Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 221

February 28, 2016

The World of The Walking Dead Gets Bigger

Every week for the sixth season of AMC’s post-apocalyptic drama The Walking Dead, Lenika Cruz and David Sims will discuss the latest threat—human, zombie, or otherwise—to the show’s increasingly hardened band of survivors.

Lenika Cruz: I’m certain it’s no coincidence that a character by the name of Jesus appeared and suddenly The Walking Dead was saved. If “The Next World” tentatively renewed my faith in the rest of season six, “Knots Untie” has forced me to join the camp of the show’s true believers again. Jesus isn’t just a cool new character—he’s also a narrative windfall (or land mine, depending on how much you want to dwell on all the tragedies that undoubtably lie ahead). Learning of the existence of Jesus’s Hilltop colony, and of Negan’s group, the Saviors, may be the biggest world-building development since the introduction of the Wolves. The show was starting to languish in the stale, claustrophobic Alexandria, so I sensed a cure-all coming when Jesus told Rick, Michonne, Maggie, and the rest, “Your world’s about to get a whole lot bigger.”

“Cure-all” is maybe a touch hyperbolic and premature, but judging by this episode, a bigger world has already led to a more promising story. Rick, Michonne, Glenn, Maggie, Abraham, and Daryl hopped in the RV and followed Jesus to his community in hope that they could strike up a trade deal and refill their dwindling food supply. Of course, Jesus’s line that “things aren’t as simple as they may seem” may as well be the disclaimer for every new community the group discovers. (No hospital is just a hospital; no genteel governor is just a genteel governor.) In this case, Hilltop may have livestock and crops and a fancy mansion, but its lack of fighters and ammo forced the colony to make a deal with Negan and his Saviors to keep them from murdering everyone. So, naturally, Rick and the gang proposed to go take on these bloodthirsty monsters in exchange for food and supplies. Naturally. What could go wrong?

I, for one, anticipate a Pyrrhic victory that’s more “Pyrrhic” than “victory.” So does everyone else, I’m guessing. (As wise Maggie offered darkly: “It’s going to cost us.”) But at least now that show has essentially revealed its endgame for the season—a bloody showdown between the Alexandrians and the Saviors. I couldn’t blame Rick and the crew for their hubris in volunteering for such a huge task. As Rick said, confrontation has never been their weak spot. They’re battle-tested—the masters of impossible head shots, the possessors of great cardiovascular endurance, the epitome of cool under pressure. And at this point, their ability to fight—a skill that seemed woefully mismatched to the placid earlier days of Alexandria—is their only currency. That brawl in the yard, which began with a Red Wedding-esque act of betrayal against Gregory (“Negan sends his regards”) and ended with a blood-drenched Rick shrugging at the stunned onlookers was a perfectly timed demonstration of their value.

But even apart from the central action, “Knots Untie” was a terrific hour of TV. The two subplots—Abraham’s concerns about building a family and Maggie’s negotiations with the Hilltop leader Gregory—not only dovetailed with the larger arc, but also had full and elegant mini-arcs of their own. The Walking Dead has concerned itself with the philosophical dimensions of having children in a post-apocalyptic world in the past. But having Abraham grapple with his simultaneous love for Sasha and his sense of affection and duty for Rosita gave his character a new depth. And the show handled it with uncommon subtlety: The tail-light necklace metaphor and Abraham’s near-death moment of clarity kept the thread from feeling like a tonally awkward soap opera. His plight threw the attitudes of other characters into relief as well—Daryl as the perennial lone wolf, who acutely sees the tragic potential in family-building; and Maggie, Glenn, and Michonne as the optimists, despite the odds.

“See?” the show seemed to be saying. “We have restraint.”

