k2y0"><br>He even keeps this mask on behind closed doors, at least at first. Reuniting with his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), Hale smiles as he carefully tries to feel out Ernest’s sensibilities and get an idea of his abilities and how he might best be put to use. Hale <em>suggests</em> that Ernest might be able to get into some profitable trouble if he’s careful about it, but he never says it out loud, keeping plausible deniability in all he does. He can call the Osage “the finest and most beautiful people on God’s Earth.” He might even mean it. But that doesn’t mean he minds being the monster who kills them.</p>
<p id="bW2OtM"><em>Killers of the Flower Moon</em> is a film of many strands, including a depiction of what happens when that mask of plausible deniability melts away. Hale’s story becomes that of a cascading meltdown, as schemes he used to pull off effortlessly stop working and his pawns, Ernest chief among them, start screwing up the game. But it’s a slow-motion meltdown. Hale brings just a little too much enthusiasm to a community meeting demanding an investigation into the murders. And as his malevolence becomes harder to conceal, and his frustration mounts, De Niro’s performance becomes increasingly comic without losing its sinister edge.</p>
<p id="6HiVTe">It’s a balancing act De Niro keeps up throughout the film. Infuriated with Ernest after a murder intended to look like a suicide goes awry because the assassin shot the victim from the back, his blustering delivery of “The front is the front and the back is the back” provides <em>Killers</em> with one of its biggest laughs and most chilling moments. Calling on the comic chops he’s honed in movies good, bad, and mediocre over the past few decades, De Niro plays it like a frustrated restaurant manager fed up with a waiter who keeps screwing up orders. But the loss of a human life—the life of a man he knew well—doesn’t seem to enter his thoughts. And when Ernest swears on the life of his children, Hale takes offense. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="hdCOsB">Hale’s not amoral, at least by his own standards. He doesn’t think of himself as a bad man. He’s so skilled at compartmentalizing that he doesn’t even seem to see any contradiction between killing a man and calling him a friend, or of mourning with people he’s eliminating one by one to steal their money. It’s psychopathy with a smile. It’s also, the film illustrates repeatedly, exactly what it takes to succeed in America. De Niro embodies this, giving the film a jolt of black humor whenever he’s on-screen without ever breaking its tragic mood. It’s bold, stunning work—revelatory, even, given how easy it’s become to take De Niro for granted. As he enters his 80s, De Niro’s seemingly discovered he still has the capacity to surprise, an exciting development that suggests this next stretch of his career could be one of its most exciting. Let’s put to rest talk about what De Niro’s lost over the years. It’s time to start talking about what he’s gained.</p>
<p id="1l0LsT"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2024/2/27/24084239/robert-de-niro-oscars-killers-of-the-flower-moon-supporting-actorKeith Phipps2023-10-18T06:20:00-04:002023-10-18T06:20:00-04:00The Story of Martin Scorsese’s Most Forgotten Film
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.brentschoonover.com/" target="_blank">Brent Schoonover</a></figcaption>
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<p>The story of Martin Scorsese’s film career isn’t complete without his unlikely—though thematically consistent—telling of the story of the 14th dalai lama</p> <p id="LDiU25">Among the most boneheaded of the many boneheaded volleys in the one-sided battle between Martin Scorsese and fervent superhero movie fans is the accusation that all Scorsese movies are the same. Even if you ignore the vast differences in tone and approach that separate, say, <em>Goodfellas</em> from <em>The Irishman</em>, Scorsese’s filmography contains everything from Edith Wharton adaptations to concert films. He brings signature touches and abiding obsessions to every film he makes, but no two Scorsese movies are alike. </p>
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<p id="ZX33Jm">Some, however, are even less alike than others. When it was released in 1997, Scorsese had never made a film quite like <em>Kundun. </em>He’s never made one quite like it since. </p>
<p id="OzqsQZ"><em>Kundun</em> didn’t originate with Scorsese. It came to him. Melissa Mathison was certainly not the only screenwriter to consider taking on the story of the 14th dalai lama, the spiritual and, traditionally, political leader of Tibet. But most screenwriters did not obtain permission from the Dalai Lama himself. Mathison, whose previous screenplays included <em>The Black Stallion</em> and <em>E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial</em>, worked up a treatment that would serve as both history lesson and coming-of-age story. It followed the Dalai Lama from the moment he was recognized as the 14th incarnation of the Tibetan leader at the age of 2 through his decision to live in exile in northern India in 1959. Between those points is the story of Tibet as the nation felt the impact of World War II and, in its aftermath, China’s ultimately successful attempt to annex and take control of the country. </p>
<p id="TNYZFz">Mathison sent the treatment to the Dalai Lama by way of a Tibetan scholar. When the Dalai Lama expressed interest in the project, she then consulted with him several times: “He wanted everything to be as correct as possible,” Mathison <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/image/178027491/?terms=mathison%20kundun%20scorsese&match=1">later told <em>The Philadelphia Inquirer</em></a>. Some of those meetings included readings of the screenplay, performed in part by Mathison’s then-husband, Harrison Ford. </p>
<p id="so66Co">With a Dalai Lama–approved screenplay in hand, Mathison generated interest from studios, initially taking the project to Universal. In the 1998 documentary <em>In Search of Kundun With Martin Scorsese</em>, Mathison recalls being given a list of possible directors and saying, “The only person I want to send it to is not on your list.” After being told she was out of her mind for wanting Scorsese, Mathison pushed back: “I’m not saying he wants to do it. But I know he’s going to get it.”</p>
<p id="uSM46z">That only sounds counterintuitive. In the same documentary, Scorsese discusses being drawn to stories of “people who really had the guts to stand up and do things through nonviolence” while making <em>The Last Temptation of Christ</em>. It might seem contradictory that Scorsese made some of his most violent films between <em>Last Temptation</em> and <em>Kundun</em>, but those movies also invariably depict violent lives heading toward soul-destroying dead ends. What better counterpoint to blood-soaked cinema could there be than the story of the Dalai Lama? And what better guide to a spiritual practice that’s unfamiliar to many viewers than a Catholic filmmaker trying to navigate the territory himself?</p>
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<p id="9AwuGm"><br><em>Kundun</em> plays to Scorsese’s strengths in other ways as well, particularly his ability to depict worlds with distinct moral codes—a trait shared by Catholicism, the mob, Tibetan Buddhism, pool sharks, and 19th-century high-society New York—and the ways one era gives way to the next. Only a little over two decades pass between the beginning of <em>Kundun</em> and its final scene, but it conveys a sense of modernity creeping into the mountain nation even before its annexation by China. The shifting times that <em>Goodfellas</em> and <em>Casino </em>capture via pop songs, <em>Kundun </em>conveys with the introduction of new technology and mass media that brought world events to Tibet’s remote doorstep. A memorable late-film shot of the Dalai Lama with the piercing light of a film projector at his back is both beautiful and ominous. This is the world he’ll have to learn to navigate if he and his people are going to survive.</p>
<p id="7HQ2Fa">With its restless but purposeful camerawork and razor-sharp editing by Thelma Schoonmaker, <em>Kundun</em> is stylistically of a piece with Scorsese’s other films. Yet for all it has in common with Scorsese’s other work, some elements set it apart. Its distinctive look is thanks to Scorsese’s sole collaboration with the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, who took on the ambitious project as his follow-up to <em>Fargo</em>. It’s also the only Scorsese film with music by Philip Glass, a practicing Buddhist whose score joins the composer’s trademark looping themes with traditional Tibetan instruments to striking effect.</p>
<p id="YPyE2h">It’s unusual in other ways as well. The cast is composed largely of nonprofessional Tibetan actors. (Four different actors portray the Dalai Lama at different ages.) Their delivery often makes it clear that English is not their first language, but that plays like an extension of the choice to shoot the film in English in the first place. It might have been a commercial concession, maybe the only one, made by the production, but as much as Glass’s score and Deakins’s candlelit interiors, it plays into <em>Kundun</em>’s hazy, never quite real atmosphere. The movie is history rendered as a dream—and in a few horrifying flashes, as a nightmare.</p>
<div class="c-float-left"><aside id="xd4DA6"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Martin Scorsese’s Unwavering Faith ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2016/12/22/16040118/silence-film-review-martin-scorsese-70c94cbe1c76"},{"title":"The Five Stages of Scorsese ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2016/12/23/16047062/martin-scorsese-movies-50-years-72de1e5b173d"},{"title":"Everybody Loves Martin Scorsese—Except Maybe the Oscars ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2020/2/6/21126150/martin-scorsese-oscars-history-losses"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="NdxRqr">It’s that quality that most sets <em>Kundun</em> apart in Scorsese’s filmography. The director usually makes narratively muscular films in which every scene serves to push the story forward. (Even <em>The Irishman</em> and <em>Killers of the Flower Moon</em> play lean, despite their three-plus-hour running times.) Structured more like a string of vignettes than a traditional narrative, <em>Kundun </em>stays close by the Dalai Lama’s side and largely limits its perspective to what he can understand. </p>
<p id="KzFYVa">The scope widens as the Dalai Lama reaches maturity and has to deal directly with the changing political situation that threatens the stability and independence of Tibet, but early scenes are filled with details the young Dalai Lama can see but not yet understand. When lamas in search of their leader’s next incarnation discover him at age 2 (when he’s played by Tenzin Yeshi Paichang) and put him through a series of tests to confirm their discovery, only a shot of one lama’s hand shaking as he struggles to hold a teacup, overwhelmed by the moment, interrupts the sense of serenity. Later, when one of the boyhood Dalai Lama’s closest advisers dies in prison after allegedly organizing an uprising, the film offers few details beyond a quick shot of his death. To the 12-year-old Dalai Lama (Gyurme Tethong), it’s this chilling outcome that haunts him, not the intrigue leading to it. By the time the adult Dalai Lama (Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong) visits Mao Zedong (Robert Lin), his understanding of how the world works has grown. Mao’s hospitality and promises ring false. And when the chairman smilingly informs his guest that “religion is poison,” he understands the threat behind the smile. The film concludes with the Dalai Lama’s long, difficult flight to India, an act of defeat and defiance whose outcome the film, like history itself, leaves undetermined.</p>
<p id="EERUb3">Referring to the studio era in the 1995 documentary <em>A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies</em>, Scorsese speaks of directors who adopted a “one for me, one for them” approach in choosing projects. Scorsese’s own career hasn’t always mapped onto this pattern, but the instances when it has have been hard to miss. <em>Kundun </em>now looks like Scorsese’s biggest one for me, a project made possible by his biggest one for them, <em>Casino</em>, which reunited much of the cast and creative team responsible for <em>Goodfellas</em> for another sprawling crime story.</p>
