Last night, MGM+ premiered the first chapter of its two-part documentary “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon.” (Part Two airs this Sunday.) It’s an exhaustive look at the 82-year-old singer-songwriter’s career—or, at least, the first chunk of it, starting with his days in Simon & Garfunkel and continuing through his solo years, ending around 1990 and the release of The Rhythm of the Saints.
The documentary, directed by Alex Gibney, mostly focuses on the successes, but there are occasional peeks at the low points. One of them, many may not remember. In October 1980, Simon wrote and starred in a movie that wasn’t autobiographical but was definitely close to his heart, telling the story of a singer-songwriter at a crossroads. “One-Trick Pony” got mixed reviews and bombed at the box office, proving to be one of the legend’s biggest failures.
For years, it wasn’t easy to find the film, with even the accompanying soundtrack (written by Simon) mostly known for its bouncy Top 10 hit “Late in the Evening.” But its mention in “In Restless Dreams” may inspire fans to seek the movie out. If you do, you’ll be greeted by a curious, muted little misfire that demonstrates that, no matter his prodigious talents, filmmaking and acting may not be among them. And yet, “One-Trick Pony” has this odd poignancy running through it—an acknowledgement of the path not taken by Simon, one in which a life in music was mostly filled with disappointment and heartache. Paul Simon is a superstar, but his onscreen character is far from it. “One-Trick Pony” is about Simon wondering how the other half lives.
It had been five years since Simon’s last album, 1975’s acclaimed hit Still Crazy After All These Years, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year. But in the interim between records, it wasn’t as if Simon was floundering. Memorably appearing on the hip new variety series “Saturday Night Live”—yes, of course, his turkey-outfit bit is legendary, but have you seen him play one-on-one with NBA great Connie Hawkins?—he soon became one of its most popular guests. He was also quite amusing in 1977’s “Annie Hall,” playing a corny L.A. music executive who lures Woody Allen’s singer girlfriend away from New York. That same year, he also released a best-of, Greatest Hits, Etc., which included a new song, “Slip Slidin’ Away,” that went Top 10. Things were going well for Simon.
What was also notable about Greatest Hits, Etc. was that it had completed his contractual obligations to his longtime label, Columbia. He signed a lucrative new deal with Warner Bros. and, as part of that agreement, Simon was itching to get out of his comfort zone. He was curious about making a movie.
“I wanted to do something other than just record an album,” he told Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh shortly before the release of “One-Trick Pony.” “I felt my choices were either to write a Broadway show or a movie. I chose the movie because I thought it would be closer to the process of recording. You get a take, and that’s your take. I don’t have to go in every night and see whether the cast is performing. Also, I could still record and use the movie as a score. But if I’d written a show, I couldn’t have recorded my own stuff—other people would have had to sing it.”
“One-Trick Pony” follows the struggles of Jonah, a mid-30s rock musician who, back in the 1960s, had written a generational anthem, an acoustic antiwar protest song called “Soft Parachutes.” But that was a long time ago, although Jonah is still out there touring with his band, gigging wherever anyone will have them. Unfortunately, his style of rock is losing popularity, as evidenced by the fact that a cool new band, the New Wave-leaning B-52’s, blow away the same crowd that was, before, only politely receptive to Jonah. (You can see why: Performing “Rock Lobster,” the Athens unit absolutely slays.)
Things aren’t much better on the home front—that is, when he’s actually home. Jonah is separated from his wife Marion (Blair Brown), who not unreasonably wonders when he’s going to stop chasing a young person’s dream. Engaged in random hookups on the road, Jonah makes gestures toward reconciling with Marion, but it’s clear they’ve done this dance before, many times, and if it wasn’t for their young son, Matty (Michael Pearlman), whom Jonah loves dearly, he wouldn’t try that hard. With the possibility of getting to record another album looking iffy, Jonah is facing both a professional and personal reckoning.
As “In Restless Dreams” makes obvious, outside a similar penchant for romantic turmoil, Simon’s and Jonah’s life trajectories didn’t have much overlap. (In the late 1970s, Simon was dating soon-to-be-wife Carrie Fisher, leading to an endearing moment in “One-Trick Pony” in which Jonah and Matty go to the movies to check out the then-brand-new blockbuster “The Empire Strikes Back.”) But if Simon played Jonah, some audiences and critics would inevitably assume that he was the main character—and that, by extension, Jonah’s artistic frustrations and music-business complaints were actually Simon’s. Truth was, Simon didn’t want to portray the character—his new label, Warner Bros., pushed for that to happen. (If Simon had gotten his way, maybe his buddy—and recent Best Actor winner for “The Goodbye Girl”—Richard Dreyfuss would have taken on the role.) Eventually, Simon realized he had to do it.
“I didn’t want to do a film about music that I couldn’t believe in,” Simon explained later. “That’s the biggest problem I found with other [rock-related] films. They seemed false. Take [the 1976 version of] ‘A Star Is Born.’ It didn’t seem like a rock film to me. … You don’t really believe Barbra Streisand is a rock star. You always know it’s really Barbra Streisand.” The idea of having Dreyfuss, or anyone else, lip-synch to his vocals just seemed silly to him.
Simon was in a position where he could make such decisions. Even though he didn’t direct “One-Trick Pony,” he did have final cut (according to the 1980 Rolling Stone profile). And he got to choose the director, which meant that certain filmmakers balked at his invitation, figuring they wouldn’t be calling the shots on set. “I remember having a conversation with Alan Parker,” Simon told Marsh. “He said, ‘What would I do here? You wrote it, you’re starring in it, and you wrote the music. I don’t want to be a yes man. What would my role be?’ A lot of people, I think, had that feeling.” Ultimately, Simon went with Robert M. Young, who died last month at the age of 99. “His ego didn’t get in the way,” Simon suggested. “He saw room for him to function as a director and be of help to the movie and still feel that he was, you know, in charge.”
Up to that point, Young had worked mostly on independent films, like 1977’s “Alambrista!,” which chronicled a Mexican farmer (Domingo Ambriz) trying to cross the border into America in order to secure a better life for his family. By comparison, “One-Trick Pony” was a more mainstream project, even if it did somewhat reflect the New Hollywood era in its lament for an outsider facing off with an unfeeling society. And Simon took his lead role seriously, even working with an acting coach to play this unhappy artist who, ultimately, must decide whether he’ll allow his personal, rock-oriented songs to be corrupted by a shallow music exec (Rip Torn) and the flashy producer (Lou Reed, of all people) who are only concerned about getting Jonah on pop radio.
The late 1970s was a prolific, if uneven, period for rock movies. You had acclaimed concert films such as “The Last Waltz” alongside disasters of varying degrees like “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (a jukebox musical that featured Beatles songs but not the Beatles) and “Renaldo and Clara” (Bob Dylan’s spacey, nearly-four-hour melodrama that he wrote, directed and starred in). The same year as “One-Trick Pony” came out, Hollywood released cheesy musical (or music-adjacent) opuses like “Xanadu” and “Flash Gordon.” Simon’s old partner Art Garfunkel had made the leap to acting—he’s terrific in 1971’s “Carnal Knowledge”—but Simon didn’t have much on-camera experience. And unlike “Purple Rain,” which would open a few years later, “One-Trick Pony” wasn’t meant to catapult a rising star into the stratosphere—and use a semi-autobiographical storyline to achieve it. This was music icon Paul Simon playing a guy who most definitely wasn’t Paul Simon. And yet there was something about Jonah’s disappointing career that Simon envied.
“Not since I was a kid have I played in a band,” he told Rolling Stone. “It’s odd to have been in rock ‘n’ roll all this time and never really been part of a band. I was part of a duo—a vocal duo—and I played with studio musicians. So I was never part of that life in that way, and that is an essential part of rock ‘n’ roll. I only know it by being with people who are in it. But I never lived it.”
In “One-Trick Pony,” he lived it, sorta, recruiting an actual band to play Jonah’s group. (Simon diehards will recognize his frequent collaborator, drummer Steve Gadd, alongside legendary bassist Tony Levin and the late, great Eric Gale and Richard Tee.) But in one of the immediate signs of the film’s problems, the music that Simon/Jonah plays in “One-Trick Pony” is just okay. Lacking the sharpness and dynamism of Simon’s initial solo work from the early 1970s, the songs don’t exactly make the case that Jonah is still producing incredible work. And for a movie that’s so much about the artistic importance of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s striking how un-rock the tunes are. (As Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau put it in his review of Simon’s soundtrack album, “Like so many aging folkies he’s devolved into a vaguely jazzy pop.”)
If “One-Trick Pony” was trying to suggest that Jonah’s creative heyday was long gone, that would be one thing, but the movie essentially argues that it’s the industry that’s changed, not our hero. That reading is backed up by something Simon said in that Rolling Stone profile when addressing criticism that he was too focused on the movie to make sure the songs were good. “I know how hard I worked on the music,” he said. “And I know what’s there in terms of melodies and rhythms and time changes.”
This is not the film’s only limitation, though. No matter how funny he was in “Annie Hall” or “SNL,” Simon doesn’t have leading-man presence. His dramatic scenes with Brown are often awkward—there’s one moment where he’s meant to get angry that’s unintentionally hilarious—and he’s not any more convincing when Jonah encounters different desirable women in his travels. (Joan Hackett and Mare Winningham do their best playing off his drab, stiff demeanor.) It’s telling that, like Dylan in “Renaldo and Clara,” the only sequences that really work really are the ones in which the star is performing on stage—or when Simon interacts with the young, adorable Pearlman. In these scenes, Simon seems to loosen up—his discomfort and self-consciousness fade away.
Simon’s ineffectual acting might have been less of a hurdle if it tied into the character’s depressive misgivings about the musical purgatory in which he finds himself. (One of the movie’s most cutting moments is when Jonah allows himself to be part of a 1960s-nostalgia TV special, alongside the Lovin’ Spoonful and Sam & Dave, all of them treated like has-been curiosities—exotic animals in a surreal pop-culture zoo exhibit.) But Simon’s script doesn’t lend much insight into who Jonah is—and his odyssey in the film isn’t particularly engaging.
There’s a potentially great idea in “One-Trick Pony”: What does the life of a struggling, working-class musician, the kind who never gets movies made about him, look like? But Simon seems too removed from that reality to embody it. “One-Trick Pony” is so confused about the world it’s trying to dissect that, watching the film this time, I wondered if the wondrous B-52’s were supposed to represent everything that was “wrong” about contemporary music—while noble Jonah symbolized “real” art and rock ‘n’ roll integrity. (I’m not the only one: In a recent interview, B-52’s member Cindy Wilson admitted to having the same feeling regarding what their purpose in the film was supposed to be, saying: “He picked the wrong band! That was hilarious, the way that happened.”)