Meanwhile, Maggie’s quick, assured rise to the level of Deanna’s successor led to one of the best lines in an episode that had plenty. “See? I have leverage,” she told a bedridden Gregory, after she demanded half of everything Hilltop had in exchange for saving them from Negan. It couldn’t have been a more satisfying reversal from earlier. David, you were probably also horrified, yet unsurprised, to learn that powerful men who feel entitled to women’s bodies are alive and well in the zombie apocalypse. Gregory’s creepy attempts to exploit Maggie’s vulnerability could not have worked less in his favor, but I was glad the episode 1) didn’t draw out his predatory behavior and 2) didn’t use it to trigger Glenn/Rick/Daryl into killing him out of anger. “See?” the show seemed to be saying. “We have restraint.”

David, which line of this episode was your favorite? Was it when Daryl asked Abraham of Michonne, “You think she’d settle?” Or was it Abraham interrogating Glenn: “When you were pouring the Bisquick, were you trying to make pancakes?” Or was it every time someone said “Jesus” (“We’re not going to hurt you. We’re friends of Jesus”)?

David Sims: Abraham’s musings on pancake-making were top-notch, helped along by watching Glenn silently try to unpack what the hell he was talking about. I too enjoyed this episode, and I’m generally heartened by the show’s lighter tone after last year’s miserable set-piece. But, like Maggie, I’m fearful about what’s around the corner. The strong world-building of “Knots Untie” further gave the sense that The Walking Dead is going to change from a show that’s always on the road to one that’s about civilization taking deeper root.

I’m fascinated by the Hilltop colony, which stands in contrast to both the cloistered world of pre-Rick Alexandria and the shoot first, ask questions later approach of our main characters. These are smart, wily people, especially Jesus, but they’re cowed by the unseen protection racket of Negan, whose actions we’ve only seen in proxy form so far. I was excited to see Xander Berkeley, a character actor who excels at playing slimeballs, in the role of Gregory, but I don’t think The Walking Dead is too interested in delving into the dynamics of Hilltop and how he ascended to its leadership. Everything’s pointing toward a much bigger showdown, which gives me pause.

After a half-season that was largely about the zombie horde as a threat, we’re digging back into The Walking Dead’s real villains—humankind.

To me, The Walking Dead is at its best when it’s tackling smaller situations, like Slabtown or Terminus—I like watching the show spin little yarns of how people might behave at the end of the world. The way Negan is talked about in “Knots Untie,” it’s hard not to think of the maniacal Governor, who dominated the action in the show’s third and fourth seasons, when it was at its absolute worst. Yes, the zombie-ridden world of The Walking Dead is suited to dictators and psychotic maniacs, but hopefully there’ll be more to this new adversary than just the constant threat of violence, torture, and death for all who defy him.

But, like Rick and company, I guess I’ll worry more about Negan later. “Knots Untie” did a very nice job building up some characters who haven’t gotten enough attention lately, like Maggie (whose bedside confrontation with Gregory was something special) and Abraham. Perhaps one reason I’m so worried about Negan’s rise is that I’ve become so attached to this current ensemble and, for the most part, just want them to live in peace in Alexandria for the rest of their days. The group’s decision to go after this local bully is perfectly in line with their characters—they’re not one to be intimidated, after all—but it’s characters like Abraham and Maggie that I’m going to fret over once open warfare begins.

I’ll say this, though: I’m glad the show is taking a bit of a break from zombies for the moment. That shot of a useless walker, pinned under a car and growling harmlessly, seemed like a clever little hat-tip to the audience. After a half-season that was largely about the zombie horde as a threat, we’re digging back into The Walking Dead’s real villains—humankind—as the show gears up for its next major arc. That the people of Hilltop have survived for so long with barely any weapons is a bit of a head-scratcher, but the show doesn’t want us thinking about such zombie practicalities at the moment. Now that, I don’t mind so much.

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Published on February 28, 2016 19:00

The Winners and Losers of the 2016 Academy Awards

Perhaps Spotlight’s win shouldn’t have been surprising—it was a diffuse Oscar season, with a lot of favorite films but no consensus pick, and that’s the kind of year in which a film that almost everybody liked can rise to the top. Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant, Room, and The Big Short all had their passionate fans, but weren’t generally popular enough to be marked as consistent favorites. Spotlight, a sober tale of journalism done right, was less sweeping or cinematic than many of the other nominated pictures, but it was still an important tale powerfully told: enough for it to win Oscar’s biggest prize. Trivia: The last film to win Best Picture and just one other Oscar (Spotlight took Best Original Screenplay) was Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth in 1953.