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<p id="pS1JG7">There’s an implicit promise of support when a studio takes on a director’s one for me. To its credit, Disney made <em>Kundun</em> after Universal dropped it—but that’s pretty much where the credit ends. China warned Disney about releasing the film while it was still in production in 1996, and though the <em>New York Times</em> headline covering the company’s response—“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/27/movies/disney-will-defy-china-on-its-dalai-lama-film.html#:~:text=The%20Walt%20Disney%20Company%2C%20facing,to%20release%20the%20film%20anyway">Disney Will Defy China on Its Dalai Lama Film</a>”—is technically true, the defense proved both half-hearted and half-assed. After giving the film a limited Christmas Day release in two theaters, the company rolled it out to 439 theaters on January 16 without much fanfare. It quickly wilted (some <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kundun-1998">restrained</a>-<a href="https://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/1963/">for-a-Scorsese-movie</a> <a href="https://ew.com/article/1998/01/09/kundun-2/">reviews</a> probably didn’t help). Then the groveling began.</p>
<p id="nA4ZQd">In October 1998, Disney CEO Michael Eisner met with Chinese premier Zhu Rongji to discuss plans to build a Disney theme park in China. Of <em>Kundun </em><a href="https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing/">he said</a>, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it.” He continued, adding, “Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.” Nevertheless, China essentially made Disney submit to a boar on the floor–like humiliation before allowing the company to release <em>Mulan</em> in China <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/08/world/easing-tensions-disney-gains-ok-to-show-mulan-in-china.html?searchResultPosition=8">the following year</a>: Disney had to buy the distribution rights to a pair of Chinese films and hire a Chinese performance group to help promote <em>Mulan</em> in Europe.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="rEwQC8">Shanghai Disneyland opened its doors in 2016. As of 2023, <em>Kundun</em> remains <a href="https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/kundun">unavailable</a> on any streaming service. (The only legal way to watch it is via Kino Lorber’s typically well-executed Blu-ray.) Still, though it can be cold comfort to those who made it in such situations, the film exists. It was made, it was released, and despite Eisner’s comments, it was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq7EDnC629s">seen and admired</a>. (On the other hand, the film’s images of a mandala being made and swept away suggest an understanding of the temporary nature of art, and of all earthly things.) And while its marginalization may now make it look even more like an outlier in Scorsese’s filmography, it’s a major work—an exploration of the struggle between spiritual ideals and the hard realities of a fallen earth from an artist who’d made such struggles central to his work from the start. Without it, the Scorsese story is incomplete.</p>
<p id="21iOsT"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/10/18/23920951/kundun-movie-review-martin-scorseseKeith Phipps2023-07-18T08:31:20-04:002023-07-18T08:31:20-04:00Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros., and the Struggle for the Soul of Movies
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<p>The upcoming face-off between ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Barbie’ points to a conflict between two radically opposed visions of movies. On the one side: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. On the other: Christopher Nolan.</p> <p id="o8U8w9">From the moment Warner Bros. announced <em>Barbie </em>would arrive in theaters on July 21, 2023, the same day previously announced as <em>Oppenheimer</em>’s release date, the two films have been pitted against one another. But the face-off is ultimately a distraction from larger issues within the film industry, even if it involves some of the same players. In the battle between <em>Barbie </em>and <em>Oppenheimer</em>, the only rational response is to hope for both films to be (a) good and (b) successful. Both are, from all appearances, ambitious and unusual projects from major directors. (Greta Gerwig’s <em>Barbie</em> is rooted in IP but can’t be easily mistaken for the fashion-doll equivalent of <em>The Super Mario Bros. Movie</em> or a <em>Transformers </em>sequel.) Both, in other words, are the sorts of films treated as must-sees by those who consider themselves more than casual moviegoers, as suggested by AMC’s report that it’s <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/news/barbie-oppenhemier-double-features-amc-theaters-1235665632/">already sold 20,000 tickets to those planning to take them in as a double feature</a> and by the appearance of <a href="https://bucktee.com/product/barbenheimer-shirt?attribute_sizes=L&gclid=CjwKCAjw5MOlBhBTEiwAAJ8e1q1E0Da6WOgVfCbrVuZhP_XLlhHEzOtlnpcjBra9QLWbY9tbkZ5y9RoCJ4AQAvD_BwE">“Barbenheimer” T-shirts</a>. For those who care about movies, the only real choice this coming weekend is “all of the above”; it doesn’t matter which ends up winning the weekend box office.</p>
<p id="Wjmov9">The matchup does point to another underlying conflict, however, between two radically opposed visions of movies, their place in culture, and their future at large. On one side: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. On the other: <em>Oppenheimer </em>director Christopher Nolan, who, with each new revelation made about the man now in charge of Warner Bros., is starting to look like the anti-Zaslav. And though there’s ultimately a clear hero and obvious villain, the situation they’re both involved in isn’t a simple one.</p>
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<p id="WjNdZB">Like a lot of the predicaments that the world now finds itself in, it features the COVID-19 pandemic in a major supporting role. On December 3, 2020, Warner Bros. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/03/warner-media-movies-hbo/">announced</a> that its 2021 films—all 17 of them, including <em>Dune</em> and the third <em>Matrix</em> sequel—would premiere simultaneously in theaters and on the service then known as HBO Max. It was an unexpected development, to say the least. Theatrical exhibition had been devastated by the pandemic, and the FDA would not authorize the first coronavirus vaccines for another week. But this was a major studio putting its bets on streaming rather than theaters for (at least) the next year, a move most speculated had as much to do with HBO Max’s flagging subscription numbers as a concern for public health and safety.</p>
<p id="AuSC0b">Four days after the announcement, Nolan weighed in, <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/christopher-nolan-rips-hbo-max-as-worst-streaming-service-denounces-warner-bros-plan-4101408/">telling <em>The Hollywood Reporter</em></a>, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.” By Nolan’s logic, this wasn’t just about art, but about business. “Their decision makes no economic sense,” he added, “and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.” It was an issue disturbing enough for Nolan to end his relationship with Warner Bros., a collaboration that dated back to his 2002 remake of <em>Insomnia</em>, his first film for a major studio. In September 2021, news broke that Nolan’s next film, a biopic of atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, would be for Universal.</p>
<p id="PEgAUr">In some respects, Nolan was then an imperfect messenger for the primacy of the theatrical experience. In the year leading up to Warner Bros.’ decision, the release of Nolan’s 2020 film, <em>Tenet</em>, became a kind of beacon of hope, signaling the moment when movie theaters would resume business as usual. Its U.S. release date kept shifting, moving from July 17 to July 31 before finally opening in some cities on September 3. For many, it seemed too soon (and restrictions prevented the film from opening in New York and elsewhere). Warner Bros.—presumably with Nolan’s approval, if not at his insistence—refused to make the film available digitally for critics, requiring them to attend screenings. Some <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/this-is-not-a-tenet-review-heres-why/2020/08/31/4d808cd6-e881-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html">simply</a><a href="https://uproxx.com/movies/tenet-covid-coronavirus-movie-theaters/"> balked</a>. It seemed like an instance in which Nolan favored theatrical evangelism at the expense of public safety.</p>
<p id="Ua7N7W">Still, the merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery in April 2022 into the Brundlefly-like Warner Bros. Discovery seemed to confirm the wisdom of Nolan’s decision to bolt. With that merger came Zaslav’s ascent to CEO of the new company, a role he’d previously played at Discovery.</p>
<p id="e3aiWJ">A catalog of Zaslav’s greatest hits since taking control of Warner Bros. Discovery would be an article unto itself. In fact, <em>GQ</em> had a pretty good article written by Jason Bailey earlier this month that detailed just that—<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/07/05/gq-pulled-david-zaslav-article/">you might have heard about</a> it because the piece was edited to soften its criticisms at the request of a Zaslav spokesman, and then the story was pulled entirely when Bailey asked for his byline to be removed. (The original still exists in <a href="https://archive.is/2023.07.03-160323/https://www.gq.com/story/david-zaslav-warner-bros-discovery-ceo-tcm-max">archived form</a>.) Some highlights include the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115380005/warner-bros-kills-off-batgirl-movie-90-million-in">shelving of a nearly completed Batgirl movie</a>, which allowed the studio to use it as a tax write-off; the removal of original series made for HBO and other networks, including the once-mighty <em>Westworld</em>, also seemingly for tax purposes; and the <a href="https://variety.com/2023/music/news/warner-bros-discovery-500-million-deal-sell-film-tv-music-publishing-assets-1235652398/">sell-off</a> of over half of Warner Bros.’ film and TV music assets.</p>
<p id="inXXMp">Nothing is as concerning, or as revealing of Zaslav’s vision of the movies, however, as the gutting of Turner Classic Movies, the beloved cable destination for classic film. Thoughtfully programmed to provide context for our cinematic past, TCM has been essential to cinephiles since 1994—increasingly so since the shuttering of video stores and other channels’ retreats from airing classic films. (It’s now a distant memory that AMC used to be TCM’s rival.) It was, from all evidence, a gutting performed less out of necessity than out of an attempt to save money, any money, no matter what was lost in the process. TCM was, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-06-29/how-profit-driven-turmoil-at-turner-classic-movies-placed-a-vast-cultural-heritage-at-risk">by all reports</a>, a profitable operation, if not one destined to pad out the coffers of Warner Bros. Discovery to Uncle Scrooge–like dimensions. An intervention by Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese led Zaslav to restate his commitment to TCM and his love of classic film—which he also expressed via an unconvincing and glib Maureen Dowd <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/24/opinion/save-turner-classic-movies.html">column</a>—but TCM remains a decimated operation with an unsure future in the climate Zaslav has created.</p>
<p id="pnkFrE">Here’s a thought exercise: Would Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery have indulged Nolan’s pet project of a few years back: <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/5/17/17349312/christopher-nolan-2001-space-odyssey-unrestored-stanley-kubrick-cannes-review">releasing an “unrestored” version of <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em></a>, created by using original negatives owned by Warner Bros.? The release earned a lot of cinephile attention, and viewers who turned out for its art-house run in 2018—the same year the Discovery-owned TLC debuted the first episode of <em>Dr. Pimple Popper</em>—saw a gorgeous version of one of the greatest movies ever made. But so what? Why indulge in that sort of small-potatoes exercise?</p>
<p id="ffivz1">Another project is even more telling of how Nolan’s vision contrasts with Zaslav’s. In 2015, Nolan released the short documentary <em>Quay</em> and oversaw the release of <em>The Quay Brothers in 35mm</em>, projects dedicated to the work of stop-motion animators Stephen and Timothy Quay. The Quays’ work, largely unknown outside of cinephile circles, is exacting, laborious, and deeply rooted in the old ways of making movies. It makes perfect sense as a Nolan inspiration.</p>