You can’t deny the empathy Simon conveys toward Jonah, knowing how lucky he is not to have met the same fate. Being incredibly talented has no doubt helped Simon, but even the most successful artists recognize the fickleness of the business—how an unwise creative direction here or a bit of bad timing there can fatally derail a career. So many folk artists didn’t survive the shifting musical climate once rock ‘n’ roll took hold. Which is why, with hindsight, “One-Trick Pony” might be best viewed as an unlikely companion piece to “Inside Llewyn Davis,” another tale of a poor bastard who never could quite get it together commercially. However, unlike the Coen Brothers’ soulful, darkly comic masterwork, “One-Trick Pony” rarely touches something deeper or truer about art, life, relationships, legacy and impermanence. Not that there aren’t great jokes in Simon’s film—casting the snarling, uncompromising Reed as the smiling avatar of artistic sellout was inspired—but too often “One-Trick Pony” is too superficially glum, too dragged down by a stagnant lead performance, to be a compelling portrait. Simon cares about Jonah, but he doesn’t really understand him.
And yet, that lack of understanding is what makes the film somewhat touching. Tracking down that Rolling Stone piece, I learned something: “One-Trick Pony” originally had a different ending before it came to theaters. While it seems perverse to worry about a spoiler alert for a 44-year-old film, I will just say that Simon’s initial choice of how to resolve Jonah’s struggles strikes me as either falsely optimistic or dully cynical.
As the movie reaches its finale, Jonah is working on his new album, with Reed’s producer throwing on a lot of strings and saxophones to give the songs more commercial appeal. Naturally, Jonah hates it, although it’s an indictment of “One-Trick Pony” that I think those touches actually make the tunes better. (And it’s not like Paul Simon doesn’t incorporate horns and strings to his own material all the time.)
But in the theatrical version, rather than continuing to fight the record label suits, Jonah does something else, leading to an ending that feels defiant and striking in the way so many 1970s American movies did. But it’s certainly not triumphant—if anything, it’s very much in keeping with this sad, beaten musician who can tell the deck is stacked against him. Also, I suspect it’s not something Paul Simon himself would ever do.
He recovered from this film’s failure—just like, decades later, he’d recover from finally making his Broadway debut with the poorly-received musical The Capeman. One of the hallmarks of his hallowed career is that, no matter what, he has just kept going. What makes the failed, fascinating “One-Trick Pony” still haunting is it’s him, for once, imagining what hanging it up would look like.
]]>In the moment that it’s happening, it can be difficult to recognize that an actor is changing course. You’ve come to know this star in one guise—considered him to be one of the best to ever do it—and then he takes on a role that feels out of character. At the time, the role seems like a novelty—a change of pace—but in retrospect, you can pinpoint that movie as the one that signaled a new beginning. And how you feel about that new beginning is often tied up in how you feel about that movie.
Robert De Niro had done comedy before “Analyze This.” He was sensational as the straight arrow in “Midnight Run.” Even further back than that, he was magnetic as the disturbed stand-up in “King of Comedy,” which, depending on your point-of-view, was a comedy, a thriller, or a horror movie. But “Analyze This,” which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, was different from those previous attempts at being funny. The film capitalized on the imposing onscreen persona audiences had come to know—the young Vito Corleone from “The Godfather Part II,” the aging Jimmy Conway in “Goodfellas”—and gave it a wry twist. The performances we love him for, he was about to spoof.
It was an amusing commentary—we didn’t know it was a sign of things to come. More than two decades later, when so many of us lament who De Niro has become—the still-dynamic actor who occasionally reminds us of how great he once reliably was—we should look back at this fairly disposable mob comedy he did with Billy Crystal. It was the moment he decided to become the King of Comedy, for better and (mostly) for worse.
“Analyze This” had a clever premise. A powerful mobster, Paul, is starting to be hampered by stress and anxiety, but he’s afraid to share that info with anyone, lest he be considered weak—especially by New York’s rival crime families. Through convoluted circumstances, he is clandestinely put in touch with a psychiatrist, Ben, who’s terrified at the prospect of treating a killer. But Ben quickly realizes it’s an offer he can’t refuse, which causes considerable problems since he’s about to marry his reasonably terrified girlfriend Laura.
Directed by Harold Ramis, who co-wrote the script with “The Larry Sanders Show” writer Peter Tolan and Oscar-winning filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, “Analyze This” opened on March 5, 1999, just a few months after an ambitious new HBO drama with a similar conceit, “The Sopranos.” But at the time, “Analyze This” was the more high-profile project because of its stars, with Crystal playing the anxious, wisecracking Ben. (Lisa Kudrow, world-famous thanks to “Friends,” was cast as Laura.) For Paul, the filmmakers thought De Niro would be perfect—if he’d be up for it, of course.
“[Producer Paula Weinstein] said, ‘Do you think he would do it?,’” Crystal recalled around the film’s release. “I said, ‘I think he should do this because this is great for him. It’d be hilarious, and when you want scary, there’s nobody scarier. Who do you want to see do that? There’s a number of people that would be very good at this, but [they] are not him.’”
The idea wasn’t that crazy. Despite reuniting with director Martin Scorsese for 1995’s “Casino,” another engrossing mob tale, De Niro had sprinkled in some comedies in subsequent years, proving very amusing as a hair-trigger doofus criminal in “Jackie Brown” and a cynical spin doctor in “Wag the Dog.” Still, signing on to play Paul was the most overt acknowledgment of his cinematic persona—the casting was funny precisely because he’s Robert De Niro. And, ironically, there was a “Godfather” precedent to this type of cinematic subversion: For the 1990 comedy “The Freshman,” Marlon Brando played a mob boss who sure seems a lot like Vito Corleone. Now it was time for the man who played the younger Vito to take his turn tweaking his image.
Go back and watch “Analyze This” now and you’ll notice how much it represents a turning point in the man’s career. De Niro may not have been a stranger to comedies, but he’d never done something quite so broad and mainstream. “Midnight Run” shined thanks to his opposites-attract rapport with Charles Grodin, but in that film the comic friction came from how much Grodin’s character got under his skin. With “Analyze This,” Paul was the unmovable force—the frightening gangster you don’t want to cross—while Ben was the very Crystal-esque everyman freaking out about the impossible situation in which he’s found himself. De Niro would later go bigger in his comedic roles, but here he’s still restrained. He understands the joke only works if he underplays.
“Analyze This” is not especially successful—at least artistically. Yes, it’s got a killer concept and some funny moments, but Ramis struggles to ratchet up the comedic tension between the two leads. (Basically, Ben doesn’t want to get involved in helping Paul, Paul forces him to do so, and then Ben complies. Later, Ben tries again to extricate himself, also to no avail. And so on.) You keep waiting for “Analyze This” to kick into a higher gear, for something unexpected to happen. (Maybe Ben gets seduced by the gangster lifestyle? May Paul turns out to understand human psychology better than his shrink?) But the movie just keeps skimming the surface, rarely going beyond the obvious jokes. (There are some jokey references to scenes in “The Godfather,” although the payoff is never that rewarding.)
Nonetheless, “Analyze This” got okay reviews and was a sizable hit, prompting the 2002 sequel “Analyze That.” (James Gandolfini’s anguished mobster Tony Soprano even mentioned the 1999 original on an episode of “The Sopranos,” not taking kindly to the plot’s similarities to his “real” life.) It’s hard not to be nostalgic for an era, not so long ago, when studios actually made modestly budgeted comedies—and when those comedies did really well at the box office. But unlike, say, Ramis’ “Groundhog Day,” “Analyze This” wouldn’t be held up as the gold standard for that period of Hollywood comedies.
Part of the problem was evident on set. In a terrific 2004 New Yorker profile of Ramis, Crystal described the contentious making of “Analyze This”: “There were times when I thought the film was becoming too gangster-y, and times when Bob thought it was too funny. We were like pit bulls on Harold’s pant leg.” Ramis told New Yorker writer Tad Friend that he sided with Crystal in the debate. “You have to decide who you’re making the movie for,” the director explained, “and that’s…” Ramis paused and then added, “I don’t want to say the lowest common denominator, but the biggest audience you can get. I’ve had a lot of people tell me they loved ‘Analyze This’ until Billy Crystal does shtick pretending to be a mobster [at the end of the film] and that’s where we lost them. If the audience is divided, I have to cast the winning vote, and it’s always been comedy first with me, even at the expense of story or continuity.”
“Analyze This” loses me at that moment, too, although to be honest, I jump off before then. (As I get older, my Crystal allergy has gotten progressively worse, and he’s pretty unchecked throughout the film.) But even so, the movie never quite marries its darker and lighter elements. Those issues also affect De Niro, who’s very convincing as the intimidating mobster but doesn’t entirely figure out how to make him hilarious. It makes me think of an interview Scorsese gave last year, in which he mentioned, “[De Niro] wanted me to do ‘Analyze This,’ and I said, “We already did it. It was ‘Goodfellas.’” In fact, you could argue De Niro is just as funny in Scorsese’s mob movies as he is in “Analyze This,” even though those characters are a whole lot more serious.
Nonetheless, the commercial success of “Analyze This” created a new way for Hollywood to look at the consummate actor’s actor: Sure, he was a formidable presence, but he could also be funny. And De Niro decided to take the plunge. “It didn't bother me, and I never thought about it,” De Niro said in 2015 when asked about this shift to comedy. Later, he added, “I didn’t worry about [whether it was good for my career] too much. After ‘Analyze This,’ Jay Roach asked me if I wanted to do ‘Meet the Parents.’ I liked Jay a lot, so that’s how it started.”
Everyone knows how it’s been going since: If “Analyze This” was merely a hit, 2000’s “Meet the Parents” was a phenomenon, one of the year’s highest-grossing films, which gave birth to a franchise that earned approximately $1.2 billion worldwide. As the grumpy former CIA operative Jack, who can’t stand his precious daughter’s uptight boyfriend, De Niro wasn’t aping his mobster past, but he did find a humorous spin on the many bruisers and badasses he’d brought to the screen. (Let history remember that, the same year that “Meet the Parents” opened, he also hammed it up as Fearless Leader in “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle.”) “Meet the Parents” toyed with the same tough guy/wimpy guy comedy-duo dynamic as “Analyze This”—this time teaming him with Ben Stiller—but the former film’s script was far funnier, repeatedly milking the idea that, seriously, Robert De Niro would be the scariest potential father-in-law to have. Everything that Crystal had said would make De Niro so good for “Analyze This” actually came to fruition a year later.
De Niro was soon doing comedies on a regular basis. Sadly, most of them were abysmal. (The “Meet the Parents” sequels are especially dire.) Occasionally, you’d get a gem—he’s delightful in his “30 Rock” cameo playing himself (turns out, he’s secretly British!)—but more often, you’d get a “Showtime.” Or an “Analyze That.” Or a “New Year’s Eve.” What was initially novel—serious, two-time Oscar-winner Robert De Niro is being funny for once!—started to calcify into a stale gimmick. As excellent an actor as he is, comedy-comedy has never come easily to him. He’s needed to attack it from an angle, not head-on. Even as Rupert Pupkin, perhaps the most famous unfunny stand-up in cinematic history, the humor is subsumed in desperation and mental instability. “The King of Comedy’s” laughs catch in the throat, the possibility that De Niro’s character could snap at any moment never far from our minds. It’s an incredible performance because it’s not naturally comedic—it’s the tragic story of a disturbed entertainer who doesn’t have the chops.