Chris Rock was laser-focused on the #OscarsSoWhite controversy from beginning to end—his entire opening monologue swung at it, and he interspersed several strong bits through the show, returning to the interviews with real-life cinemagoers of color that worked so well in his first hosting gig. It was an acidic night on that front, but it had to be, and the Academy’s President, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, made an impassioned plea to members to accept the changes geared towards expanding voter diversity, as if to say, let’s stop this publicity disaster from ever happening again.

The big winners were Spotlight, Mad Max: Fury Road (six wins), and The Revenant (three wins), but voters spread the wealth among the Best Picture nominees. Room took home Best Actress, Bridge of Spies won Best Supporting Actor, and The Big Short won Best Adapted Screenplay—only Brooklyn and The Martian went home empty-handed. For the third time in four years, Best Picture and Best Director were split between different films, a historical rarity that is now becoming voters’ favorite tactic to honor a film they technically respected (like Life of Pi, Gravity, and The Revenant) alongside the expected Best Picture movie. Now, the Academy looks firmly towards its future—and its effort to drastically expand its members of color in the coming years. —David Sims

12:15 AM Lenika Cruz Link

Spotlight Wins Best Picture

The biggest upset of the night came at the very end. Many critics had expressed a hope that the sobering and methodical Spotlight would win, while acknowledging the likeliness that The Revenant would snag the award (the film took Best Actor and Best Director earlier). But it was Spotlight—a film that reaffirmed the power of investigative journalism to challenge powerful institutions, a film that perhaps more importantly gave voice to countless survivors of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church—that walked away with the honor.

12:11 AM David Sims Link

Leonardo DiCaprio Wins Best Actor for The Revenant

Everyone saw it coming, and he waged a furious campaign for the award, but there was still a strange sense of satisfaction to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Best Actor win for The Revenant. It puts an end to the tiresome narrative that accompanies any over-nominated movie star who’s never won—this was his sixth nod—and perhaps it’ll free him up to take riskier projects in the future, since he no longer has to hunt for a trophy. The narrative around DiCaprio’s campaign was heavily focused on the grueling physical toil of the film’s outdoor shoot, and DiCaprio noted in his speech that production had to relocate to the southern tip of Argentina to find snow, urging the audience to acknowledge the damage of climate change, one of his long-standing causes. “We need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating,” he said.

11:56 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Brie Larson Wins Best Actress for Room

In an evening with few surprises … another non-surprise! Larson, along with her co-star Jacob Tremblay, were the soul of Room, a film about a young mother trying to protect and nurture her son in the most unbearable circumstances. The 26-year-old, who swept the best-actress field for the major precursor awards (Golden Globes, SAG Awards, BAFTA Awards), thanked her director, Lenny Abrahmson, Room’s novelist and screenwriter, Emma Donoghue, and Tremblay.

11:50 PM David Sims Link

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu wins Best Director for The Revenant

Mad Max: Fury Road’s technical sweep seemed to presage an insurgent win for George Miller, its revered director, but in the end, the favorite took the prize—Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, for The Revenant, which will almost certainly end up taking Best Picture as well. Iñárritu won last year for Birdman, making him the first director to win back-to-back Oscars since Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who won in 1949 and 1950 for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve. John Ford also accomplished the feat in 1940 and 1941 for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley.

11:40 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

Lady Gaga's Emotional Performance

The sincere and unapologetic theater kid known as Lady Gaga may not actually be made for these times, given that cool, controlled social-media image projection is now the preferred mode for pop stars. But though her twitching and gesturing behind a white piano on a dark stage while performing “Till It Happens to You” tonight caused some snickers on Twitter, the truth is that she vested a so-so rock ballad with energy and specificity that nearly made for an iconic moment. At some points, her gaze followed the camera as it panned while she sang: a confrontation. In other moments, she seemed totally lost to emotion.