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<p id="RuHxzM"><br>In some ways, it’s not fair to compare a CEO—who, by definition, has to be in charge of a sprawling operation—to a single filmmaker. But it’s possible that because of his dedication to the past, Nolan is better equipped for the future. Since the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/20/netflix-shares-fall-losing-subscribers">disastrous report</a> in April 2022 that Netflix had lost 200,000 subscribers, sending its stock plummeting by more than 35 percent, there’s been a nagging sense that something isn’t right with the streaming model—that the vision of theatrical releases as advertisements for film’s <em>real</em> home on competing streaming services may be misplaced, and that at some point, the bill would come due on the spending sprees used to set up streaming services for future profits. It makes sense that so many issues involved in the simultaneous WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes can be explained by a combination of greed and fear.</p>
<p id="SBkyQj">Nolan’s approach, by contrast, puts the emphasis on theatrical exhibition and on movies made to be seen by crowds on the biggest possible screens. Most films aren’t released in <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/bennyhareven/2023/07/14/the-top-8-best-ways-to-see-oppenheimer--and-why-imax-1570-is-the-winner/?sh=7f69b3227932">eight different formats</a> or accompanied by <a href="https://twitter.com/NolanAnalyst/status/1664579107198492672">format viewing guides</a>. Movies are an event, in other words. Home viewing is essentially the film’s afterlife. It’s, in many respects, the way things used to be and nothing like the world preferred by Zaslav and others in the streaming business.</p>
<p id="hQT9Eo">That might be why the <em>Barbie </em>(a Warner Bros. film) vs. <em>Oppenheimer </em>showdown feels a little personal. In many cities, their press screenings have been, at least initially, scheduled on the same night, forcing critics to cover one or the other. At the same time, Warner Bros. has been vocal about wanting to coax Nolan back to the studio, where he’d fit right into a professed plan to emphasize theatrical screenings and risky projects, as <a href="https://variety.com/2023/film/features/warner-bros-christopher-nolan-film-execs-new-strategy-interview-1235642666/">expressed by Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy</a>, co-CEOs of the division now known as Warner Bros. Film Group. And there’s no reason to think that De Luca and Abdy aren’t serious. They’re real film people with track records to prove it, including a recent stint together at MGM that included auteur projects like Paul Thomas Anderson’s <em>Licorice Pizza</em> and Ridley Scott’s <em>House of Gucci</em>. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="Hoi7WT">But they also work for David Zaslav, whose record has so far been defined by the trading of artistic achievement and lasting prestige for immediate profits. De Luca and Abdy’s definition of success might not be the same as their boss’s, and it’s hard to imagine that Nolan wouldn’t be wary about a return to the fold no matter what promises are made. Whatever the case, the film industry status quo that Zaslav has come to symbolize seems unsustainable—and, with the ongoing strikes, it’s not being sustained at all—and Nolan’s adherence to tradition suggests movies can still be made, distributed, and watched the way they were before the disruptions of the last decade. Whether he’ll be a model for others to follow or one of the last of his kind remains the great, unanswered question. </p>
<p id="MY4Lul"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2023/7/18/23798504/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-barbie-face-off-david-zaslavKeith Phipps2023-03-08T06:20:00-05:002023-03-08T06:20:00-05:00And the Oscar Goes to … Both of Them
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<p>Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert could win Best Director(s) for ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once.’ It’s not the first time a duo has been nominated, and history suggests the odds are in Daniels’ favor.</p> <p id="SJ1ltp">Film is a collaborative art, but it’s one with some pretty clearly defined roles. Those roles can get a little blurry sometimes but, in theory at least, it’s the director who’s in charge, and thus the person to get the directing credit. And directing credits tend to err on the side of simplicity: In the United States, the Directors Guild of America is reluctant to assign multiple credits, even in recent cases like<a href="https://www.indiewire.com/2018/05/solo-a-star-wars-story-phil-lord-chris-miller-original-film-1201967484/"> <em>Solo</em></a> and<a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/rocketman-director-talks-cleaning-up-bryan-singers-mess-1208284/"> <em>Bohemian Rhapsody</em></a>, where a substantial portion of what makes it to the screen is the work of filmmakers other than the credited director. Most films end up bearing one director’s name in the credits and, consequently, so do most films nominated for Academy Awards.</p>
<p id="Xq6HEU">There are notable exceptions, however. For an example, look no further than this year’s Oscars, which include nominations for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as “Daniels”), the current favorites to win the Best Director trophy (or trophies) for <em>Everything Everywhere All at Once</em>. Established directing teams like Daniels (or the Wachowskis or, to return to <em>Solo</em>, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) regularly share directing credits. In other cases, extraordinary circumstances—like Michael Apted finishing the 2012 film <em>Chasing Mavericks</em> for an ailing Curtis Hanson—lead to credits with multiple names under the words “Directed by.” </p>
<p id="jHcG5n">Given their relative rarity, films with shared credits have fared pretty well in the Best Director category. Though only four directing duos have been nominated, two have won. (Daniels would make it three.) But the shared nominations (and a couple of solo nominations with asterisks) reflect different sorts of collaborative processes and different possible routes that might end with two directors standing side-by-side onstage on Oscar night.</p>
<p id="B9cE4i">The first team to share the directing prize did so under the most dramatic conditions. From the time it reached Broadway in 1957, <em>West Side Story</em> had been a tremendous success, and—even with the involvement of, for starters, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents—that would not have happened without Jerome Robbins, who conceived the play and served as its choreographer and director. In adapting the film, producer Walter Mirisch determined Robbins’s involvement would be crucial.</p>
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<p id="eKAJ2f">Robbins’s inexperience with film, however, led Mirisch to bring in Robert Wise as a codirector. A prolific veteran who already had films like <em>The Day the Earth Stood Still </em>and <em>Run Silent, Run Deep</em> behind him and <em>The Haunting</em>, <em>The Sound of Music</em>, and many more ahead of him, Wise’s experience, by Mirisch’s calculations, would complement Robbins’s talents. “We tried to impress upon them that we wanted the best strengths of both of them,” Mirisch recalled in the 2003 documentary <em>West Side Memories</em>.</p>
<p id="TIbLES">It didn’t quite work out that way. Perpetually unsatisfied with his work, Robbins shot, in Rita Moreno’s words, “take after take after take,” prompting the film’s financiers to demand his removal with about 40 percent of the film left to shoot. Robbins exited, but he also left behind a cast with whom he’d rehearsed the remaining dance numbers, and most of his assistants. He also didn’t <em>entirely</em> depart the production, helping Wise with the editing after the filming had wrapped.</p>
<p id="cj00zc">The film became a critical and box office hit in 1961, and whatever sore feelings remained were not in evidence the following April, when <em>West Side Story </em>won 10 of the 11 Oscar categories in which it was nominated. Robbins was even given an honorary award for, in the Academy’s words, “his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film.” When Rosalind Russell <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIlIYiExXpI">announced Wise and Robbins as the first directors to share the directing prize</a>—beating out Federico Fellini, J. Lee Thompson, Robert Rossen, and Stanley Kramer—both men were all smiles. Robbins thanked the film’s producers, and the original producers of the play, and gracefully left the stage. (Robbins, however, never directed another feature.)</p>
<p id="GTA6ro">Would Warren Beatty and Buck Henry have been as jovial had they won for the 1978 comedy <em>Heaven Can Wait</em>? Maybe. But the charming, seemingly effortless comedy had a tumultuous production that predated the arrival of Henry, who showed up first to work on a script penned by Beatty and Elaine May before pivoting to codirector. It’s a process Henry and star Dyan Cannon were still coy about 40 years later at a screening of the film hosted by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz. Henry alluded to arguments with Beatty and, after Mankiewicz rattled off a long list of supposed silent treatments between cast and crew members on the set, Cannon replied, “All that stuff is such garbage,” before adding, “Well, not all of it. There’s a few quotes in there that are right-on.”</p>
<p id="OnITOt">A respected actor and writer with a cutting comic wit, Henry, like Beatty, made his directorial debut with the film. But Henry had an understanding that he would be second in command. Beatty originated the project, a remake of the 1941 supernatural comedy <em>Here Comes Mr. Jordan</em>, in which Robert Montgomery<strong> </strong>plays a boxer (a football player in Beatty’s version) who’s sent back to Earth in another man’s body after dying before his scheduled expiration date. And while Henry had enjoyed great success as, among other accomplishments, the cowriter of <em>The Graduate</em> and the cocreator of <em>Get Smart</em>, Beatty was the more powerful of the two and had been asserting that power on the set of other productions in the years leading up to his directing debut. “Warren gets me real cheap all the way around, because it was my big chance,” Henry is quoted as saying in Peter Biskind’s 2010 biography <em>Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. </em>“We both knew that he had final say, that was a given.”</p>
<aside id="895xnA"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How to Fix the Oscars, Once and for All ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2023/3/6/23626817/academy-awards-2023-how-to-fix-the-oscars-telecast-show"},{"title":"The Four Biggest Story Lines Heading Into the Oscars ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2023/1/27/23573428/oscar-nominations-best-picture-favorite"}]}'></div></aside><p id="Tez2RN">By Henry’s recollection, their collaboration was defined by arguments about everything from camera placement to Beatty’s habit of shooting dozens of takes to what color of pants Beatty should wear in a scene to Beatty’s suggestion that they “get rid of the character actors mid-shoot.” “I think he was testing me,” Henry recalled, “but I don’t know what the test was for. Maybe how much power he had over everyone, which he liked to do.” Still, Henry stuck it out to the end, in part because he also had an acting role in the film. <em>Heaven Can Wait </em>was given a warm reception when it hit theaters in summer of 1978 and received nine Academy Award nominations. It won only one, however, for art direction. Wise and Robbins remained the only directors to win together.</p>
<p id="jF4BNi">That would remain true for almost three more decades. During that time, the idea of shared directing credit became a sticky one for the Oscars. In 2004, Fernando Meirelles received a nomination in the directing category for <em>City of God</em>, a film for which Kátia Lund is credited as codirector. In the opening credits, Lund’s name appears second-to-last, credited as “co-direção,” followed immediately by Meirelles, who is listed as the outright director. For the Academy, which does not recognize the unusual credit of “codirector” (only films with two or more directors given the same title), it would be a distinction with a difference. For Lund, it would inspire mixed feelings. </p>
<p id="ui7KRZ">The project originated with Meirelles, but he felt he couldn’t make it without the help of someone with experience in Rio’s favelas. So he sought out Lund, who became deeply involved in the project. “I worked on the script from the fourth to the 12th draft,” she<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/feb/06/oscars.oscars2004"> told <em>The Guardian</em> at the time</a>. “I supervised the crew. I know I was there working with Fernando to construct the vision and style of this film. If I was not directing, what was I doing?” The Academy’s rules would put Lund in an awkward spot. “What I have decided is that this is Brazil going to the World Cup and I’m not going to be the one who wrecks the party,” she told the paper. </p>