In the last few decades, it’s become commonplace for film critics and entertainment journalists to wring their hands, wondering what has become of the once-mighty Robert De Niro. Why can’t he still do good work? Why does he constantly pick such mediocre material? Recent successes like “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” have helped bat away that sentiment, but then you’ll be greeted by the arrival of something so marginal as “The War with Grandpa” or “About My Father” and you’re reminded all over again, “Oh, right, there’s still that De Niro who signs up for garbage.”
Granted, he’s made a lot of bad movies this century, but it’s something about the bad comedies that’s especially galling. They feel like a betrayal of his fans, and also a betrayal of his considerable talent. Partly, this is a symptom of our generally dim view of comedy in comparison to drama, with De Niro long representing the pinnacle of dramatic film acting. Maybe if he proved himself to be a remarkable comedian, we’d feel differently, but he hasn’t—more accurately, he’s a superb actor who sometimes has lucked into finding a funny script. Not every brilliant dramatic actor can be a sterling comic star—Daniel Day-Lewis and Denzel Washington have rarely tried to show off their humorous side—but because De Niro keeps slumming in dreck, his limitations are more apparent. And more dispiriting.
Did any of us have any idea where De Niro was heading 25 years ago? He was just playing an amusingly troubled mobster tormenting his antsy shrink, a revered actor having a little fun doing something different. In the canon of his work, “Analyze This” is pretty forgettable—and yet, it’s the reason we now have Funny De Niro. “Meet the Parents” wouldn’t have happened without it. Unfortunately, neither would have “Dirty Grandpa.”
Not that long ago, it was exciting to wonder what would happen if De Niro pivoted to comedy. For the most part, it’s been disappointing to find out the answer.
]]>Clad in gowns and tuxes on the morning of Oscar Sunday, journalists from around the world board shuttles that transport them from the Cinerama Dome to a point near the complex that houses the Dolby Theatre—where the big event takes place. This year, however, the logistics had to account for the expected pro-Palestine protests in the vicinity.
As the shuttle I was on approached the drop-off area around noon, four hours before showtime, a small caravan of cars bearing “Free Palestine” on their rear windshields slowed down traffic on the corner of Highland and Sunset, where a sizeable group of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza congregated. The demonstrations occurred just a couple blocks away from where some of the world’s most influential people gathered to celebrate the films of 2023, several of which dealt with past and ongoing conflicts.
Inside the Oscar interview room, where winners speak briefly to the press moments after their onstage speeches, no surprises were expected. Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” started the night with 13 nominations, seven of which turned into wins by the time Al Pacino unceremoniously revealed that, as predicted, it had received the Best Picture Oscar.
But whether on site, in the periphery, or watching from home, the fog of war was inescapable at yesterday’s ceremony. Not only because the frontrunner and eventual victor chronicles the creation of a weapon of mass destruction, or the fact that hundreds of individuals were right outside denouncing a genocide happening in real time. Throughout the night, multiple winners invoked a desire for peace amid a reality in turmoil.
Early in the evening “War Is Over” was named Best Animated Short. Produced by Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX, the film was inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" and written by their son Sean Ono Lennon (who spoke on stage). The win is a first for director Dave Mullins, a Pixar Animation Studios veteran with animation department credits in beloved titles including “The Incredibles,” “Coco,” and “Up.”
Backstage I asked Mullins and producer Brad Booker about their thoughts on how the anti-war message of their honored work resonates with the current state of the world.
“When we started the film, there were no conflicts—there's always conflicts but the major conflicts that we all track every day were not underway yet. We met with Sean in June of '21. And then Peter Jackson came aboard two weeks after the war in Ukraine broke out, and we finished our film in October of this last year, and that was right when the stuff in Gaza went completely sideways,” Booker explained.
“The takeaway from it is that there's a lot of fighting, there's a lot of war, there's other ways to solve it,” Mullins added. “And that's what I think John and Yoko were trying to say. Is like maybe talk a little more, kill a little less. That's the idea and that's what we tried to show in the film.”
”It sounds naïve, but if you want it, we can all make it happen,” Booker concluded.
On stage, the only person who mentioned Gaza by name was British director Jonathan Glazer, whose cerebral, German-language Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” became the first win for the United Kingdom in the Best International Feature Film category.
“Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.
Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Alexandria, the girl who glows in the film as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance,” he read.
Glazer didn’t visit the interview room. But Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers, the surprising yet utterly deserving winners of Best Sound for “The Zone of Interest,” did make an appearance. I asked them how they thought their movie was relevant to the ongoing tragedies happening now, considering that Glazer mentioned Gaza in his own speech.
“This film doesn't say, ‘Look at those people. They were awful. How abhorrent that was.’ What the film says is, ‘They're so like me. This is so unusual, and this was humans doing this to other humans.’ So that's almost quite a normal thing,” said Burns. “For me it's incredibly relevant, and it's super important that this message of this film and this little thing here [raises the statuette] means that so many more people are going to watch the movie and that message about let's treat people with respect and do things like cease fire would be more important these days than ever.”
“The message of the film is about we choose to build walls, and then sometimes we choose not to look over them, and I think that's a crucial part of what we have in this film,” added Willers.
With a pained expression, Ukrainian war correspondent, photojournalist, and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov walked into the interview room holding the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his harrowing account of the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion “20 Days in Mariupol”—the first Oscar ever for a Ukrainian production.
I asked him about the jarring experience of being part of Hollywood’s awards season while his homeland continues to be under siege over two years after Mariupol was first occupied. Chernov noted that for him and his team it was never only about Mariupol, but rather about using the spotlight the film has granted them to bring attention to the other towns that have also been ravaged including Bakhmut, Mar'inka, Avdiivka, Soledar, and Popasna.
“It's been a privilege, but it's been a strange, painful experience at the same time. Because I'm standing here, [but] my heart is in Ukraine,” Chernov said. “My heart [is] with all the people who are now suffering and losing their lives and losing their homes and fighting for their land. Those who are in the jails. I don't know how I can fix it. I don't know whether I should try. But I hope that this win will just elevate this story to more people, and they will see us, and we will hear Ukrainians.”
The most invigorating thrill of the event came when, against most prognostications, Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. I’m almost certain my audible cheer, one of true shock and disbelief, resonated through the room. An artist concerned with the horrors of armed conflicts, Miyazaki famously skipped the 75th Academy Awards, where “Spirited Away” received the same honor, to protest the Iraq War.
In his latest Oscar-winner (and perhaps his final feature), the protagonist, 12-year-old Mahito, loses his mother to firebombing during World War II within the movie’s first few minutes. That catastrophic loss haunts him for the rest of his journey through a fantastical realm where both the dead and the unborn reside. Yet, even when given the chance to forego our troubled world for that more whimsical kingdom, Mahito chooses to return home, to bet on the flawed humanity of those he loves rather than giving in to despair.
That sentiment seems to be shared by all these stories about war, “Oppenheimer” included: if we humans are capable of causing so much suffering, it’s also on us to course correct.
]]>It was finally time. The 96th Academy Awards ceremony was ready for its big moment: Best Picture. But when presenter Al Pacino appeared on the stage with the envelope, somehow skipped over reading the names of the 10 Best Picture nominees along with their producers (as the presenters of the top category are expected to do) and murmured “My eyes see….Oppenheimer,” the celebratory reaction felt delayed by a few seconds for those of us present at 3400-seat Dolby Theater. For such a Kenergy-filled night capping an awards season that gave us a Best Picture line-up for the ages, the ending seemed unfairly anticlimactic. (That’s how you invite “Oppenheimer” to claim its 7th Oscar?) At my section of the orchestra, people almost had to take a silent second to confirm that Nolan’s movie actually won. (Producer Emma Thomas saved the moment with a terrific acceptance speech.)
From my vantage point in the third mezzanine seat, the fizzled ending was the bookend to a clumsy-ish start, with host Jimmy Kimmel delivering a mix-bag opening monologue. While the reliable host won some laughs and celebrated the sometimes embarrassingly earnest, self-referential spirit of the Oscars, his early gags—like the uncomfortable mention of Robert Downey Jr.’s past struggle with substance abuse—drew a combination of disbelief and polite grins at best. “This is the highest point of Robert Downey Jr’s career. Well, one of the highest points,” Kimmel said. In that moment, I couldn’t help but think of Aidy Bryant’s brilliant Spirit Awards opening monologue from just a couple of weeks ago when the host poked fun at the tradition of “roasting celebrities” in awards ceremonies, continuing with a purposely unclever “Hi Natalie Portman, you stupid bitch!” Kimmel’s joke felt like the same type of approach that Bryant had targeted. But to give him credit, Kimmel scored big by dedicating a good chunk of his time to last year’s two Hollywood strikes and celebrating the workers and crew members that make the movies run on. The Dolby rose to its feet at the gesture.
What filled the bookends was glorious, for the most part. After I watched a small part of the show from my mezzanine seat through the first commercial break, I proceeded down to the orchestra level thanks to my wristband that gave me access to the entire Dolby and lingered by the lobby-area where the likes of “The Color Purple” nominee Danielle Brooks, “The Holdovers” winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, famous Oscars chef Wolfgang Puck and presenter Jennifer Lawrence passed through and stopped by. That’s where I witnessed the Best Animated Feature win of Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” on a giant screen, a triumph that could be called surprising by most. (I stuck with my Miyazaki prediction, while many went with “Spider-Man: Across the Spirder-Verse.”) Master Miyazaki wasn’t present at the ceremony. But Studio Ghibli COO (and movie’s Executive Producer) Kiyofumi Nakajima jokingly told me on the red carpet that the master does pay attention to his film’s Oscars journey, but perhaps quietly.
“Since he is of a certain age now, he is trying to be very humble and he's pretending that he doesn't really care,” he said with a chuckle. Taking pride in Japan’s longstanding tradition of 2D hand-drawn animation, “It’s a treasure in Japan,” Nakajima continued. “It’s the one that we are most comfortable doing and we are very good at it. And I think 3D animation is America's major talent. So I think it's interesting that we are able to represent our 2D animation.” As the film’s distributor, GKIDS president David Jesteadt told me, “We feel there's a little something different about this year. Having Miyazaki's film is certainly a huge honor after starting—what was that—14 years ago with “The Secret Life of Cows.” That was our first nomination. It’s been gratifying to have these nominations reinforce the idea that the animation world is continuing to change and there is a big community that opened up around it. So it's been really fantastic. And [Miyazaki] is saying that they are watching the ceremony in Japan.”