Joe Biden introduced her, calling on all viewers to join a pledge to “intervene in situations where consent has not or cannot be given.” Toward the end of the song, women and men identified as victims of sexual abuse came forward, with messages written on their arms: “NOT YOUR FAULT,” “UNBREAKABLE.” The song had been written with Diane Warren for The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus rape.

11:37 PM Lenika Cruz Link

‘Writing’s on the Wall’ Wins Best Original Song

In an upset, Sam Smith and Jimmy Napes won for their theme to the Bond movie Spectre, edging out The Hunting Ground anthem “Till It Happens to You,” by Lady Gaga and Dianne Warren (the latter has had her songs nominated eight times for an Oscar, though she’s never won). In his acceptance speech. Smith dedicated the win to the LGBT community around the world, saying “I stand here tonight as a proud gay man, and I hope we can all stand together as equals one day.” This Oscar also means Smith is halfway to an EGOT.

11:33 PM Megan Garber Link

The Genius of Live Music for the “In Memoriam” Segment

The “In Memoriam” tribute is usually one of the most predictable elements of an Oscar show—a montage scored with treacly music whose swings and swells are meant to pull at the heartstrings of the audience. There’s another predictable aspect of all that, though: Audiences, wanting to applaud the lives and accomplishments of those being remembered, end up giving extra applause to the actors and directors they’re most familiar with. It’s understandable. It’s also a little bit awkward.

This year, though, the montage’s musical accompaniment was performed live. Dave Grohl, with an acoustic guitar, sang The Beatles’ “Blackbird.” It was a lovely rendition of a lovely song, but it had another effect, too: The live performance kept the audience from applauding during the tributes on the screen. David Bowie got the same treatment as writers and producers. Everyone was remembered equally—and paid, together, the tribute of silence.

11:28 PM David Sims Link

Ennio Morricone Wins His First Competitive Oscar

He’s one of the most legendary composers in the history of film, and he won an Honorary Oscar in 2007 (Clint Eastwood sweetly translated his speech from the Italian onstage). But Ennio Morricone, who has been scoring films since 1959, had never won for Best Original Score until tonight, when he won for The Hateful Eight. The 87-year-old flew to Hollywood for the ceremony, and it was apparently worth the trip—the Dolby Theater audience rose in a standing ovation before he even got to the podium.

11:17 PM David Sims Link

Son of Saul Wins Best Foreign Film

Best Foreign Film was one of the Oscars’ strongest categories this year, but Son of Saul was always a runaway favorite to win. The movie won rave reviews for its unique visual take on a grueling Holocaust narrative, following two days in the life of a Jewish prisoner assigned to a work unit in Auschwitz. The movie’s director, Laszlo Nemes, accepted the award, Hungary’s second Oscar (its first was for Mephisto in 1981).

11:11 PM Katharine Schwab Link

Stutterer Wins Best Live-Action Short

Benjamin Cleary and Serena Armitage won for their film Stutterer, a sweet comedy about a man with a speech impediment who looks for love online. Armitage thanked the Academy for taking the time to honor shorts, which still haven’t made it into the mainstream. They are, however, a hotbed for creativity—a topic I wrote about this week—and the reboot-riddled film industry needs them more than ever.

11:04 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Chris Rock Addresses #OscarsSoWhite, Part 2

Chris Rock has been going pretty hard, as expected, with his criticism of the whiteness of this year’s Oscar nominees. In one of his best bits, he interviewed black cinema-goers in Los Angeles, asking them what they thought about the lack of black people at the Oscars. One of the gentlemen he interviewed pointed out that Asians and Hispanic actors were also being ignored by the Academy—the first time, as many noted on Twitter, that people of color who aren’t black had been explicitly acknowledged during the ceremony. (So far this evening, a few of winners of Asian and Latino descent have been onstage, including Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Pakistani filmmaker; Emmanuel Lubezki; and the creators behind the Chilean short film Bear Story.)

Even among advocates for greater representation in Hollywood, it’s a complicated issue, as I wrote earlier this week. No hashtag or host or group can be responsible for changing the dynamics of Hollywood, or the mainstream media, or the racial politics of the entire country.