<p id="tbralx">A few years later, Loveleen Tandan’s work as “Co-Director (India)” on <em>Slumdog Millionaire</em> would briefly raise the issue again, though Tandan<a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/slumdog-s-female-director-should-be-able-to-share-oscar-6809470.html"> went to great pains</a> to stress she considered Danny Boyle the film’s director. By that point a different team had won the Best Director prize: Joel and Ethan Coen, for the 2007 film <em>No Country for Old Men</em>. Their collaboration was not, unlike the pairings of Robbins and Wise and Beatty and Henry, formed for a single film, but the latest project in a lifelong partnership. That partnership’s history, however, does reveal how slippery movie credits can be. Though by all accounts the Coens worked in close collaboration at every level since their 1984 debut, <em>Blood Simple</em>, the pair would not share credit as directors until <em>Ladykillers </em>in 2004. In previous films, Joel took the directing credit, Ethan was credited as the producer, and the two shared the screenwriting credit. (Longtime editor “Roderick Jaynes” is also a collaborative pseudonym.) Sometimes movie credits don’t tell the whole story.</p>
<p id="fJoHzH">A Daniels win this year would seem to suggest that directing duos have an advantage at the Oscars, winning three times out of a possible four. Still, other talented directing teams, like the Wachowskis, have never received Oscar recognition. Neither have the partnerships of Joe and Anthony Russo and the Dardenne brothers. (To say that the style of these teams differs vastly is putting it lightly.) Peter Farrelly had his best luck at the Oscars with his first film made without his brother Bobby, the Best Picture–winning <em>Green Book </em>(though Farrelly’s direction did not receive one of the film’s four nominations).</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="0dxLdO">Some of those names also serve as a reminder that such partnerships don’t always last; the Coens, Wachowkis, and Farrellys have all begun to work apart from one another in recent years. Reunions, of course, always remain possible, as do future awards and nominations. In practice, two directors aren’t always better than one, but when it comes to the Academy Awards, Oscar history suggests a pair is a winning combination.</p>
<p id="iKpkwp"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2023/3/8/23630161/daniels-everything-everywhere-all-at-once-best-director-duo-historyKeith Phipps2023-01-27T10:49:39-05:002023-01-27T10:49:39-05:00The Four Biggest Story Lines Heading Into the Oscars
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<p>Is there even a Best Picture favorite? And what is Andrea Riseborough doing here?</p> <p id="3JgOYZ"><em>This piece was updated on January 27 with additional information after publication.</em></p>
<p id="ilNx2M">After the announcement of the Academy Awards nominations, some stories end while many others begin. Any speculation about, say, Tom Hanks getting a nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category for <em>Elvis </em>becomes moot. Other stories dramatically change shape, like Danielle Deadwyler’s once seemingly inevitable nomination for <em>Till</em> turning into a <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023-01-24/oscar-nominations-2023-oscarssowhite-again-black-actors#:~:text=Danielle%20Deadwyler%20did%20not%20earn,in%20the%20movie%20%E2%80%9CTill.%E2%80%9D&text=As%20films%20with%20Black%20leads,are%20resurrecting%20the%20hashtag%20%23OscarsSoWhite.">case study</a> on whether the #OscarsSoWhite campaign has had any genuine long-term effect. If awards season were a movie, the unveiling of the Oscar nominees would be the dramatic twist that propels the story into the final act.</p>
<p id="fPoHeh">What form that act will take remains unclear. The Academy Awards ceremony is just six weeks away, but a lot can happen in that span as films make last-minute appeals to Academy voters while gaining and losing that intangible but undeniable quality that can make or break an award run: momentum. (Look no further than last year, when voters finally caught up with <em>CODA </em>and liked what they saw enough to hand it awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Picture.) Some of the narratives, however, took shape the moment the names were read. Below are four story lines worth following as Oscar night approaches.</p>
<h4 id="Ldn4qw">The Best Picture race is wide open.</h4>
<p id="FOJQ4f">In many respects, this isn’t a new story but the latest chapter in an ongoing saga. The Best Picture category has been unpredictable since the Academy expanded the field beyond five nominees in 2009, blowing up the idea of what a Best Picture looks like. Consider the years leading up to it: <em>Crash</em>, one of the least deserving winners, took the prize in 2005, followed by <em>The Departed</em>, <em>No Country for Old Men</em>, and <em>Slumdog Millionaire</em>.<em> </em>Those three range in quality from “good movie” to “all-time masterpiece,” but they also have a touch of inevitability to them as ambitious efforts from well-established directors. None feel staid, but they do feel safe.</p>
<p id="OebzCy">Now try to find a pattern in the last half decade of winners: <em>The Shape of Water</em>, <em>Green Book</em>, <em>Parasite</em>, <em>Nomadland</em>, and <em>CODA. </em>The shift from <em>Green Book</em> to <em>Parasite</em> alone is whiplash-inducing: One year brings a toothless depiction of racial harmony, the next a masterful and cutting class satire from South Korea. It’s almost as if Faye Dunaway mistakenly announcing <em>La La Land</em> instead of <em>Moonlight</em> were an omen of chaos to come. Best Picture is a field where a long shot can seemingly come out of nowhere and walk away with the top prize. (Again, look no further than <em>CODA.</em>)</p>
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<p id="liTnk5">So what about this year? Gold Derby, which combines the predictions of experts, the site’s editors, and registered users,<a href="https://www.goldderby.com/odds/combined-odds/oscars-winners-2023-predictions/"> currently has <em>Everything Everywhere All at Once</em> as the most likely winner</a>. The site lays its odds at 13-2 compared to its closest competitors, <em>The Banshees of Inisherin </em>and <em>The Fabelmans</em>, which are both currently at 15-2, and <em>Top Gun: Maverick </em>and <em>Tàr</em> at 17-2. That looks like a tight competition.</p>
<p id="OaFveK">In many respects, it does feel like <em>Everything Everywhere All at Once</em>’s year. The film has exceeded expectations at every turn, enjoying a long life in theaters and a swelling fan base that at times has resembled the<a href="https://variety.com/2022/film/news/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-director-tells-fans-stop-attacking-film-critics-top-10-lists-1235454638/"> hivelike fandom</a> inspired by superhero movies. It’s an ideal Best Picture winner in so many ways: playful, cutting-edge filmmaking in the service of some pretty simple, laudable sentiments about empathy and familial love. But while Ke Huy Quan seems like a lock to win Best Supporting Actor and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert look likely to win the Best Original Screenplay prize, those might—<em>might</em>—also be the ceiling for <em>EEAAO</em>’s award hopes.</p>
<p id="IlXvju"><em>Banshees</em>, <em>Tár</em>, and especially <em>The Fabelmans</em>, the most overtly personal film of Steven Spielberg’s career, could offer competition. A win for <em>The Fabelmans </em>would honor both Spielberg and a film fueled by a love of movies, however complicated that love might be. Both <em>Banshees</em> and <em>Tár </em>are complex and challenging while still being approachable enough for older voters, and each features a handful of great performances. And after the nearly universally loved <em>Top Gun: Maverick</em> helped prove that, yes, moviegoers <em>do</em> still want to go to theaters, it wouldn’t be a surprise if it received some gracious votes.</p>
<p id="NNLe0b">It’s also worth keeping an eye on some dark horses. Despite receiving mixed reviews when it arrived in theaters, <em>Elvis </em>hasn’t left the building (sorry), and Netflix’s <em>All Quiet on the Western Front </em>racked up nine nominations. Was anyone talking about <em>All Quiet on the Western Front</em> two weeks ago? Seemingly not. But here it is, and while it might not look like a winner now, who knows what the race will look like two weeks from now? (And, besides, there is precedent: A previous adaptation won the top prize in 1930.)</p>
<p id="Wwr9PL">Further complicating matters: a changing voting body and a method of voting that sets Best Picture apart from other categories. The Academy <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/the-academy-becomes-a-little-less-white-and-male/489509/">pushed to diversify its membership starting in 2016 </a>in response to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign, an initiative that, at times, has led to a wider set of winners. The ballot has changed too: Since the expansion of the category to include more films, the Best Picture award has employed preferential voting, meaning every voter ranks every nominee in their preferred order. That makes the Best Picture race harder to predict in any year, but <em>especially </em>in a year like this one, when there is no discernable favorite.</p>
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<br>Where are the streaming services?</h4>
<p id="A5w4jh">It’s not like Netflix and Apple, whose competition helped define the Oscars the past few rounds, sat the year out. They just didn’t have a lot of luck. Apple’s most likely contenders were <em>The Greatest Beer Run Ever</em>,<em> </em>Peter Farrelly’s follow-up to <em>Green Book</em>, which debuted to indifference, and <em>Emancipation</em>, which didn’t stir much critical enthusiasm and faced considerable Oscar headwinds due to the fact that its star disrupted last year’s ceremony by <em>slapping Chris Rock</em>. Amazon Studios had a similarly rough year: <em>My Policeman </em>and<em> </em>the Ron Howard–directed <em>Thirteen Lives </em>were both theoretical contenders at one point, but they faded quickly. And finally, over at Netflix, the studio did rack up some nominations thanks to the German adaption of <em>All Quiet on the Western Front </em>and, to a lesser extent, <em>Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio</em> and <em>The Sea Beast</em>, but it expected more—unfortunately, Alejandro Iñárritu’s <em>Bardo</em>, <em>False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths</em>, <em>Blonde</em>, and <em>Glass Onion</em> picked up only one nomination each, and <em>White Noise </em>was completely shut out.</p>
<p id="CtNBmD">So what’s going on here? Just last year <em>Being the Ricardos</em> (Amazon) slugged it out with <em>The Power of the Dog</em> (Netflix) and <em>CODA </em>(Apple TV+). It’s certainly too soon to count streamers out of future awards seasons, but Netflix’s contracting budget and the still hazy picture of what streaming’s theatrical future will look like suggest that the era in which the Academy Awards doubled as a proxy battleground for media giants might be passing.</p>
<h4 id="C8ZeOl">Andrea Riseborough’s surprise nomination is a multifaceted story.</h4>
<p id="OtZnbC">It’s silly to call anything involving dozens of Hollywood stars and other media figures “grassroots,” but Riseborough’s successful campaign to be nominated for Best Actress for her performance in <em>To Leslie</em> was the result of a true groundswell—by which I mean an Edward Norton–sponsored screening, Gwyneth Paltrow Instagram posts, and Q&A sessions hosted by Kate Winslet and Amy Adams. The campaign went public in a big way on Twitter, when celebrity after celebrity (or their reps)<a href="https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/to-leslie-twitter-oscar-campaign-andrea-riseborough/"> tweeted out</a> nearly identically worded words of support. Have you heard? It’s a “small movie with a giant heart.” Everyone from<a href="https://twitter.com/AllisonBJanney/status/1615085229957414935?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet"> Allison Janney</a> to<a href="https://twitter.com/JoeMantegna/status/1612574482941759488"> Joe Mantegna</a> says so.</p>
<p id="a0OXTT">This isn’t really anything new, even if it’s taken a new form. It’s essentially an old-fashioned campaign that’s playing out in a more public sphere than usual. As<a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/01/awards-insider-little-gold-men-to-leslie"> <em>Vanity Fair</em>’s<em> </em>Katy Rich notes</a>, this is 2023’s equivalent of Sally Kirkland pushing herself into the Best Actress race for 1987’s <em>Anna</em> or Melissa Leo campaigning for herself for <em>The Fighter</em> and winning the Best Supporting Actress prize for her troubles. For smaller films—particularly ones as little seen as <em>To Leslie</em>—the road to the Oscars must be paved by very famous friends who probably owe a favor or two.</p>