For the rest of the show (with 2+ hours still to go), I luckily scored an empty orchestra-level seat next to the fresh Oscar winners of the animated short, “War Is Over! Inspired By The Music of John & Yoko” to my right. Sean Lennon told me, “We started the film production three years ago. The war in Ukraine had yet to break out, and so it actually happened during our pre-production. It felt chilling in a way because we'd already been planning to do a tribute to my mom and dad and their message of peace and love. And then suddenly it became very real, relevant and contemporaneous. So it's sort of a bittersweet feeling 'cause it's given gravitas to our film. And the film obviously resonates for the modern era now. But it's also very sad that the message of peace and love is still necessary and relevant. The idea of “War is over if you want it” is not just about a specific war, a specific time. It's also about overcoming violence in our minds.”
And, okay, I buried the lede. To my left was Ryan Gosling’s supportive and endearingly enthusiastic mother, Donna Gosling. “Oh he looks so good,” Ms. Gosling said when her son and Emily Blunt took the stage and launched into a playful Barbenheimer tête-à-tête. Naming “Lars and the Real Girl” as one of her favorite films of Gosling, “My son has always been about doing good work and working with good people. Look at the way he honored stunt workers now,” she remarked when I asked her whether she ever imagined Ryan as a bona-fide movie star during his successful indie beginnings. “I am not even sure if Ryan saw himself here. He was always step-by-step, about the work and not about destination. If you make decisions based on the destination, you miss the journey.”
Later, it felt like a true honor being the only person in the entire Dolby who experienced Gosling’s infectious “I’m Just Ken” performance live next to his mom. (Well, other than Gosling’s stepdad Valerio Attanasio seated on the other side of Ms. Gosling.) Like everyone else, we rose to our feet, sang along and danced to the show’s most exuberant moment—perhaps one of the finest live performances Oscars have ever produced. “That was terrific,” I told her at the end. “I am so proud of him,” she said.
In that same seat, I got served my tequila shot promised by Guillermo Rodriguez, and giggled at the nude John Cena bit and John Mulaney’s brilliant “Field of Dreams” description. From my vantage point, the somber “In Memoriam” segment felt beautiful and respectful, even though the dancers apparently made for a distracting sidebar in the telecast. Meanwhile “The Zone of Interest” deservingly winning sound over some of the bigger budget/high-tech entries like “Oppenheimer” and “Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One” collected the night’s biggest gasp. That win, which was met by a standing ovation (a rare feat for a Sound category), was bested only by Glazer himself, the only winner in the room to deliver a statement that acknowledged what’s happening in Gaza right now, sentiments also voiced by the Pro-Palestine protests I drove through on my way to the show. "Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst," Glazer, who is Jewish, said. "It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?"
Later, Emma Stone’s win shook up the Dolby at a night when Lily Gladstone in “Killers of the Flower Moon” was largely expected to win. Charming as ever, a visibly shocked Stone gracefully accepted her award, and not without a mention of her former “La La Land” co-star Gosling. “Oh boy, my dress is broken. I think it happened during ‘I'm Just Ken,’ I'm pretty sure.”
Unlike last year, I didn’t have access to the Governors Ball this time. But I did notice of who was the very first in line to take the escalator up to the festivities: Steven Spielberg, responsibly masked, ready to party. His eagerness was in fact a good recap of a night marked not only by fresh faces and young winners, but the old-school Hollywood—names like Pacino, Nicolas Cage, Danny DeVito, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rita Moreno, Martin Scorsese, Sally Field and more—that showed up and made the Oscars what we want them to be: a night where cinema’s past and future march arm in arm. Perhaps that future looks a little bleak right now, but the enthusiastic response to Cord Jefferson when he called for a greater number of mid-budget fare in his “American Fiction” Best Adapted Screenplay acceptance speech signaled a little hope. Perhaps one day, studios will re-learn and remember that instead of one $200-million film, there could be ten successful $20-million films for a healthier industry with longevity.
My night ended at the NEON soiree where the “Anatomy of a Fall” Best Original Screenplay winner Justine Triet danced the night away with her actors Swann Arlaud and Milo Machado-Graner, and shared a hug with double-nominee Sandra Hüller, who made an appearance late. Dragging myself to my condo late at night, I felt like a winner for having the good sense to stuff a pair of foldable ballerina flats into my little evening purse. Let’s just say that I learned my lesson the hard way last year.
]]>When selecting movies to screen at the 50th Telluride Film Festival this past August, “The Bikeriders” by director/writer Jeff Nichols was making its premiere. Not only the stellar cast of Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Michael Shannon captured my attention but also the uniqueness of telling a man’s story with a strong female point of view. The film charts the rise and fall over ten years of the Chicago suburb-based Outlaw Motorcycles Club that ultimately changed from a local riding club to a disturbingly violent gang. The club’s founder and leader, Johnny (Tom Hardy), struggles to enforce the rules he’s making; Benny (Austin Butler) is his captivating but dangerously unpredictable follower; it's Kathy (Jodie Comer), the wife of Benny, who has the club all figured out—she thinks they’re all idiots. She’s written as a strong-willed character in a yin-yang situation with Benny as he gravitates toward Johnny, somewhat of a father figure. Nichols has said this is not your typical love triangle in which two guys are vying over a girl; he thought it would be interesting for a woman, Kathy, and the club leader, Johnny, to fight over a young man, Benny.
Blending comedy, violence, and moments of tenderness while exploring the biker code of loyalty, Nichols creates an intriguing modern story of a gangster film told uniquely from a woman’s perspective. There’s so much to appreciate here. Kathy’s role as a strong woman and a role model is a reason to champion the film. The screenplay allows her to stand up for what she believes is right, making her own decisions, while solving her own problems without a male savior.
In looking back from a woman’s point of view and my experiences with motorcycles, growing up in Los Angeles, motorcycles were standard; their presence was like no other on the highways, especially the 405 freeway. My father would remark, “Watch those bikers for me, kids,” as he was always on high alert with his driving when they were close to his family, as the bikers were known to dart in between traffic. As the oldest of five, he usually depended on me as a lookout. Seeing the Hells Angels riding together was an ominous sight to behold, as their ultra-loud sound is both deafening and exciting. What fascinated me were their black leather jackets with their iconic logo, very cool black leather biker hats, and leather side-fringed pants.
During my high school years in Nebraska, living out in the country, it was normal to ride motorcycles. I knew classmates who had Harley Davidson bikes, and my parents would let me ride on them occasionally, but never at night. Despite having lived in the Chicago suburbs for most of my life, where the film takes place, I had no knowledge of the motorcycle club or its saga. As you can imagine, my interest in the film was high.
Nichols introduced the film during the Telluride Film Festival and participated in a discussion. He spoke about Danny Lyon, the photojournalist who wrote the photo book about the Midwest club on which the film is based, and also joined the club. Nichols has been intrigued by the book for 20 years. He also mentioned the newest edition’s foreword and that Lyon tried to find out what happened to the club, saying he talked to some of the old riders. He was told that was the end of the club he rode with in 1965, as they now refer to him and the original members as “the old Outlaws.” That gave him the idea of how to shape the film: watching a small group of friends in a social club throughout the sixties that grows beyond their abilities and turns into a motorcycle gang by the early seventies.
Nichols told me he felt fortunate to have cast Austin Butler before “Elvis” came out and put him in high demand. I mentioned that I was reporting on the Telluride Film Festival for Roger Ebert’s website. He had nothing but praise for Roger and said he was very grateful for making his top ten list for the film “Shotgun Stories” (2007), as it changed his life, giving him an honor that encouraged him as a filmmaker.
Our conversation and his film sparked my curiosity to know more, especially about why he chose to tell a male’s story from a female gaze, and also to discuss the intricacies of making a motorcycle film using bikes from the ’50s and ’60s, as I know those bikes are very different from today’s bikes.
Clearly, this is a guy’s story focusing on a club or brotherhood that protects each other at all costs. The women in that era had very different roles; they usually rode on the backs of the bikes, prepared meals, and cared for the children, as they were not involved in the inner circle of the boys’ club or the decision-making. And they were less likely to be involved in violence. Kathy is written as a strong female character, one who serves as a role model for writing a progressive women’s character as self-sufficient, and not having a male savior.
During my Zoom interview with Jeff Nichols, I asked him why he wanted to tell this story from a woman’s point of view. He said that the ultimate truth is Kathy is the most interesting person in the book. He fell in love with the way she talked about herself, her relationship with Benny, and her relation to the club, including the biker guys. She was funny but also shockingly honest. There was no filter. It could be who she was then or because she talked into Danny Lyon’s reel to-reel tape recorder. Another reason she’s the perfect person to view this club and these people is that she is both an outsider by the benefit of being a woman and an insider because she is intimately involved in this club. So, with hindsight, only a woman could have this special kind of access.
Knowing this is a fictionalized story of the book, I asked Nichols about the love triangle aspect, as the woman is not the center. He explained that it was the biggest kind of creative work he did because their relationship and the love triangle wasn’t in the book. He took a mythological approach to Benny, mirrored in having the leader of this club, Johnny, building a kind of Frankenstein monster that one day will rise up and consume him. Johnny knows he’s not built for the world they’re going into.
Johnny is in his 50s. He’s got his hair greased. Even his clothes, how he dresses, and the bike he rides, show he’s not one of these new guys, and he feels himself separating from the club. It made sense that he would be drawn to Benny, a young man who would ultimately become the leader. Johnny continues talking about Kathy, as she held the tension that Johnny’s character couldn’t enunciate, which was beautiful, amazing, and completely absurd. There’s so much about American masculinity, and Kathy is the best one trying to interpret that.
Comer’s work here is impressive as she’s the one so often with the moral and intellectual upper hand. Nichols said, “That is one of the best parts of that love triangle in that relationship dynamic. This woman is sitting there dealing with these men who can do amazing things and can be incredibly beautiful, attractive, and alluring. Still, they need help to do simple things in terms of understanding themselves or enunciating themselves, particularly when talking about their masculinity.”
I find it fascinating that Nichols has such an astute consciousness of women in his writing. As Johnny, a man of few words, is shown to solve most of his problems with the club through violence or intimidation, he’s totally at a loss for words, shocked that a woman would confront him. It’s both enlightening for women and perceptive to see that women can sometimes cut to the chase despite men’s macho exteriors.
Women haven't often had a strong POV in biker films. Take 1966's “The Wild Angels” with Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, and Bruce Dern. Sinatra’s role centered on trying to figure out a moody Peter Fonda as a boyfriend. At times he said he loved her, and then we’d see him go off with another woman from the gang who was clad only in a bra and panties, leaving her in tears. In that era, women were portrayed as playthings—screeching, laughing, dancing, and pouring bottles of alcohol all over each other while wearing little clothing. Sinatra was shown as a pouty, sad person who took orders from Fonda without blinking an eye. When looking at women’s roles here today, they are cringeworthy.