10:54 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

Amy Wins Best Documentary

Amy Winehouse’s extraordinary and tragic life led to Amy, which has turned out to be extraordinary in its genre. It was the rare bona fide documentary hit, making more money than any other British non-fiction movie ever. It also drew a mix of acclaim and controversy for the way it collaged home footage of Winehouse with paparazzi videos that the producers paid to use, arguably rewarding the same media outlets that hounded the singer in life. Accepting the Oscar for best documentary film, the director Asif Kapadia said the movie was “about showing the world who she really was, not a tabloid persona: the beautiful girl with an amazing soul, funny, intelligent, witty, someone special, someone who needed looking after.”

10:46 PM Katharine Schwab Link

A Girl in the River Wins Best Documentary Short

“This is what happens what determined women get together,” said Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy after she accepted the award for Best Documentary Short for her film A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. The movie is about honor killing in Obaid-Chinoy’s home country of Pakistan; in her speech, she paid tribute to “the brave men out there who want a more just society for women,” and revealed that after watching her film, the Pakistani prime minister decided to change the nation’s laws on honor killing.

10:39 PM David Sims Link

Mark Rylance Wins Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies

Mad Max’s technical domination wasn’t expected to be total and Ex Machina’s visual effects win was surprising, but the first huge shock of the night was Mark Rylance defeating the heavily favored Sylvester Stallone for Best Supporting Actor. Rylance had collected the lion’s share of critics awards for his work as the mild-mannered Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, but prognosticators thought Stallone’s work as an aged Rocky Balboa would be a sentimental favorite. Rylance’s speech was as classy as ever (check out some of his Tony wins on YouTube when you have the chance), praising his director Steven Spielberg (“Unlike some other leaders we’re being presented with these days, he leads with such love”) and his co-star Tom Hanks.

10:22 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Inside Out Wins Best Animated Feature

No surprise that a film directed by the man who helmed Up and Monsters, Inc. won for being a deeply heartfelt yet funny story that appealed to kids and adults alike. In his acceptance speech, Pete Docter offered a message to children who might be watching: that even though they couldn’t necessarily control the feelings of anger or fear they sometimes experienced, they “can make stuff. Make films, draw, write. It’ll make a world of difference.”

10:18 PM Katharine Schwab Link

Bear Story Wins Best Animated Short

Best Animated Short goes to Bear Story, a sad but beautiful film about a lonely bear who makes an animatronic diorama in order to remember his family after he was taken by the circus. After accepting the award, the first for their home country of Chile, the director Gabriel Osorio and the producer Pato Escala honored Osorio’s grandfather, who inspired the film, and “all the people like him who have suffered in exile.”

10:07 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

The Ongoing Trolling of Will Smith

Predictably, Hollywood has been the target of lots of #OscarsSoWhite jokes tonight. Less predictably, so have been Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, who are boycotting the ceremony. In his opening monologue, Chris Rock said Jada refusing the Oscars would be like Rock refusing Rihanna’s panties: There was no invitation in the first place. He also said that while it might be unfair that Will didn’t get nominated for Concussion, it also wasn’t fair how much money he made from Wild Wild West. Later, in a video purporting to pay tribute to Black History Month, Angela Bassett shouted out works like Enemy of the State and mentioned a “fresh” talent … and then revealed that she’d been honoring Jack Black. The gag, of course, was about Hollywood’s tendency to pass over black actors for white ones. But it was also about trolling Will Smith.

Here's tonight's Black History Month Minute.https://t.co/rPBKac5fdl

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 29, 2016

10:04 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Ex Machina Wins Best Visual Effects

I’m not one to seriously partake in the year Oscars prognostication, but ... I didn’t see that one coming! Sure, it didn’t have the spectacle of Star Wars or The Martian, but it’s nice to see a film as special—and frankly under-appreciated—as Ex Machina score such a win. (Who could forget all the horrifying android-skin peeling scenes?)