<p id="hbVG0T">But the nomination is also a case of Riseborough being recognized for years of excellent but often unnoticed work. Since appearing in the (pretty good, slightly underappreciated) 2013 Tom Cruise blockbuster <em>Oblivion</em>, the English actress has mostly opted for lower-profile work, whether taking a supporting role in films like <em>Nocturnal Animals</em> and <em>Battle of the Sexes</em> or starring in top-rate indie genre movies like <em>Mandy</em> and <em>Possessor</em>. She’s committed, intense, chameleonic, and obviously respected. Cate Blanchett even took time out of her Critics’ Choice Award acceptance speech to praise Riseborough.</p>
<p id="JV021w">Yet while it’s never fair to say one nomination pushed out others, Riseborough was nominated while two Black contenders—Viola Davis for <em>The Woman King</em> and Danielle Deadwyler for <em>Till</em>—were not. That’s not Riseborough’s fault, but it does make this awards push part of another story involving the paucity of Black nominees, a problem that’s plagued the Academy for years and which it’s taken steps to correct. Riseborough’s campaign and nomination lay bare just how much of an advantage it still is to have famous and well-connected (and white) friends, which is exactly what led to the rise of the #OscarsSoWhite movement less than a decade ago.</p>
<p id="5VBCUp">Where Riseborough’s story goes from here is an open question. Certainly a lot of voters will now be checking out <em>To Leslie</em>, a film that barely played in theaters and earned around $27,000. Will the ascent of the film’s fortunes, and Riseborough’s stock, continue until she takes the top prize, or is this its peak? Riseborough would have to supplant both <em>Tár</em>’s Cate Blanchett and <em>EEAAO</em>’s Michelle Yeoh. That doesn’t seem likely. But it wouldn’t be the first time Riseborough defied expectations.</p>
<p id="IILCiR"><strong>Update, Jan. 27: </strong>According to <a href="https://puck.news/was-the-andrea-riseborough-oscar-campaign-illegal/"><em>Puck</em>’s Matthew Belloni</a>, the Academy is now investigating whether Riseborough’s campaign violated Oscar rules, specifically how they restrict lobbying: “Contacting Academy members directly and in a manner outside of the scope of these rules to promote a film or achievement for Academy Award consideration is expressly forbidden.”</p>
<h4 id="VHDVnD">There’s a gulf between the films that get nominated and the films that make money.</h4>
<p id="37AdXl">The Academy’s recent attempts to pander to popular taste have been pretty embarrassing. Remember when “The Flash Enters the Speed Force” won the “fan-favorite award” for “ultimate cheer moment” the same year the awards for several established categories were pushed off the air? Grim stuff. But there is a reason for it: Some of the most acclaimed and most nominated movies of 2022 languished in theaters. You can already hear the tiresome “I’ve never heard of that movie and no one I know has ever seen it” tweets being drafted in advance.</p>
<p id="oNlFKQ">Some of the struggling titles are pretty surprising, too. On the heels of <em>West Side Story</em>, <em>The Fabelmans </em>continued Steven Spielberg’s string of box office disappointments (with terrific movies, too). As of this writing,<em> Tár</em> has earned a little over $6 million, which makes it a blockbuster next to <em>To Leslie</em> but a disappointment considering it’s one of the year’s most universally acclaimed films. The old model of letting nominations boost a film’s box office doesn’t really work anymore, either. You can already watch <em>The Fabelmans </em>and <em>Tár</em> at home, and the same goes for <em>Triangle of Sadness </em>and <em>The Banshees of Inisherin</em>, the latter of which is already on HBO Max. Both those films fared better at the box office, but neither could be called a breakout hit. And while the Best Picture field also includes hits like <em>Everything Everywhere All at Once</em> and <em>Elvis</em>, and historically successful smashes like <em>Avatar: The Way of Water</em> and <em>Top Gun: Maverick</em>, their inclusion only accentuates the gap between blockbusters and everything else. (And if we’re being honest, a Best Picture win for <em>The Way of Water </em>or <em>Maverick </em>feels pretty out of reach at this point in the race.)</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="xELQ0p">This is, of course, concerning given the ongoing emphasis on big franchise films above all other sorts of filmmaking. What’s the angle in backing prestigious movies if awards don’t help the bottom line? On the other hand, an unexpected hit like <em>Everything Everywhere All at Once</em>—a medium-sized film with a giant heart that takes different forms at different points across the multiverse—suggests that conventional wisdom goes only so far. The future of filmmaking, like Oscar races, could zig in an unexpected direction with little warning.</p>
<p id="Ga8cWX"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
<p id="Y9C9Ft"><em>An earlier version of this piece misstated how many Oscar nominations Netflix got this year.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2023/1/27/23573428/oscar-nominations-best-picture-favoriteKeith Phipps2022-10-11T06:20:00-04:002022-10-11T06:20:00-04:00‘Triangle of Sadness’ Has the Best Scene of the Year
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<p>The vomit-filled sequence that marks the midway point of Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’ may be the best scene of the year</p> <p id="tGYboA">In <em>Triangle of Sadness</em>, the new, Palme d’Or–winning dark comedy from Ruben Östlund, the setup for the year’s most unforgettable scene begins with a seemingly tossed-off detail. In attempting to organize a formal Captain’s Dinner on a luxury yacht, Paula (Vicki Berlin), the ship’s high-energy, detail-oriented head steward, can’t get Captain Thomas Smith (Woody Harrelson) to commit to any night but Thursday. Ordinarily, this would be fine, except the ship is set to hit a low-pressure system that evening. Still, the captain’s the captain and orders are orders so Thursday it is. What’s a cruise without some choppy waters anyway?</p>
<p id="TJ1CIK">Captain Smith’s stubbornness has catastrophic and unintended consequences, but it’s not the only force at work. The day of the dinner, Vera (Sunnyi Melles)—the pampered wife of Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), a Russian manure titan fond of telling others “I sell shit!”—decides that she’d like the entire crew of the ship to go swimming as a treat. It’s a ridiculous request, but the customer is always right, particularly customers with her kind of money. So swimming they go, letting the night’s seafood feast spoil without refrigeration in their absence: a second flap of the butterfly’s wings, on the way to a perfect storm of inclement weather and bodily fluids.</p>
<p id="HXNuaH">What follows has the rhythm and progression of a symphonic movement. A few notes—a darkening sky, a guest making an unexpected and alarmingly forceful belch—turn into a theme that repeats in variations and builds in force. The mounting disaster even develops its own subplots, like a passenger who attempts to fight nausea by downing champagne. (This doesn’t work out.) In time, it all builds to a climactic cascade of vomit (some thick, some thin), diarrhea, and rainwater before being joined with another theme that serves as a kind of counterpoint. </p>
<p id="vRLHD0">Fueled by a seemingly bottomless supply of liquor (and an equally bottomless ability to consume it), Dimitry, a product of the Soviet Union who’s embraced capitalism with the fervency of a convert, and Captain Smith, a diehard socialist, debate politics over the ship’s loudspeaker. As the guests get sicker and sicker and the ship rocks ever more violently, they trade quotes from Ronald Reagan, Noam Chomsky, Margaret Thatcher, Karl Marx, and others. Like Sideshow Bob stepping on an array of rakes, the spectacle builds and builds, then loses comic steam, then regains it with twice the force.</p>
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<p id="8gIDP4"><br>Like the rest of <em>Triangle of Sadness</em>, the sequence is blunt, broad, and obvious in its satire—but also extremely funny and executed with an almost scary level of technical assurance. Each new eruption of vomit is both funny in its own way, precisely framed, and executed with expert comic timing, in part because Östlund has the patience to let the gags play out. “I think that real-time aspect often helps a certain kind of humor that comes out,” the director <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23387652/ruben-ostlund-triangle-of-sadness-interview">recently told <em>Vox</em></a>. “You can highlight small things, and then it becomes comical. It sort of reminds me of these Renaissance paintings, where there’s just a ton going on in the image, and maybe there’s a guy doing something silly in the background or a dog peeking over the frame, and it’s funny to look at.”</p>
<p id="6NZieU">But <em>Triangle of Sadness</em>’ orgiastic seasickness owes just as much to a pair of films from the early 1970s: <em>Blazing Saddles</em> and <em>The Exorcist</em>. From the former it borrows the idea of building a comic rhythm from human emissions; its famous campfire flatulence scene may have lost its power to shock, but it’s still a model of comically timed bodily emissions. And, like every film to make vomiting a central feature, it should thank <em>The Exorcist </em>for paving the way.</p>
<p id="J9x0Bn">Movies had <a href="https://letterboxd.com/jimmyjone/list/cinemetic-film-vomir/">featured puking</a> before <em>The Exorcist. </em>In Ingmar Bergman’s <em>The Virgin Spring</em>, a boy gets sick when left alone with the body of a woman his older companions have raped and killed. John Waters’s <em>Multiple Maniacs</em> prominently features a “puke eater” (an effect the director <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/aug/03/john-waters-multiple-maniacs-baltimore-criterion">achieved with Alka-Seltzer</a>). But for mainstream audiences in 1973, watching Linda Blair’s projectile vomit in the face of Jason Miller’s Father Karras was like something they’d never seen before. It’s effectively the Big Bang from which all future movie upchuck flows. That includes the moment in Rob Reiner’s 1986 film <em>Stand by Me</em>, in which Gordie (Wil Wheaton) tells the story of a pie-eating contest that descends into chaos after a bullied kid’s self-induced puking prompts everyone in attendance to follow suit. </p>
<p id="2chG4e">It’s the comic yin to <em>The Exorcist</em>’s horrific yang, but most memorable puking scenes are neither entirely one or the other. Like sex and violence, scenes of nausea and vomit tend to hit viewers on a biological level. (Some <a href="https://www.doesthedogdie.com/does-someone-vomit">find they can’t watch them at all</a>.) However paradoxically, the familiarity of the act makes such moments so shocking. Terry Jones appears cartoonishly obese as Mr. Creosote in the most famous scene from <em>Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life </em>and meets an absurd fate after consuming that fatal “wafer-thin mint.” But the gagging and retching that precede it are disturbingly true to life. The food poisoning scene in <em>Bridesmaids</em> hits so hard because it plays like an only slightly heightened version of a common experience. </p>
<p id="FR2SBg">It’s easy to see all of the above (and other films) in <em>Triangle of Sadness</em>, which synthesizes them into a kind of magnum barfus. The sheer number of vomiting characters rivals <em>Stand by Me</em>, the commitment to maximum grossness recalls <em>Meaning of Life</em>, and the force of expulsion rivals the demonically assisted spew of <em>The Exorcist</em>. But Östlund combines them to serve his own purpose, in the process removing any sense of relief. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="DvGP4n">Gordie’s story ends. Maya Rudolph and her bridesmaids piece themselves together again. Even Regan’s pea soup moment, though it escalates the horror of the movie, has a beginning, middle, and (gross) end. <em>Triangle of Sadness</em>’s central scene goes on and on, intensifying without abating and never suggesting that order can ever be restored. The scene provides no sense of resolution, and the film offers only a brief glimpse of the following morning before visiting a different sort of chaos on the yacht. The immediate problem passes, but nothing has been fixed. No one has learned anything. The purging has done nothing to expel the sickness that caused it.</p>
<p id="NPaeqw"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/10/11/23397767/triangle-of-sadness-vomit-scene-best-of-2022Keith Phipps2022-09-12T08:19:48-04:002022-09-12T08:19:48-04:00There’s a Movie at the Center of the ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ Drama. History Suggests It’ll Be a While Before We Can See It Clearly.