The movie “Hell’s Angels on Wheels” (1967) starred Adam Roarke, Jack Nicholson, and Sabrina Scharf. Roger Ebert wrote: “This actually isn’t such a bad movie. Sure, it’s an exploitation picture, manufactured on a low budget to cash in on the current boom in motorcycle gangs. Sure, it has all the obligatory clichés, like an orgy and a couple of brawls and a lot of beer and pot and animalistic behavior. What did you expect?” What he did praise was the realism, as the cast included the bike clubs from Oakland, Sacramento, and San Francisco, and the president of the Hells Angels himself, Sonny Barker. However, he has no lines, though he also served as a consultant. I would agree with his review, as the movie is grittier, and by utilizing so many more riders, the group much more impressive, although Scharf’s female role was that of a ditz, as she would change her mind constantly. I’m not sure if it was because of the drug use or if that was her nature. The other women were portrayed the same way, wearing little clothing, giggling, and appearing to have a good time.
Viewing these ’60s biker films was actually nostalgic for me as it brought back memories of interviewing Peter Fonda in 2010 in a Chicago suburb after a screening of his motorcycle film “Easy Rider” (1969) during a fan event. What struck me was that some of the people who came to have him sign their helmets, bikes, and other cycle paraphernalia could have actually been or were in the Chicago Outlaws Club, which is now the second-largest bike club in the world. I have great memories of hosting the audience Q and A with him. What resonated with me were his stories about the filming with director and actor Dennis Hopper. Yes, he confirmed there was an actual budget for the marijuana consumed in the movie, which he laughed about, as did the packed crowd. He also spoke about the tall handlebars of the bikes in the ’60s, as they were so high, causing his arms to be in constant pain. He also mentioned the bikes weighed over a thousand pounds.
Roger Ebert gave “Easy Rider” four stars, writing, “And someday it was inevitable that a great film would come along, utilizing the motorcycle genre, the same way the great Westerns suddenly made everyone realize they were a legitimate American art form. “Easy Rider” is the picture.”
In mentioning the fan event with Fonda to Nichols, I told him what Fonda had said about his arm aching from the tall handlebars. Nichols then said the bikes they used were from the ’50s, ’60s, and even one from the ’40s. They presented many challenges as they all operated differently. He also told me there was a night when Austin Butler, at a very low speed, was turning around at the end of the street. He hit a patch of wet leaves, and his bike just flipped right out from under him, but the throttle was still engaged. So, all they saw was a headlight just spinning. Luckily, Austin jumped out of the way, but it was very, very challenging using vintage motorcycles.
As a female film critic who’s covered movies for over 20 years, I always appreciate it when filmmakers intertwine more women into a film’s storyline, especially one of this nature, as the number of male characters far exceeds the number of women. Kathy is an example of a strong, positive, level-headed, independent female character willing to go the distance for not only her husband Benny’s well-being but also because she realizes the club isn’t safe for herself. There were certainly women like her in motorcycle clubs all over the country. Now their stories get to be told too.
"The Bikeriders" will be released on June 21st, 2024.
]]>When director Maureen Bharoocha sent Rita Moreno the script for the horror-comedy film “The Prank” the EGOT winner had a few requests before signing above the dotted line.
“She read it over a weekend and was like, ‘I have two questions before I sign on to say yes,’” Bharoocha recalled to RogerEbert.com ahead of the film’s March 15 release. “‘Can I smoke a cigarette? And can I wear leather pants?’ And I was like, ‘A hundred percent you can do that.’ It’s not often that you get your first pick.”
And if Rita Moreno as a cruel, cigarette-smoking and leather-pants wearing physics teacher isn’t enough of a reason to watch “The Prank,” then the plot, which is about Moreno’s students falsely accusing her of murder, will be.
As a viewer, perhaps the biggest joy of the schoolyard-hijinks-gone-wrong film is that the 92-year-old actress seemed to be having so much fun being bad.
“And she’s never played anything like this,” Bharoocha continued. “I was thinking, maybe if we can get her the script, she'd be like, ‘Oh, I want do something that I’ve never done before,’ and it could be enticing in that way.”
And the rest, they say, is history. The film premiered at SXSW in 2022, and Moreno’s turn in the campy, genre-bending story was met with applause.
For this year’s Women Writers Week, RogerEbert.com spoke with Bharoocha via Zoom about casting and directing the legendary actress in the “part comedy, part thrills” drama, the gamble of mixing genres, and the “zigzaggy” career path that has led her to SXSW and beyond.
Hannah Loesch: I think a good place to start would be the origin story for “The Prank.” How did you become attached to the story, and how did you get EGOT winner Rita Moreno to star?
It kind of happened in two different ways. I got this script written by Rebecca Flinn-White and Zak White and it just kind of leapt off the page for me. It was just so much fun and I hadn’t read anything like it. And so often as a director, when you read other people’s scripts, it’s like, do I connect with this? No. But something about their script was just so exciting. I immediately could visualize it and I kind of made it my own in my head. And so I was like, Oh, I really wanna direct this movie. And then I had always wanted to work with Rita Moreno. She's a legend and an EGOT and just somebody who I’ve admired for so long… So I kind of kind of put my spin on it and we sent it to Rita.
Cailin Loesch: Tell us about Rita Moreno as a villain in this story. When I first read about “The Prank,” I just kept picturing her as this Cruella De Vil–type character who targets children instead of dogs. [All laugh] That could not be accurate. I assume she made the role her own.
One thing that I think we can all relate to is having tough-as-nails-type teachers who are really hard on you. I had Mrs. Jordan, my seventh-grade nemesis, who I thought was always a little harder on me than everybody else and picked on me. And when you’re young, you don’t realize that sometimes it’s because they see more in you, so they’re tougher on you. The character of Mrs. Wheeler, that’s how I approached her with Rita: She’s a tough teacher who loves teaching and kind of loves the idea of punishing her students to make them better. She takes a little satisfaction from that. That devilish glee from really being tough on your students was where we drew from.
HL: At least she means well!
CL: I love how you mentioned seventh grade, because that’s when I had one of my worst mean teacher experiences. I asked my teacher for help on a math problem and she literally said to me “Go ask your sister.”
HL: And Cailin was like “My sister’s not a math teacher.” [All laugh]
CL: I don’t know if that was constructive. I think I’d probably rather have had Mrs. Wheeler.
HL: People have tough bosses, too! You get it your whole life.
Right! I think we all can relate. But Mrs. Wheeler is kind of preparing students for life’s lessons.
CL: I like the idea that it’s the teacher trying to make you better as opposed to just being out to get you. If you only saw the character in this movie from the student’s perspective, you might not know her intentions. But how do you convey them to the audience?
That’s part of the fun of the movie. You don’t really know what her intention is. What’s great is it’s part comedy and part thrills. Like, how does this prank unravel? How does it make her upset? What are the things that they discover? Who is telling the truth? And in this age of social media, it’s like, when do things go too far and what will people do to get revenge on one another?
HL: So, we know she had her leather and her cigarette, but is there a side to Rita Moreno as an actor that you saw in this role that you hadn’t seen before? She’s obviously had such a long and storied career. What in the movie do you think is going to make audiences go “I didn’t think that I would ever see Rita Moreno in a role like this.”
I think sometimes people forget how long and layered her career has been. Some people are probably more familiar with her from “One Day at a Time” and “West Side Story” than “Oz.” She has such a deep well to draw from that she was able to kind of pivot and layer Mrs. Wheeler in a way that’s not one note. She does have this exterior life that Rita is bringing to the role. What was really exciting is that normally we see our teachers in one way in the classroom, but we do get to see the many sides of Mrs. Wheeler throughout this movie.
CL: Do you feel like the Rita you met on day one, when you didn’t know her yet, is the same as the Rita you know now? Do you see her differently after getting to work so closely with her for that extended period of time?
I do, but I think actually what it was is that my love and affection and my admiration for her just grew. She just loves movies. Every single thing that we were doing on set, whether it was doing a silly little gag with a flag or sitting on an apple box doing lines off-camera, she was willing to do. And for somebody who’s 92 and who has been in this industry for as long as she has, the fact that she still has such a love and appetite for making movies was really inspiring. It elevated everybody’s performance across the board. We had Connor and Ramona who were just so incredible. Everybody was on their A game. And then getting to bring Keith David in—how excited he was when he was doing scenes with Rita and two of them throwing the ball back and forth—made me excited. It was an energy that we were feeding off of. When Rita steps on set, it kind of changes the dynamic. There is such a reverence.
HL: How do you think people are going to feel as the credits are rolling, as they’re leaving the theater? What do you think people will from it as it relates to the digital age, the age of social media that we live in?
One, I hope they stay for the credits, ’cause we have a bunch of fun bloopers from the movies. You get to see how excited we were and how much fun we had on set, truly. I hope they just have a good time. They get to sit in a movie theater, which is so rare now. The movie kind of examines what we do on social media, because it is so much a part of our lives. We can get kind of out of control. You can’t really believe anything you see now. And we made this movie before everyone was talking about artificial intelligence, so it’s even more of a complicated problem now.
CL: The premise of the movie, students playing a prank, is an age-old tale. But at the same time, this concept would’ve been completely different 50 years ago because it wouldn’t involve social media.
HL: If John Hughes directed it, it would’ve been a different movie. Still good, but very different. [All laugh]
A dark John Hughes movie. I love it.
CL: You said that when you were attached to direct the movie, you kind of put your own spin on it. What vision did you bring to the script once it was finished and after you became director?
One of the big shifts that I had is that originally the script starred two boys, two best friends. And I think one of the things that we don’t get to see enough in movies is platonic [boy and girl] best friends in high school. So often they’re paired as a love interest. Connor [Kalopsis] was already attached to the script when I came on. So we had an open call for men and women to play his counterpart. And once Ramona Young’s tape came in, it was clear that she was the only choice. I also really love mixing genres, taking a comedy and a thriller and kind of walking that tightrope. It was definitely me infusing my sensibilities in comedy and my sensibilities in the horror and thriller spaces and making that cohesive. And I loved that we made Mrs. Wheeler a physics teacher, a woman in STEM. The peanut gallery is another kind of thing that I think is always fun. We have a lot of people on the sidelines discussing what’s happening during this prank.
CL: Do you feel that as a director your style is different depending on the project and the actor? Do you feel like you're the same director on each project that you work on?
Hopefully I’m the same person on every set in that I’m collaborative. I think, especially when you’re playing in the comedy space, anybody can pitch and a good idea can come from anywhere. I want to be able to have the vision of what I want but be open to hearing a new idea, a new pitch, or a new take on something that I can make my own or I can fold in. The way I see movies is that the script is our baseline. We need to be grounded with one foot in reality. I want to make sure that things feel authentic so that we can go heightened in comedy and thriller. You can go high if you have your foot planted on the ground. You can let somebody explore a scene, let them kind of go in a different direction, as long as we can come back to the script. That’s what I really love to do when I direct, whether that’s comedy or drama or thrillers or horror. Then everybody owns a piece of the movie and there’s so many fingerprints all over it, contributing fun things, little Easter eggs. That’s such a big part of making a movie.
CL: Your sets sound like a dream!