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<p>As long as Hollywood has been around there have been troubled productions. Sorting through the rubble of one like Olivia Wilde’s upcoming film has traditionally taken a very long time.</p> <p id="uHAi8G"><em>Editor’s note: Before </em>Don’t Worry Darling <em>hits theaters on Friday, revisit this essay on the long history of dramatic Hollywood productions.</em></p>
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<p id="qvmTSG">You probably haven’t yet seen <em>Don’t Worry Darling</em>, the second film directed by Olivia Wilde, but you’ve almost certainly heard about it. The film became the subject of <a href="https://uproxx.com/movies/dont-worry-darling-tiktok-video-olivia-wilde-florence-pugh-feud/">TikTok-fueled rumors</a> of on-set tension between Wilde and star Florence Pugh as far back as 2021. Since then, the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/9/7/23341759/dont-worry-darling-press-tour-dramapedia-chris-pine-harry-styles-olivia-wilde">stories of behind-the-scenes troubles have multiplied</a>, picking up subplots involving infidelities, he said/she said accounts of cast changes, and a video of Harry Styles maybe-but-almost-certainly-not spitting on Chris Pine that’s been studied with a Robert Langdon–like intensity. At this point the movie itself feels like an afterthought, a still nucleus surrounded by buzzing electrons that set off one unstable reaction after another.</p>
<p id="qhHfix">Yet the movie remains just that: a movie, as hard as it might now be to watch it without thinking of all the trouble and fuss that went into making it. In some ways that’s always true. It’s impossible to entirely shut out what we know about the people who make movies while disappearing into the worlds they create, but it’s usually easy enough to put to one side. We can think of Ben Affleck as both the Dunkin’-loving guy who married Jennifer Lopez <em>and</em> Bruce Wayne without our brains short-circuiting. But sometimes the story behind a movie can overwhelm the movie itself, particularly one like <em>Don’t Worry Darling</em>, whose<em> </em>story seems likely to continue unfolding up to the moment of the film’s release. Will the cloud around Wilde’s film ever lift? History is filled with films overshadowed by scandal and tragedy, but it’s hard to draw a conclusive answer from the past. Taken together, however, some of the most troubled films provide some suggestions of what’s to come for <em>Don’t Worry Darling</em>.</p>
<p id="JlI30b">One of the biggest scandals of Hollywood’s golden age doubles as a kind of best-case scenario for troubled films. In 1949, Ingrid Bergman was one of the biggest and most beloved movie stars in the world after immigrating from Sweden to Hollywood a decade earlier. In 1950, she was denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Colorado’s Edwin C. Johnson, who called her “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-congress-slut-shamed-ingrid-bergman">a powerful influence for evil</a>” and proposed a licensing system whereby those who committed immoral acts would not be allowed to work in the film industry. Bergman’s offense: She fell in love with a man who was not her husband and had become pregnant with his child. Specifically, she fell for Roberto Rossellini, director of her film <em>Stromboli</em>. Rossellini had become a leading light of the Italian neo-realist movement thanks to films like <em>Rome, Open City</em> and <em>Paisan</em>. An admirer of his work, Bergman wrote Rossellini a letter proposing they work together. They began an affair while making the film that became a public scandal and Bergman gave birth to her first child with Rosellini, a boy named Robin, shortly before <em>Stromboli</em>’s release. </p>
<aside id="Hr8buB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Everything You Wanted to Know About the Drama-Filled ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ Press Tour (but Were Afraid to Ask)","url":"https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/9/7/23341759/dont-worry-darling-press-tour-dramapedia-chris-pine-harry-styles-olivia-wilde"}]}'></div></aside><p id="MykwCq">In the press the film itself became, at best, an afterthought. One page from the February 16, 1950, issue of the <em>Los Angeles Times</em> tells the story in headlines, stuffing four <em>Stromboli</em> items next to one another. One concerns Rossellini’s assertion that the film had been altered for American audiences (the cheeky subhed: “Director Repudiates Parentage of U.S. Version of Bergman Film”); another quotes a Cleveland cleric discussing the affair as an example of the “sex exhibitionism which is a symptom of the moral decay of the West;” a third covers a Vatican judge who defined the affair as adultery; and finally, a story about its performance at the box office observed, “Ticket Buying on Thin Side at Bergman Film Premieres.” </p>
<p id="LO7ew4">Elsewhere, protests erupted and calls went out to suppress <em>Stromboli</em>, including a vaguely threatening letter to a Birmingham theater owner written by future civil rights archvillain Eugene “Bull” Connor “urgently request[ing]” it not be shown within city limits. Critics were also generally unkind, from <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em>’s Bosley Crowther (“feeble, inarticulate, uninspiring and painfully banal”) to <em>Variety</em> (“all it lacks is a good story” … “the star portrays a bosomy wanton through 95 percent of the footage”). The movie was doomed.</p>
<p id="UCZS4w">Except it wasn’t, at least in the long run. <em>Stromboli</em> is now rightly regarded as a key film in both Bergman and Rossellini’s career, an imperfect but ultimately stunning fusion of its star’s Hollywood glamor and its director’s fondness for real locations, non-professional actors, and street-level human drama. (It also features some truly dramatic scenes of tuna fishing.) It helps that Bergman—who looks like a misfit in these surroundings—is playing an outsider, a Lithuanian refugee fleeing disgrace and seeking a new life by marrying a sympathetic Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) who brings her back to a life of hardship on the eponymous island. In time, <em>Stromboli</em>’s reputation would be restored, as would Bergman’s, who returned to Hollywood at the end of the decade and, in 1972, received <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/29/archives/ingrid-bergman-gets-apology-for-senate-attack.html">an apology from the U.S. Senate</a>. The movie now looms over the scandal that defined its release.</p>
<p id="GfP9ZC">That’s the best-case scenario, one helped by the quality and importance of the film at the center of the tumult. Other films, though, haven’t been as lucky or as successfully rehabilitated. Movies that go over budget or produce stories of directorial hubris are particularly prone to being damaged by bad press. Among many others, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s <em>Cleopatra</em>,<em> </em>William Friedkin’s <em>Sorcerer</em>,<em> </em>Michael Cimino’s <em>Heaven’s Gate</em>,<em> </em>Elaine May’s <em>Ishtar</em>, and<em> </em>Kevin Reynolds’s <em>Waterworld </em>all hit theaters after talk of bloated budgets and production overruns. Some were flops. Some ended up making money. All have been reclaimed by admirers to one degree or another in the years since their release without ever quite shaking their reputations as failures, undeserved or not. History suggests that the only sure way to quiet that kind of press is overwhelming success. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola brought <em>Apocalypse Now </em>to a stunned world after a troubled production that stretched on for years and put his personal finances in danger. Almost three years later he wasn’t nearly so lucky with <em>One From the Heart</em>.</p>
<p id="WnmBD6">By contrast, there’s no sure way for a film to escape from a tragedy. When it was released in the summer of 1983, reviews of <em>Twilight Zone: The Movie </em>mostly confined talk of the on-set accident that killed Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen during production the previous year to passing mentions. But it wasn’t hard to find references elsewhere. References to their deaths—the result of a series of reckless choices that included violating child labor laws by shooting scenes with minors in the middle of the night—surrounded discussion of the film for years after its release as director John Landis stood trial for manslaughter. (He was eventually, and controversially, acquitted, in 1987.)</p>
<p id="UwzA41">The accident seemingly had little immediate effect on Landis’s career, though. Ahead lay Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, <em>Trading Places</em>, <em>Three Amigos!</em>, and more. One year after his acquittal, Landis even invited the jury of his trial to a free screening of his new movie, <em>Coming to America</em>. But the controversy almost certainly dented <em>Twilight Zone</em>’s box office. Producer and co-director Steven Spielberg distanced himself from the project and Landis and the film received a muted release for a major Hollywood production. Today it’s mostly a dark footnote. (What’s true for one film isn’t necessarily true for another, however: <em>The Crow </em>became a considerable success after the death of star Brandon Lee in an on-set firearms accident.)</p>
<p id="QTdQzV">Sometimes, a film is simply too big for one element, however tabloid-fueling, to overwhelm its reputation. Steven Spielberg filled his 2005 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s <em>War of the Worlds </em>with images inspired by 9/11 and its aftermath, bringing the full strength of his directorial skill to a powerful and upsetting science-fiction blockbuster (with, it has to be said, a pretty weak ending). In the roll-out to its release, though, all of that seemed on the verge of being overshadowed by its star, Tom Cruise, who chose the press tour to make an impassioned declaration of love for Katie Holmes <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/8/1/17631658/tom-cruise-oprah-couch-jump">on Oprah Winfrey’s couch</a> and engage in a tense interview with <em>The Today Show</em>’s Matt Lauer. The film was met with critical acclaim and financial success. It also set a template for troubled press tours that would follow, from Joaquin Phoenix’s apparent breakdown on the<em> Late Show With David Letterman </em>while promoting <em>Two Lovers</em> (later revealed to be staged as part of the faux documentary <em>I’m Still Here</em>) to Lars von Trier’s comments about “understanding Hitler” while discussing <em>Melancholia</em> at Cannes to Liam Neeson’s admissions of racist revenge fantasies in interviews around <em>Cold Pursuit</em>. Eventually, those films’ reputations settled where they belonged: <em>Melancholia</em> is considered a masterpiece, <em>Two Lovers</em> is remembered as another excellent New York drama from director James Gray, and <em>Cold Pursuit</em> isn’t remembered at all.</p>
<p id="D6F6eY">In time—and often it’s a <em>long</em> time—the smoke clears around even the most troubled films, allowing them to be assessed on their virtues alone. How long it takes depends on the film and its troubles. So where does that leave <em>Don’t Worry Darling</em>? It’s a little tough to tell, in part because new stories of behind-the-scenes conflict seem to surface every day. It doesn’t have to get past any tragic deaths or reports of budget overruns, but in many ways, the scandals surrounding it couldn’t be more of the moment: stoked by social media, aggregation-friendly news items with extremely clickable headlines, and story lines featuring celebrities with seeming armies of admirers eager to defend their champions. In other ways, uproar around <em>Don’t Worry Darling </em>resembles that around <em>Stromboli</em>, particularly the narratives that have made Wilde the villain of the piece. There’s a puritanical streak to some of the anti-Wilde sentiment—how dare she date a young pop star after separating from her beloved comedian husband!—and it’s worth considering what role sexism has played in some of the coverage. It’s not like a troubled production stopped <em>Bohemian Rhapsody</em> from becoming an Oscar-winning hit, and <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/hellboy-david-harbour-neil-marshall/">wild stories</a> of on-set conflict didn’t overshadow 2019’s <em>Hellboy</em> (even if the film ultimately flopped).</p>
<p id="pJXBkx">On the other hand, the film itself is tough to defend <em>too </em>vigorously. Scripted by Katie Silberman from a story by Silberman, Carey Van Dyke, and Shane Van Dyke, its central concept is ultimately revealed to be a clever, tailored-for-the-2020s descendant of <em>The Twilight Zone. </em>The production design looks amazing and Wilde directs with considerable visual flair, but its execution is lifeless in ways that blunt its point. Its positive qualities might eventually win it champions, but shake away the scandal and there’s not that much left. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="D5Z5UF">For now, <em>Don’t Worry Darling</em>’s press tour will go down as the most disastrous ever—until the next one. (Coming in 2023: <em>The Flash.</em>) The players may be new, but the story isn’t. Set against the backdrop of the Bergman affair and its aftermath, Kate Alcott’s 2017 novel <em>The Hollywood Daughter </em>concludes with chapters set in the late ’50s, years after Bergman’s tabloid headlines, when the novel’s protagonist, Jesse, returns to a Hollywood that’s moved on to new outrages. As she watches a tour bus line up outside the house where Lana Turner’s daughter killed her mother’s gangster boyfriend, her friend turns to her and says, “The old ones die. ... They have to, Jesse. There has to be room for all the new juicy stuff.”</p>
<p id="ODIQS4"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/9/12/23344605/dont-worry-darling-drama-hollywood-historyKeith Phipps2022-08-18T09:46:01-04:002022-08-18T09:46:01-04:00When the Creator of ‘Candid Camera’ Pushed Cringe to X-Rated Extremes
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<p>1970’s ‘What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?’ is a time capsule and a precursor to masters like Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen—but it also proves that even cringe comedy has boundaries </p> <p id="5EkkU4"><em>On Friday, Nathan Fielder will bring a close to the first season of his mind-boggling, skin-crawling HBO series, </em>The Rehearsal<em>. No matter </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/7/15/23219384/the-rehearsal-nathan-fielder-review-hbo-nathan-for-you"><em>how you feel about the show</em></a><em>, one thing that can’t be denied is that it’s pushing the boundaries of cringe comedy. So in its honor, </em>The Ringer <em>hereby dubs today </em><a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23311428/welcome-to-cringe-comedy-day"><em>Cringe Comedy Day</em></a><em>. Join us—if you can stop clenching your teeth and covering your eyes—as we celebrate and explore everything the niche genre has to offer.</em></p>
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<p id="Kppa6h">In 1949, <em>The New Yorker</em> turned its attention to an unusual new series on the still-new medium of television. Created by Allen Funt, <em>Candid Camera</em> featured a series of pranks performed on unsuspecting people who had no idea they were being filmed. But critic Philip Hamburger didn’t like what he saw.<a href="https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1950-01-07/flipbook/072/"> He found nothing funny about it</a>, accusing Funt of reducing “the art, the purpose, and the ethics of the ‘documentary’ idea to the level of the obscene.” “For my money,” he continued, “<em>Candid Camera</em> is sadistic, poisonous, anti-human, and sneaky.” That might sound like an overreaction to an episode in which Funt tricked a shopper into bouncing up and down on a mattress and pressured a messenger into delivering a dead fish. But it also sounds like someone who saw, however hazily, the far-reaching implications of what he’d just watched, recognizing that Funt had tapped into forces that would later power reality TV and the comedy of humiliation; forces Funt would discover even he could not always control.</p>
<p id="0YrWnf"><em>Candid Camera</em> continued to air on and off until Funt’s death in 1999. (Funt had a stroke in 1993 and left the show, after which <em>Candid Camera</em> returned in a variety of forms hosted by, among others, Funt’s son Peter, Dom DeLuise, Suzanne Somers, and, most recently, Mayim Bialik.) Under Funt, its formula remained largely unchanged: Funt would film his subjects in surprising, embarrassing situations, usually pitting their impulse to stand up for themselves against their desire to be polite. When the joke had run its course, they’d be let off the hook, often by Funt revealing himself. (Funt was so recognizable in the 1960s that when he ended up on a plane that was being hijacked to Cuba in 1969 a few passengers thought it was a gag—though the number would grow<a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/candid-camera-hijacking/"> as Funt told the tale over the years</a>.) The subjects’ response was almost always a mix of embarrassment, relief, and, sometimes at least, anger.</p>
<aside id="QlyEcB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The Psychology of Cringe Comedy: Why We Love to Watch What Hurts Us","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2022/8/18/23310222/cringe-comedy-psychology-history-the-office-rehearsal"},{"title":"Dashed Dreams: Remembering the Cringiest Episode of ‘The Office’","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23310195/the-office-making-of-scotts-tots-episode-cringe-comedy"}]}'></div></aside><p id="HOB09e">The show attracted some talented contributors over the years—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi0qNI1EIh4">Fannie Flagg</a>,<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGb_jzaUWOg"> Woody Allen</a>, Betty White, Carol Burnett, and<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMMSpM8vukI"> Buster Keaton</a>, who revived some classic routines made nearly unwatchable by Funt’s grainy camera and the cackling audience—and wasn’t without its inspired moments, like an elaborate sight gag involving a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8hFO791brc"> car that splits in two</a>. If it’s now difficult to explain why it was so popular for so long, segments of the show—like one in which<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29IDmf8NPUM"> a bunch of Bostonians angrily react</a> to the prospect of a dance club taking up residence in a vacant house—at least double as valuable time capsules for a vanished era. The attitudes animating the show could be a swirl of contradictions, too, as in a 1963 clip in which airline passengers <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMuZI5kmpVU">responded to learning that they’d be traveling on the first plane with a female pilot</a> (played by Flagg). It’s tempting to dismiss the premise itself as sexist, but the first female airline pilots were still 10 years in the future at the time and, after their initial shock, most of the interview subjects seemed pretty cool with the idea.</p>
<p id="0gNfTu">For the most part, however, <em>Candid Camera</em> exploited the crudest possibilities of cringe comedy. If Nathan Fielder and Sacha Baron Cohen are the rocket scientists of finding insights in the uncomfortable act of filming ordinary people—with the important distinction that their subjects know they’re being filmed, even if they’re not always fully clued into the context—Funt now looks like a kid playing with a keg of gunpowder just to see what happens. Especially when you consider Funt’s X-rated 1970 film <em>What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?</em>, an 85-minute journey to the uncomfortable extremes of the <em>Candid Camera </em>format. (Warning: The Association-inspired light rock theme song will lodge itself into your head for days.)</p>
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<p id="ZLIP0D">Funt made <em>Naked Lady</em> in between incarnations of <em>Candid Camera. </em>When the most successful version of the show concluded its seven-year run on CBS in 1967, Funt found himself with time on his hands and an urge to experiment. He decided to see what he could get away with in movies that he could never try on TV. The time seemed to be right for it. “By a very fortunate circumstance <em>Candid Camera </em>went off the air just at the time that the sex permissiveness was beginning to happen,” Funt told the Associated Press in a 1970 profile. “It coincided with the new kind of cinema in which the standard formulas no longer prevailed.”</p>
<p id="vjW9Qx">With that new permissiveness Funt decided to see how unsuspecting ordinary people would respond when unexpectedly confronted with sexual situations. He opens the film with the bluntest version of this idea, the one promised by the title: a series of clips in which office workers, mostly men, react to encountering a fully naked woman (not counting a sun hat) exiting an elevator. They are, predictably, unnerved and confused, as are the objects of gags offering slight variations on the same theme (a nude hitchhiker, a nude professor, etc.). But as much as Funt seems to enjoy seeing what happens when nude women show up in places nude women don’t normally appear, he also recognizes he can’t keep repeating that gag for the length of the film. And that’s when <em>What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?</em> gets both more compelling and uncomfortable in ways even Funt couldn’t have foreseen. </p>
<p id="gaoz72">In one sequence—set, like much of the film, to a cutesy song—a tailor caresses the thighs and buttocks of his customers. It’s essentially sexual assualt presented as entertainment. In another queasy-making scene, Funt asks people whether they approve of an interracial couple—the man is played by Richard Roundtree—making out in a bus station. The reactions range from disapproval to shrugs to a man lamenting that his son married a Mexican woman but boasting about their beautiful children. Funt, to his credit, agrees when one of his subjects says, “I think it’s great,” but until that moment it’s not clear who we’re supposed to be siding with. And it’s not clear at all what the intended point is in a chapter headed “A Few Thoughts About Rape,” a collection of short clips of more leering men and nude women bookended by a disturbing scene of a staged assault.</p>
<p id="kww4QM">The most telling time-capsule moments occur when Funt decides to play the part of an amateur Masters and Johnson. In one, Funt has a long, frank discussion with a middle-aged Midwestern woman about how much she enjoys sex and what she enjoys about it, including the occasional bit of S&M. It’s shocking because it now sounds so commonplace, the stuff of countless podcasts and stand-up routines. In another scene, a female interviewer dressed like an East Village hippie asks a man whether he’ll have sex with her only to be told, with a bit of shyness, “Well, like, I’m queer. I dig chicks but I only dig chicks when I’ve <em>known</em> them.” In a separate interview segment a few years before the <em>Roe</em> decision, a man laughs and says, “I’ve got a good gynecologist who got me out of the woods last year with an abortion.” It’s a snapshot of long-ago shattered taboos, freedoms gained and freedoms lost. </p>
<p id="GIvo6C">Not that much of this was evident to viewers in 1970. The film received an X rating at a moment when that wasn’t yet synonymous with pornography, though it certainly signaled that Funt was heading into territory he’d never explored on TV. Reviews largely smirked along with Funt. In the <em>Asbury Park Press</em>, Edward Knoblauch described the scene of the handsy tailor, in his words, “having a field day fitting tight slacks on his young lady customers” as a highlight of a “light, amusing, and entertaining film.” (He saved his objections for a later scene in which a woman was asked to pick out the dirty words from a selection that included choices like “horehound.”) In the <em>Chicago Tribune</em>, Gene Siskel declared it to be a “fresh look at stale attitudes” and lamented the discussions parents and children might have had if they’d been able to attend together.</p>
<p id="wZrrKd"><em>What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? </em>wasn’t a runaway hit, but it lingered in drive-in double features throughout the ’70s before becoming a cable staple in the ’80s. (It’s not streaming anywhere, but MGM issued a DVD version in 2011.)<em> </em>Today, it looks like anything but ordinary entertainment—to say nothing of a family film—but it’s worth remembering that, while <em>Deep Throat </em>and porno chic were still a few years away, it arrived amid both a wave of skin films designed to take advantage of loosening restrictions and movies like <em>Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice</em> that were trying to make sense of the era’s changing mores. Maybe in his own way, Funt was trying to do the same, even if it now looks like he was using all the wrong tools and applying them recklessly. </p>
<p id="hhNQXh">In some respects, <em>Naked Lady</em> confirms <em>The New Yorker</em>’s worst suspicions of <em>Candid Camera</em> back in 1948. “In reality,” Hamburger wrote, “[Funt] is demonstrating something that spies have known about since spies began to operate; namely, that most people are fundamentally decent and trusting, and, sad to tell, can readily be deceived. […] [He] succeeds in making them look foolish, or in forcing them to struggle against unfair odds, for the vestige of human dignity.” Funt might have claimed to be seeking insight into human behavior, but he came to his experiments with some preconceived notions. What do you say to a naked lady? Of course, like everyone else, you get flustered and can’t figure out <em>what</em> to say, and there’s a bit of cruelty in taking pleasure in others’ discomfort no matter how universal that discomfort might be. It’s feather-light sadism, but sadism all the same.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="vYqBEo">Which raises a lingering question: Is cringe humor, especially cringe humor in nonfiction, possible without cruelty, or is cruelty woven into the form’s DNA? There’s a great divide between YouTube pranksters picking on innocent bystanders and <em>Borat Subsequent Moviefilm </em>getting the better of Rudy Giuliani, but both are driven by a desire to humiliate. Fielder deflects some criticism by often making himself the center of his experiments in capitalism and sociology, but even his admirers have to grapple with ethical questions. What is clear is that reality television and comedic documentaries as we know them wouldn’t have looked the same without Funt deciding to make a career of embarrassing others, and finding common humanity in our ability to laugh at others’ discomfort with the understanding that, placed in the same situation, it would be our own.</p>