HL: And I think it's really cool that you started as a segment director on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” We have a lot of friends who graduated in film, TV, and communications and are working as production assistants and producers and want to move into directing their own films. How did you become the director you are today?
Everybody wants to have that story where you had your movie go to Sundance or SXSW and suddenly you’re an ingenue. And that was not my path. I have a zig-zaggy path. I did a little bit of everything, a jack-of-all-trades. But that experience gave me my reps! I did the hours, I put in the time, I can pivot, I can work fast, I can work on a dime. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” allowed me to work in a high-pressure, fast-paced environment where you have to trust your gut while also working in someone else’s comedic voice. Ultimately, I knew that I really loved working with actors and telling stories. So that’s why I left to do features and episodic. I did over 30 shorts before I got Kimmel. I did two thrillers for Lifetime. I did stuff for UCB and College Humor. I did a little bit of everything! Now, I’m trying to hone all of those skills in my own movies and bring a little bit of everything I’ve learned along the way. So I’m really grateful that I have a zig-zaggy path that I can pull all of my experience from.
]]>“She did not allow society to contain her voice,” says director Carla Gutiérrez of her documentary’s subject, Frida Kahlo. Having won Gutiérrez the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: U.S. Documentary for editing at Sundance, “Frida” will premiere on Prime Video March 14. In a conversation over Zoom, the filmmaker shared that when she started on the project, she expected to use a lot of the quotes and writing from Kahlo’s contemporaries. But that’s not what happened: “As we started working on the story, [Frida] actually took over and we were like, ‘Okay, you take over, we’re just gonna be guided by your voice.’”
The result is a documentary almost entirely from Kahlo’s perspective and as such one that values this feminine, Mexicana voice above all others, much like its owner does.
It may not seem radical to deem the diary entries and personal musings of a world-famous painter worthy of a full-length film. But even though Kahlo’s face is now ubiquitous, the act of valuing Latina voices—in film and society at large—is still relatively rare and important.
In the US, Latinos make up just shy of 20 percent of the population. As a group, we overindex as streaming subscribers and movie ticket buyers. If we stood alone, we’d be the fifth-largest economy in the world, ahead of India. And Latina women make about 85 percent of the purchasing decisions within that economy.
It would seem like smart business sense for Hollywood to cater to our needs. And yet, we remain wildly underrepresented both behind and in front of the camera.
I think part of the reason is a stereotype of silence. Too often the narrative around Latinas—and for you non-Spanish speakers, here I’m talking specifically about Latina women—is one of erasure. We’re supposed to be the workers in the background—if not invisible then very quiet, cleaning and taking care of kids, our purpose only to help the more economically fortunate.
But of course, that’s not always the case, and Latina documentary filmmakers are working hard to change the narratives around our community and our gender. In addition to “Frida,” Latinas directed three of the four films in PBS’ VOCES Shorts, airing February–March of this year.
“[I]f you only tell one kind of story, then you’re only really paving one path. If you tell multiple stories, you’re giving people options,” explains Indra Arriaga Delgado, the woman behind “Sabor Artico: Latinos in Alaska.” Its very existence is expanding the narrative around Latinos, portraying the little-known community in Alaska. Latino population centers certainly exist and deserve to have their stories told, but Latinos are in every state and our contributions should be better valued across the nation.
Arriago Delgado created the film from her own experiences, having lived in Alaska for twenty-plus years. There, she’s found and helped build a self-reflective Latino community that values its voice. “The film, it was written by me, but really, I just let people say whatever they wanted,” she says over Zoom, “And then I just went in, in the editorial process and carved out the path for the narrative.”
The result is a pretty fun film that had me laughing out loud—which doesn’t surprise Arriago Delgado. “I don’t think you can make a film about Latinos and not have humor… humor is part of our language,” she shares. But it’s not part of the narrative Hollywood spins about us—Latinos may feel most represented by comedy but we’re more like to be featured in crime stories.
There’s no crime, drugs, or cartels in either “Frida” or “Sabor Artico,” but that doesn’t mean the documentaries paint a rosy view of our communities or our place in the world. As Arriago Delgado asserts, “You can be proud of your culture, and you can celebrate your culture, but you can also at the same time acknowledge that things are really imperfect.”
With a nod to the importance of recognizing this same imperfection, Gutiérrez calls Frida Kahlo, perhaps the most famous Mexican woman in the world, “messy” and notes how she both resisted and played with stereotypes around her identity. “The gringos’ reactions to the way she looked, the fascination that they had with her, it’s like this exotic, sexy woman that was very colorful,” Gutiérrez explains of Kahlo’s reception in the US. “She was incredibly aware of it… Taking this reaction [to] the way that other people are seeing [her], and then using that as an armor and turning it around, and making it even more explosive. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna show you, I’m getting your attention so I’m gonna make my presence really performative and I’m gonna use it for power.”
That interaction between performance, expectations, and power seems to always be in play when Latinas make films these days, navigating how the powers that be see our communities and pushing against them (or not) to varying degrees. Kahlo distinguished herself as a once-in-a-generation artist thanks to her ability to make her interior experience visible. But is she perhaps so well known in part because she also conformed to if not reinforced ideas of Mexican women as fiery and sexually promiscuous? Perhaps.
Arriaga Delgado recounted getting feedback that part of “Sabor Artico” was too much of a “downer.” She wasn’t conforming enough to the happy and grateful immigrant narrative that dogs our community in more progressive circles.
It’s a constant dance but it’s one that Latina documentary filmmakers are navigating with aplomb in productions like “Frida” and “Sabor Artico: Latinos in Alaska.” They’re leaning into their own voices, following Kahlo’s example of valuing her own perspective even when others find it strange or exotic. And that’s valuable to Latinos and the nation at large who can benefit from our labor, yes, but also our insights, culture, and artistry.
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Even as they become endangered in real life, radio DJs are a tenacious presence in the movies. Just last year, “John Wick: Chapter 4” paid tribute to “The Warriors” with a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of the sultry-voiced DJ who told all the boppers to listen up in Walter Hill’s 1979 film.
It was a nostalgic nod, not only to the movie, but to the idea of a communal culture that no longer exists. You simply won’t walk down a street and hear every house tuned in to the same radio station anymore. What we have instead are people wearing earbuds, each in their own little world, probably piping in a podcast.
Despite being around for nearly two decades with increasing cultural dominance, podcasters are a relatively rare presence in the movies. In sci-fi blockbusters, they can be conduits for wonder—a character in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” is literally named Podcast—whose underdog status lends them a certain counterintuitive credibility. (See also: Brian Tyree Henry’s conspiratorial podcast host in 2022’s “Godzilla Vs. Kong.”) They can also lend quaint texture to an independent drama like “C’mon C’mon,” in which Joaquin Phoenix plays an NPR-style “radio journalist.”
But it’s in horror movies, the place where we go to collectively digest our subconscious hatreds and fears, where you can see how we, as a culture, feel about podcasts and everything they stand for: the collapse of traditional media, the rise of influencers and parasocial fame, misinformation, the attention economy, and the unnatural, brain-breaking din of hearing what everyone has to say about everything all of the time. And how do we feel? We hate it and we want it to die.
As with their content-obsessed cousins, livestreamers (quite negatively portrayed in “Deadstream” and “Dashcam”), if you’re watching a horror movie and someone is introduced as a podcaster, this is a character whose death you’re about to relish. At best, podcasters in horror movies are self-absorbed and gullible. At worst, they’re cancerous presences who stand in for a director’s hatred of their critics. The rise of podcasts happened in tandem with the rise of social media, which made it easier than ever for trolls to talk trash about famous filmmakers. And a podcaster, at least in the movies, is basically a professional troll.
The meanest of them all is in “Tusk,” Kevin Smith’s 2014 pivot into horror and the ur-text for this niche subcategory of horror films. The irony here is that Smith is himself a podcaster, and hosts an astonishing seven shows at the time of this writing. The film is based on an episode of Smith’s podcast “SModcast,” which was itself based on an online ad offering free room and board to anyone willing to dress up like a walrus for two hours a day. That ad turned out to be a hoax, but now we have a movie based on it, which is just kind of how the internet works.
Justin Long’s character in the film, podcast host Wallace Bryton, does even less fact-checking. Calling what he and his co-host Teddy (Haley Joel Osment) do “journalism”—basically, they retraumatize viral stars by interviewing/mocking them about their 15 minutes of infamy—is a real stretch. Called “The Not-See Party,” complete with obnoxious fake German accents in the outro, their show is the smug, snarky epitome of the worst excesses of millennial alpha nerds, observed from the point of view of a Gen X alpha nerd. (Say what you will about Smith’s style, but you can never accuse him of taking himself too seriously.)
Name a negative character trait, and Wallace probably has it. He’s an obnoxious, entitled, misogynistic liar—which means that, in the style of Smith’s contemporary Eli Roth, it’s okay to enjoy every anatomically implausible torture he’s about to suffer when he cuts yet another corner and ends up in the clutches of madman Howard Howe, played by Michael Parks. Despite the grotesque touches and seething hatred of its main character, however, much of Smith’s movie is a silly comedy. The hatred David Gordon Green has for the podcaster characters in his 2018 version of “Halloween,” meanwhile, is deadly serious.
Even in this overall quite brutal movie, the savagery of the deaths stands out. Aaron Korey (Jefferson Hall) and Dana Haines (Rhian Rees) are more professional than Wallace and Teddy—their show reads more “Serial” than it does guys in graphic tees farting into microphones. They’re also insensitive and selfish, but in a way that suggests they take themselves seriously; when they taunt Michael Myers or press Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) for details about her ordeal, they’re “doing it for the story.” Still, their callousness makes them two more justified deaths, dispatched by Michael early on in the film in an intensely violent scene in a filthy gas station bathroom.
Aaron and Dana’s self-aggrandizing smugness is a symptom of “true crime brain,” something that’s not unique to podcasters but which developed a particularly virulent strain during a boom in true crime podcasts in the late 2010s. “True crime brain” makes a person hypervigilant about potential threats to the self, yet callous about actual violence towards others; the condition is accurately diagnosed in the under-the-radar 2015 indie TV show “Women Who Kill,” in which producing the podcast of the same name poisons the brains of exes Morgan (Ingrid Jungermann) and Jean (Ann Carr) until they see serial killers everywhere they look. The podcast fades into the background as the film goes on, but an early scene where the hosts talk shop with a convicted serial killer is withering in its critique.
And while the actual content of said podcast is amusingly unclear, “podcaster” is also code for “terrible person” in “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022), Halina Reijn’s self-conscious Gen Z slasher about a group of rich kids (and one working-class misfit) who turn on each other when a party game goes horrifically wrong. In the film, Rachel Sennott’s character, Alice, is a superficial, self-centered, faux-progressive podcaster whose ego—she cannot tolerate the accusation that one of her friends “hate-listens” to her podcast, and starts an argument that turns violent—directly leads to her demise. Although, to be fair, she’s not any worse than her onscreen friends.
Gary (Ethan Suplee) in “The Hunt” (2020) is Alice’s mirror image, an equal and opposite right-wing idiot whose wounded ego explodes into violence with remarkable speed. Compared to that of the podcaster characters in “Halloween,” Gary’s death isn’t stretched out for the audience’s pleasure—part of the film’s overall contrarian raison d’etre. But he, and to an extent Alice, reflect the echo chamber of partisan politics in 21st-century America—a divide fueled, in part, by social media and podcasts—as well as skepticism of the credentials of a new type of media figure.
“Monolith” (2023) also plays with the tension between podcasts and more traditional forms of media, forcing its protagonist, a disgraced journalist played by Lily Sullivan, to “lower” herself by working on a paranormal podcast after losing her job at a newspaper. “The Interviewer,” as she’s called in the script, is disdainful of her new medium at first, seeing it as ridiculous and beneath her. But she gets sucked into it nonetheless, which is not only a commentary on the seductive power of likes and shares—the podcast takes off as the film’s mystery deepens, and the two forces fuel each other—but also a tacit defense of the integrity of podcasts themselves.
“The Interviewer” is not an unlikeable protagonist because she’s working on a podcast. In fact, there are some rather lovely scenes in this chamber piece thriller that show visually how a podcast is constructed. She and her lack of integrity leading into the project are the problem, making her an unreliable narrator as she takes on a private-eye type of role investigating the mystery of the “black bricks” that have been randomly appearing on doorsteps across the globe. The film doesn’t hate its lead simply for being a podcaster, but for sneering at podcasting while also being bad at it.
Nearly ten years into surveying horror movies with podcasters as characters, we finally find one that isn’t hostile towards podcasts in general. Perhaps we’re finally starting to get used to them; in a milestone of normalization, Lifetime now has two original films, “The Podcast Murders” and “A Podcast to Die For,” whose heroines are true crime podcasters. Going from repellant to plug-and-play aspirational within a decade? Not so bad! The influencers, on the other hand, still have a way to go.
]]>Among my communities, women can predict the future. Aunties know when someone is pregnant. Cousins can tell which path to take at a crossroads. Mums dream of what is yet to come, and grandmas hold memories of pasts they never witnessed. This belief in the unseen, this potential to glimpse and reshape the future must be what led to my affinity for science fiction. Sci-fi is the canvas for visions of the future—dystopian, utopian, or fully fried. It foreshadows. It sounds the alarms, exposing the technological advancements, societal changes, and ethical dilemmas we must grapple with. The genre is so accurate, we could stack its receipts up into the stratosphere. And if we pay attention, we might dodge the next series of catastrophes (because if you read sci-fi, you can see the signs).
In our current climate, science fiction is a matter of survival. Politicians and leaders should take the genre to heart. It would prepare them for every type of world-ending scenario. I wrote about this theory in my recent short story, “The Apocalypse Plurality”:
“Katrina P. Parker had decided on a higher standard for her elected officials. She would never again vote for anyone who didn’t read science fiction. Sci-fi fans tended to recognize the ramifications of a global pandemic. They knew to sidestep neo-fascists or poorly instructed AI to avoid dystopian futures ... when it came to world-enders, science-fiction fans were well-versed in the full range of scenarios. They could easily avert apocalypses. Plural.” *
I am Katrina P. Parker. She is me. And perhaps, you should be her too. Look around our world today—from the pandemics to the return of fascism; the mounting concerns about AI, and colonialism masquerading as religion; from the erosion of women's rights to cataclysmic climate change. The urgency of the situation should shake us to our souls, yet it also demands that we be compassionate enough to act for the shared good. Otherwise, the great minds of sci-fi have already prophesized our doom.
Unsurprisingly, women creators have contributed significantly to the genre, offering shattering visions of the probabilities of our demise. These stories, often dismissed as fanciful, have proven to be astute indicators of societal shifts and technological advancements. Let’s explore the perilous predictions from the women of science fiction and why their voices are crucial in understanding the trajectory of our world. From me to you (with love): we ignore them at our collective risk.
PART ONE: WOMEN’S AUTONOMY
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the nightmarish novel adapted into a film and a critically acclaimed Hulu series, has become a cultural touchstone for its portrayal of women under subjugation. The creative minds behind the adaptations depict the country of Gilead and its totalitarian regime in shocking resonance. With historical echoes of the Salem Witch Trials and other real policies like Romania’s Decree 770 or Australia’s Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869, Handmaid's Tale strikes a chord with contemporary issues. Those narrative choices underscore the invasions of women's bodies or forced separations and adoptions as grim reminders of history repeating. The series navigates the fragility of individual freedoms—particularly those of women—with unnerving precision. When asked about her hopes for The Handmaid's Tale today, Atwood said she hopes it doesn’t become a recipe book.
On another hand, Naomi Alderman's The Power, adapted into a Prime Video series, presents a world where women's newfound ability to emit electrical shocks becomes a metaphor for the empowerment of the #MeToo movement. The series’ creative team, including producer Naomi de Pear, and director Reed Morano (who also worked on "The Handmaid's Tale"), examines the complexities of a reversal of power, questioning whether it leads to parity or simply an inversion of power dynamics. Basically, would we trade misogyny for misandry? (Let’s hope not.) In the series, the weaponization of “powers” excises the current fear that, regardless of gender, any form of power is inherently corrupt. The most quoted line from the book ponders the same: “It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”
The Power, like THMT, captures the spirit of protests and uprisings, showcasing the collective action of women against oppressive systems. And it doesn’t shy away from depicting the violence and harassment women face. The influence of The Handmaid's Tale on The Power is a direct line of creative DNA, emphasizing the work isn’t done yet.
Adding to the conversation about the potential loss of autonomy is Jennifer Phang’s “Advantageous” (2015). Co-written with Jacqueline Kim, the film presents a future where the pressure on women to maintain youth and beauty in order to secure opportunities is intensified. “Advantageous” dissects the psychological and societal impacts of these pressures, echoing our current obsession with aesthetics and cosmetic procedures. The story follows the extreme measures a woman goes through to ensure stability for herself and her daughter. “Advantageous” fast-forwards to where the commodification of women’s bodies and the ageism/sexism that pervade our society could end. It adds another layer to women's rights, highlighting subversive forms of control exerted by imbalanced societal expectations.
Within The Handmaid's Tale, The Power, and “Advantageous” we are offered a speculative lens to the future. These stories serve as cautionary tales, reminding us to fight for our individual and civil rights, especially when some factions seek to return to tyrannical patriarchy. As society grapples with the vulnerability of human rights, the women behind these narratives provide invaluable insights into the challenges we face and the further hardships we might yet avert.
PART TWO: PLAGUES AND PANDEMICS
Women creators have also foreshadowed real-life plagues and pandemics. Soon to be adapted for the screen, Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day rings with an eerie warning from September of 2019. This near-future dystopia foresees the silences in our music venues and the emptiness of our public spaces after an outbreak like COVID-19. Pinsker wrote a world where quarantine is commonplace, and technology is a necessary yet inadequate substitute for human touch. The adaptation, to be developed by Jessica Matthews, promises to interrogate corporate overreach and its suffocating grip on creativity and human connection.
In parallel is Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. This prelude to our current reality became an HBO series that holds a mirror up to the tenuous social structure underpinning our interconnectedness. Mandel’s pandemic-ravaged world is an uncanny twin to lockdown and the upheavals brought on by COVID. In the series, as the world we know collapses, we cling to art, culture, and connection as lifelines, forming a tangible synonym for the nostalgia and longing we feel for pre-pandemic normalcy and the anchor of human connection in our darkest times.
In “Station Eleven”’s third episode, “Hurricane,” written by Shannon Houston and featuring Danielle Deadwyler, we see a clear warning: if we ignore the lessons of past pandemics, we risk watching society crumble. “Hurricane” skillfully builds suspense and explores deep emotions, showing how easily our world could fall into chaos. The episode is an absolute banger and the team of Deadwyler + Houston highlights our capacity to hope and adapt. “Hurricane” is the red flag, reminding us that our complacency in the face of another pandemic could lead to destruction.
A Song for a New Day and Station Eleven are prescient narratives because they lean on the past to inform the future. As we navigate the aftermath of our global crisis, these stories guide us toward resilience, creativity, and the indomitable strength of community. They are not just tales of survival; they are blueprints for the rebirth of society, where despite the silence of the world, the human song might endure.
Then again, I must acknowledge with a touch of irony that the many pandemic portrayals in our media—be it the desolate streets of “The Walking Dead,” the societal unraveling in “Contagion,” or the haunting quiet of “The Last of Us”—may have numbed us to the horrors of airborne diseases. Despite the Influenza Pandemic of 1918, which caused the deaths of an estimated 50 million people, the overabundance of apocalyptic stories might have lulled us into the belief that plagues are the stuff of screenwriters’ imaginations. What should have prepared us may have led to consequences far graver than we anticipated.
PART THREE: POLITICAL RUIN
In the realm of speculative fiction, few authors have captured societal upheaval and the potential for political ruin as incisively as Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin. Their works, particularly Butler’s Xenogenesis series (Lilith's Brood) and Parable Duology, along with Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, serve as harbingers of a future that seems all too familiar in today’s context. These two intergalactic empresses of science fiction envisioned worlds of chaos and transformation. They also provided a mirror to our present realities, hinting at the aftermath that may follow the political pitfalls of today.
In Butler’s Parable of the Talents, the rhetoric and divisive actions of Andrew Steele Jarret echo contemporary political figures, serving as a reminder of the ruination caused by autocratic politics and oligarchies. The rise of religious extremism, a prevalent theme in the Parable series, becomes even more relevant in the current global landscape, where religious fundamentalism is on the rise. By unmasking the impact of weaponized faith, Butler delivers a chilling forewarning of the consequences of unchecked zealotry. With several adaptations of her deeply prescient narratives on the way—including Lilith's Brood by Ava DuVernay and Victoria Mahoney—Butler’s work will continue to serve as a blaring siren for sociopolitical issues.
Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, first published in 1971, speaks to the ethical use of power—a theme that resonates in discussions about the responsible use of technology. The story revolves around dreams that alter reality, a metaphor for the power we wield through technology and how it can be misused. Government surveillance and control are key in The Lathe of Heaven, a relatable reference to the privacy issues and the potential for governmental overreach we face today. It also posits how the populace can be manipulated through mental healthcare—a frightening scenario. Both the 1980 and 2002 adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven offer their unique interpretations of Le Guin’s dream-altered universe. The ’80s version stands as a pioneering classic in sci-fi television, while the 2002 version provides a fresh perspective. Each is a testament to the enduring power of Le Guin’s narrative.
Political ruin often sets the stage in sci-fi, as seen in Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death and Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Okorafor’s work hurls us into postapocalyptic Africa, where Onyesonwu—a magical heroine—is poised to end the mass annihilation of her people, a narrative steeped in themes of mandated sexual assault and systemic racism. Ogawa’s story, on the other hand, explores a dystopian island where memory and culture are systematically obliterated, a disturbing metaphor for state-sponsored erasure. These works amplify the human and cultural cost of political ruination, serving not just as sci-fi narratives, but as potent reminders of our duty to resist, persist, and remember.