<p id="APZO2b"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tv/2022/8/18/23311239/allen-funt-candid-camera-what-do-you-say-to-a-naked-lady-cringe-comedyKeith Phipps2022-06-21T10:42:31-04:002022-06-21T10:42:31-04:00Cooper Raiff Is Finding His Sweet Spot in Hollywood
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<p>Off the surprising success of his first film, ‘Shithouse,’ the Dallas-born director is back with the winning ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth,’ and finding his place in a crowded marketplace</p> <p id="ofrEYB">Cooper Raiff is still figuring some things out. The Dallas-born writer, director, and actor is currently making the rounds with his second film, <em>Cha Cha Real Smooth</em>, which debuted this past January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won widespread praise, picked up the Audience Award, and sold to Apple for $15 million. Apple’s last high-profile Sundance pickup went on <a href="https://www.theringer.com/oscars/2022/3/28/22999430/2022-oscars-will-smith-chris-rock-slap-coda-best-picture">to win Best Picture</a>, so it seems likely that good things await <em>Cha Cha Real Smooth</em>, which debuted in limited release and on Apple TV+ on June 17.<strong> </strong>Raiff recently turned 25. All signs suggest he’s on the right path. But Raiff’s not so sure. </p>
<p id="dIbrx2">In <em>Cha Cha Real Smooth</em>—its title taken from the song you’ve definitely heard at a birthday party—he plays Andrew, a directionless recent college grad who moves back in with his family. Chronologically it’s a natural successor to Raiff’s first feature, <em>Shithouse</em>,<em> </em>the story of a college freshman named Alex (also played by Raiff) who feels lost and alone after moving away from his family. (An ability to choose titles that stick in the mind unites his two features.) Raiff was in his early 20s when he made <em>Shithouse</em>, a film with a protagonist in his late teens. He was in his mid-20s when he made <em>Cha Cha</em>, a film about a protagonist in his early 20s. When asked whether he’s especially comfortable making movies about phases of life he’s just left behind he replies without hesitation. “I love it,” he says during an interview at a hotel across the street from Wrigley Field. “I don’t feel like a great writer, so it feels like what’s special is that I haven’t shed that time, the person that I was. I can still touch those relationships and feelings that haven’t even resolved yet.<em> Cha Cha</em> is about a person ultimately realizing that his 20s are for him to figure out who he is.” Then he adds, “I haven’t figured out what my 20s are.”</p>
<p id="a4utQs">When I point out that, having become a professional filmmaker he’s at least got <em>that</em> much figured out, his reply is less expansive. “Yes.” And then after a pause, “Sure.”</p>
<p id="pObFRA">But even if it’s youthful confusion and trepidation that drive him, Raiff’s made those feelings work. He captures them well in <em>Cha Cha</em>, whose protagonist stares into a future that’s terrifyingly wide open—and ill-defined—after moving back in with his mother (Leslie Mann), middle school–aged brother David (Evan Assante), and stepfather (Brad Garrett). Unsure what to do beyond making vague plans to join his college girlfriend in Barcelona (even though she seems, at best, lukewarm to the idea), Andrew takes a day job at a fast food restaurant while working nights as a party starter on the bar and bat mitzvah circuit. As the summer unfolds, he drifts into a nebulous friendship with Domino (Dakota Johnson), the single (but engaged) mother of an autistic teen named Lola with whom Andrew shares an easy rapport (Vanessa Burghardt, playing a character inspired by autistic friends of Raiff’s disabled sister). </p>
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<p id="AoTd4J"><br>The film, in many respects, covers familiar ground. There’s a tradition of movies about men on the cusp of adulthood drifting through their childhood hometowns that runs from <em>The Graduate </em>through <em>Garden State</em>,<em> </em>but Raiff’s earnest, uncalculated approach sets this movie apart. So does the generosity of his film’s spirit. Andrew’s on a journey of self-discovery, but it’s one that includes recognizing that those around him are on journeys of their own that may only intersect with his momentarily before diverging. It’s a film without villains—even the bullies who pick on Lola might grow out of it.</p>
<p id="SnaExu">That sense of generosity extends to the way he talks about his collaborators. Raiff’s quick to praise Johnson and her producing partner Ro Donnelly, who together run TeaTime Pictures, and talks about working with Johnson to shape her character over the course of a five-month collaboration. “I wanted to make a movie that kind of highlighted all of her chops,” Raiff says. “I think she responded to that, and she was of course going to be a part of the creation of that character, because my pitch to her was creating a character with her.” He’s just as effusive about others, noting that Mann is his mother’s favorite actress and lauding Burghardt (who, like her character, is on the autism spectrum), Assante, and costar Colton Osorio for their work ethic. “They were the ones, outside of Dakota, who wanted to work <em>all</em> the time,” he says. “They always wanted to get on a Zoom with me.”</p>
<p id="5EOijB">Though <em>Cha Cha Real Smooth</em> is set in New Jersey, Raiff drew on his experiences attending bar and bat mitzvahs in Dallas and his memories of a community he knew well, if from a slight distance. In Dallas he attended a school that was “40 percent Jewish” and his friends’ coming-of-age celebrations became central to his social life. “I was going to a service and a party every single Saturday,” Raiff recalls. “Seventh grade is already such a visceral time. And then: puberty, and kissing, and spin the bottle, and horrible BO. That’s the thing I remember the most about bar mitzvahs.” Such events’ importance went beyond partygoing, however. “The Jewish community is so tight-knit,” he continues. “My girlfriend in high school I dated for three years, I did Shabbat dinner every Friday with her. That defined a lot of my childhood—that outsider perspective. Not saying prayers with them, but feeling like, ‘God, this community is ... I feel jealous.’”</p>
<p id="kgyUTm">Raiff took acting classes in high school and recalls being “obsessed” with watching movies, by which he mostly means the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films. But where Dallas serves as the backdrop to one half of Raiff’s origin story, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Eagle Rock, home to Occidental College, provides the other. “I never wanted to be a director until I wrote something, and tried to get so many people to direct it, and then realized no one wanted to direct my college love story,” Raiff says. “So I had to do it.” That college love story became <em>Madeline & Cooper</em>, an almost hour-long short costarring Raiff and his college girlfriend, shot on campus over spring break. Confident he had something worth sharing, Raiff uploaded it and tweeted “Bet you won’t click on this YouTube link” to indie filmmaker Jay Duplass, who lived near campus. “I created a Twitter account just for this,” Raiff told<a href="https://www.oxy.edu/magazine/issues/summer-2021/shouse-penthouse"> Occidental’s website last year</a>. “I had zero followers and I followed one person—and it was Jay.”</p>
<p id="6FLY0S">Duplass proved to be a well-chosen target. The writer, actor, and director watched the film and saw enough promise in it to meet with Raiff and offer advice on how to turn the short into the full-length feature that would eventually become <em>Shithouse</em>, in which Raiff would costar opposite Dylan Gelula (<em>Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt</em>). But for Raiff, committing to the film meant dropping out of school to pursue directing full time, <em>without</em> telling his family or new mentor and with no promise it would all work out. “We didn’t have any money,” he recalls of the experience. “People were not getting paid. And I think people didn’t have faith in the process.”</p>
<p id="1Sd8JT">In the end, it did work out, but only after considerable risk-taking and a grueling, low-budget production and no promise of finding a place in an already overcrowded marketplace. (Maybe those goofy titles aren’t such a bad idea after all.) <em>Shithouse</em> charmed audiences at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival, won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature, and secured distribution and a small theatrical run with IFC Films. Heartfelt and determinedly modest (and much less crude than its title would suggest), <em>Shithouse</em> bears the influence of the Duplass brothers and their mumblecore peers, but also fellow Texan Richard Linklater, with its focus on two people taking their first steps toward becoming a couple over the course of a night filled with walking and talking. Still, like <em>Cha Cha</em>, the film wears its influences lightly. Both play like the work of a filmmaker interested in drawing on the past without imitating it, or squeezing his stories into shapes deemed successful by screenwriting guides. “If someone told me the three acts of <em>Shithouse</em>, or the three acts of <em>Cha Cha</em>, or asked when they break off,” Raiff says, “I would be like, ‘Ah … I don’t know.’”</p>
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<p id="VTd53g"><em>Shithouse</em> also established Raiff as a charming screen presence, skilled at playing sensitive men comfortable talking about their feelings, a zone most other young actors don’t seem all that eager to explore. “I don’t know how not to sometimes,” he says. “My mom, like, cries every day, and so it’s hard to make a movie where people are not crying.” Raiff cries convincingly in both his films, plays well against both Johnson and the younger cast members of <em>Cha Cha Real Smooth</em> (particularly Burghardt), and brings an awkwardly comic touch to scenes like a job interview that goes horribly wrong. So it’s kind of shocking when he casually mentions that he doesn’t know whether he’ll ever act again, between noting that he begins thinking of films as a writer and that “directing is the thing that I really, really love so much and want to continue to work on and get better at.”</p>
<p id="cXCyLS">That might be one way in which Raiff is still figuring out his 20s. But, even if he walks away from acting, he won’t want for work. Next<a href="https://deadline.com/2021/08/cooper-raiff-direcing-the-trashers-30west-1234821740/"> he’ll direct <em>The Trashers</em></a>, starring David Harbour in a fact-based story of crime, nepotism, and minor league hockey. On the horizon is <em>Exciting Times</em>, an Amazon series starring Phoebe Dynevor, which he’s slated to cowrite and direct. </p>
<p id="Mhyxnx">It’s hard not to get a little worried when a young filmmaker who excels working on a relatively handmade scale has to find a place in Hollywood machinery increasingly oriented toward blockbusters and directors who can fill in the gaps between prefabricated action scenes. Other Sundance success stories have gone on to helm <em>Fast & Furious</em> and Marvel movies. When everyone from Chloé Zhao to Sam Raimi now squeeze their distinctive approaches into films dominated by a franchise’s house style, it often seems like scaling up is the only choice available. It’s not that these movies can’t be good, but swelling budgets often correlate with diminished risks and personal notes.</p>
<p id="XXyvqM">“I’ve been constantly talking about how I want to make sure that we’re not getting too big here,” Raiff says. “After <em>Trashers</em>, I <em>know</em> I’ll be going smaller than <em>Cha Cha</em>. Because I realized that I love this certain sweet spot that <em>is</em> lucrative. Like, why not do that?” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="lm9PQZ">Maybe he has some things figured out after all.</p>
<p id="Zqg4fc"><em>Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: </em>Uproxx<em>, </em>The Dissolve<em>, and </em>The A.V. Club<em>.</em></p>
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https://www.theringer.com/movies/2022/6/21/23176687/cooper-raiff-cha-cha-real-smooth-interviewKeith Phipps