The works of Butler, Le Guin, Okorafor, and Ogawa are both mirror and compass—plotting a course from our current sociopolitical realities while pointing toward more destructive futures. Made more evident by the historical consequences of our actions. As the hints of impending political ruin become clearer, these stories serve as warnings and guides, urging us to consider the trajectory of our behaviors and their fallout. Or perhaps to dream a future into reality where harmony and justice prevail.
PART FOUR: TECHNOLOGICAL TRAGEDY
The 2016 HBO version of “Westworld,” brought to life by co-creator Lisa Joy, expands on our pursuit of artificial intelligence. The series asks, when does AI become conscious and should it be bestowed with “personhood”? Weaving the intricacies of human and AI interaction, “Westworld” raises questions about the ethical implications and the apprehensions surrounding what defines life. As precursors for the AI entities in “Westworld,” Alexa and Siri are becoming integral parts of our daily lives and might one day achieve sentience. If AI thinks for itself, is it a danger to human existence or do they have more to fear from us? Only science fiction knows.
In the film landscape, Akela Cooper’s “M3GAN” is an alarming extrapolation of AI’s potential dangers. The film also aligns with contemporary concerns about the effects of AI advancement. In the intersections of governmental, parasocial, and digital interactions, “M3GAN” voices real-world anxieties, such as the manipulation of social media platforms, the prevalence of disinformation campaigns, and the growing use of technology to influence public opinion. From the potential of AI to shape youthful minds, “M3GAN” captures the broader concerns about the long-term effects of technology on human relationships, and the potential threats to democratic procedures and civil discourse.
Both “Westworld” and “M3GAN” portray our current technological trajectory and the ethical dilemmas we face as AI becomes more integrated into our lives. These works challenge us to consider the future repercussions of AI advancements and the responsibilities of creating increasingly human-like artificial beings. The fact we can’t stop talking about these two techno-tragedies is a testament to Joy and to Cooper, who serve up puzzles of ethics and personhood with doses of spice and sauciness. Their characters make us want to dance, to fight, and to keep them on our side.
PART FIVE: CLIMATE CRISES
The shockwaves of N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy are undeniable amid our current environmental predicament. Her vivid portrayal of the Stillness, a land plagued by the cataclysmic Fifth Season, not only crafts an epic tale of survival and power but also warns about the ramifications of catastrophic climate change. This volatile and lethal earth serves as an analogy for our society, which is increasingly threatened by the severity and frequency of natural disasters due to our bad decisions. The Broken Earth trilogy is a parable for the global impact of environmental disasters and the inequities they can intensify. Jemisin also uses societal dynamics to expose how certain groups are exploited for the benefit of the powerful, which parallels our gobbling up of nonessential resources in the face of nature’s ruin. In an upcoming film, Jemisin is adapting her books in collaboration with Sony Pictures Entertainment and TriStar Pictures. This deal, involving the author in the process, will allow her to shape the onscreen interpretation of Broken Earth.
Meanwhile, there’s Kass Morgan’s The 100. Adapted for The CW, the series extrapolates the dire consequences of environmental degradation into a postapocalyptic vision of Earth. Centuries after a nuclear cataclysm, the remnants of humanity are forced to confront a ravaged planet, an allegory for the potential uninhabitability of our world after sea levels rise and temperatures soar. The societal collapse and resource scarcity portrayed on the space stations of "The 100" are a grim forecast of a future where climate change has upended food production and water availability. The story also deals with ill-advised human conflicts that ignore existential threats. A commentary on the current politicization surrounding climate facts and science.
The Broken Earth and The 100 predict the ramifications of climate change—uprooting the challenges and the societal transformations that accompany them. When it comes to the cataclysmic decline of nature, survival is as much about overcoming our external environment as it is about rectifying the internal dysfunction of human society.
IN THE END (LET’S HOPE IT’S A HAPPY ONE)
Throughout history, magical women were refuted by accusations of witchcraft. Especially when they foresaw dire futures. From the pages of their speculative fiction grimoires, the women who write sci-fi aren’t spinning idle tales, but mixing potent potions from historic recipes of reality and prophetic imagination. Their tales aren’t fantastical but bitter foreshadowing that we should heed or regret.
Cheers to the seers among us, who with their words are quietly nudging us to take notice and change course. After all, the women of science fiction are rumored to have augmented vision—intermittently updated by nanobots sent back from the future—while we continue to squint at the horizon. And when the next wave of “who could’ve seen this coming” floods our reality, you can call it witchcraft or whatever else you want—just remember they told you so.
* Excerpt from “The Apocalypse Plurality” The Keys: Twisted Tales from Auntie's Attic (p. 241). Miniver Press
]]>Ever since Elsa Lanchester lifted her salt-and-pepper head in “The Bride of Frankenstein,” filmmakers have been trying to figure out how to nail the feminist take on the classic horror story. The brutish strength and massive size of Boris Karloff’s original cinematic incarnation of the Monster isn’t exactly an obvious choice as the centerpiece of a female-oriented narrative. But although they approach it in different ways—one as a darkly comedic steampunk interpretation of an alternate 19th century, one as a gleefully malevolent retro pastiche of the 1980s horror comedy—Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” and Zelda Williams’s “Lisa Frankenstein” both succeed in wrestling Frankenstein into a tale of rage, sex, and feminist self-discovery.
Both “Poor Things” and “Lisa Frankenstein” feature heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of their identity. It’s a key component of Bella’s (Emma Stone) journey to womanhood, as her first display of self-advocacy comes when she chooses to leave home with Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan Wedderburn for a jet-setting voyage of debauchery. Ironically, the more she embraces his sexually liberated ways, the more disapproving he is of her behavior—in Duncan’s perfect world, Bella would be exactly as immodest as it would take for her to have sex with him, and not an inch more. Bella’s intellectual awakening coincides with her growing knowledge of her own sexuality as she takes on a job at a brothel after breaking up with Duncan in Paris. Her career as a sex worker serves as an opportunity to support herself and her burgeoning academic pursuits, but it also allows her to discover sex on her own terms as an independent figure with agency.
Sex hangs heavy over “Lisa Frankenstein” as well, from the cheeky fact that the main character’s name is Lisa Swallows to the throwaway gag of her aunt giving her a vibrator for Christmas in an effort to improve her personality. Lisa (Kathryn Newton) is a reserved high schooler who is still recovering from the trauma of witnessing her mother’s brutal death, followed by her father’s speedy remarriage to Janet (Carla Gugino), a woman who can barely disguise her revulsion at Lisa’s presence in her life. She doesn’t exactly have a great track record with boys, and the furthest she’s gotten is a schoolgirl crush on Michael Trent (Henry Eikenberry), the brooding editor of the literary magazine. Between her mother’s death and the Creature’s (Cole Sprouse) emergence, she is keenly aware of her own mortality, and is determined not to die a virgin. Rather than wait for Prince Charming—or even take the easy way out, with a not-unwilling Creature already hiding in her bedroom—she resolves to orchestrate the loss of her virginity by turning up at Michael’s house in the middle of the school day to offer herself to him.
Just as both characters assert their sexuality as a means of seeking power over their own lives, rage and violence are tied into their relationships with those who attempt to control them. Although Bella initially sees Duncan as her savior, the man who’s going to introduce her to the world, her intellect quickly outstrips his and she resents his efforts to keep a leash on her. But this is nothing compared to what happens when she is faced with her previous self’s husband, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott). Although she has no memory of her life before Godwin resurrected her, it becomes clear that his behavior played a large role in her decision to jump off a bridge, ending her life. Although she initially returns to their marital home, she is not willing to suffer mistreatment, and metes out her own unique brand of revenge when he deigns to cross her.
Meanwhile, Lisa faces struggles of her own. Her stepmother, Janet, is supremely mistrustful of her, and threatens to send her off to a psychiatric institution, presumably so that she can better maintain the pretense of having a perfect family unit with her new husband Dale (Joe Chrest) and her pageant-winning daughter Taffy (Liza Soberano). Although it is the Creature who ultimately dispatches Janet—blunt force head trauma courtesy of Lisa’s hefty sewing machine—Lisa is quick to hop on board, helping the Creature bury the body, sewing Janet’s ear onto his head, and seemingly developing a taste for murder herself. When the Creature expresses a desire for a new hand, Lisa’s quick to choose the perfect donor, getting revenge on the boy from school who groped her with that same hand at a party. He sought to assert his dominance over her, and was met with Lisa’s flaming sword—or rather, ax—of retribution. It’s also no coincidence that the boy who spurns her in favor of her stepsister ends up murdered and missing a certain appendage. Lisa’s furious at the world for the injustices it has delivered upon her, and the people who attempt to control her life or interfere with her plans have a tendency to end up dead. In both Bella and Lisa’s cases, their reactions are so extreme because they have so much to lose by allowing others to have power over them. They refuse to be vulnerable—instead, they take action.
The dynamic between Creator and Creation is one of the key relationships in “Frankenstein,” and in “Poor Things” and “Lisa Frankenstein,” Bella and Lisa occupy both roles. Bella is reanimated against her will as a baby in the body of an adult woman, forced to go through the stages of human development at warp speed. She begins the film with no agency—not even her death is respected. But over the course of “Poor Things,” she claws back power over her own life, first by running away with Duncan against her father figure Godwin “God” Baxter’s (Willem Dafoe) wishes, then by carving out an independent life for herself in Paris. But her true act of supreme agency comes when she herself becomes a creator—she refuses to accept her old life as the wife of the sadistically cruel Alfie Blessington, and uses God’s laboratory to replace his brain with that of a goat, allowing her freedom at last as the new god of her dominion.
By contrast, “Lisa Frankenstein” works in reverse. Lisa starts out as a creator, accidentally serving as the catalyst (along with a mysterious green lightning storm) for the Creature’s resurrection after leaving her mother’s rosary at his grave. She continues to fill that role throughout the film, repeatedly reanimating the Creature with Taffy’s malfunctioning tanning bed, each time after sewing on new limbs for him. Each of these times she operates as a facilitator for his agenda, giving him back the specific parts that he wants to reclaim. It’s only when she makes the decision to become a Creation—allowing herself to die in a fiery tanning bed accident and then be brought back to life in the same way the Creature was—that she is fully in control of her destiny. In the final scene, Lisa has come full circle, with the Creature serving as her resurrector, as she requested of him.
As we see in both “Poor Things” and “Lisa Frankenstein,” the journey to self-actualization for Bella and Lisa is not complete without a little bit of bloodshed. They rise above the circumstances they are born into, a world that seeks to stifle them, and assert themselves as women and as individuals. When they are faced with violence, they respond in kind. And against all odds, both women carve out a space for themselves in a hostile world—even if, in true “Frankenstein” fashion, their efforts to exercise personal agency come with a body count.
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