10:00 PM Megan Garber Link

About That ‘Let’s Make the Acceptance Speeches More Substantial’ Experiment…

You know that whole experiment they’re doing at this year’s Oscars, the one in which the show’s producers asked nominees to submit lists of the people they wanted to thank before the show? The idea was that, if the names of the thankees could scroll on the screen while the winner delivers his or her speech, that would free up the winner to give a more substantial speech. Think Viola Davis at the Emmys.

Well … old habits die hard. This evening’s speeches thus far have been extremely conventional. They have been chock-full of the same thing they have been in years past: thank-yous delivered to the winners’ family and friends and fellow nominees and “teams.”

In her acceptance of her Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Alicia Vikander spent her speech thanking “Working Title and Focus.” And “my dream team.” She sought out “Tom—where are you?—my director” in the audience. She sought out Eddie Redmayne, her co-star, to thank him and tell him that “you raised my game.” She thanked her “mom and dad” for “giving me the belief that anything can happen.”

Conventional stuff, right? The list of Vikander’s thankees scrolled so quickly as to be almost illegible … but it didn’t seem to change Vikander’s speech. People want to express gratitude. And even when they try to use their time on the Oscars stage to make larger points—as Mad Max’s costume designer, Jenny Beavan, did—they are reminded of how limited that time actually is. “It could happen to us, Mad Max, if we’re not kinder to each other and we don’t stop polluting our atmosphere.”

Beavan’s speech was interrupted by another time-honored Oscar tradition: the play-off. The music, in this case, was a particularly passive-aggressive selection on the part of an Oscars aiming for efficiency: “Flight of the Valkyries.”

09:58 PM David Sims Link

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing

George Miller’s action epic continues to sweep the technical categories—it now has six awards, making it pretty much mathematically certain that it will be the biggest winner of the night. Its mostly Australian crew are making for some energetic winners, too—one of the Sound Editing honorees got bleeped out for a foul-mouthed cheer as he took the trophy, and another was wearing a skull and crossbones necklace with his black tie. Mad Max’s technical sweep could presage a surprise Best Director or Picture win, but more likely it was just the voters’ visual favorite. The Revenant was expected to take a few of these, though, and the fact that it hasn’t won outside of cinematography may signal a lack of enthusiasm for the film among the many voting branches.

09:46 PM KathArine schwabLink

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Film Editing

Margaret Sixel wins Mad Max: Fury Road’s fourth Oscar of the night for Film Editing. It’s not only her first Oscar but her first nomination. Sixel praised the “creative courage and guts” it took to get the movie made.

09:43 PM Lenika Cruz Link

The Revenant Wins Best Cinematography

Good job, Chivo. Emmanuel Lubezki won his third consecutive Oscar, after winning for Birdman and Gravity the last two years (it was his eighth Oscar nomination, and he’s now one of only seven people ever to have kept up an Oscar streak for three years). For all the focus on the lack of diversity at the Oscars, it’s at least heartening to see a Latino cinematographer, working on a film by Latino director, be honored for his impeccable work.

09:33 PM Katharine Schwab Link

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Makeup

Mad Max: Fury Road wins its third straight award, this time for Makeup and Hairstyling (the movie is up for 10 Oscars overall). Lesley Vanderwalt, Elka Wardega, and Damian Martin thanked the film’s director, George Miller, who’s also nominated for Best Director.

09:31 PM lenika cruzLink

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Production Design

Mad Max: Fury Road just won its second Oscar of the night—this time for best production design. In accepting the award alongside Lisa Wilson, the production designer Colin Gibson joked that the award could be considered the first award for diversity, after quipping that the film was about “a man with mental health issues, an Amazon amputee, and five runaway sex slaves.”

09:27 PM Megan Garber Link

The Victory of #AskHerMore

“You’re not allowed to ask women what they’re wearing anymore,” Chris Rock said at the end of his Oscars monologue. And, indeed: On the red carpet this evening, the perennial question—not what, but “who are you wearing?”—was relatively rare. Instead of asking women on the red carpet to describe their outfits, journalists instead made do with other kinds of banter. (Mostly: “I’ve been doing this for like 72 hours,” Mindy Kaling joked to E! of her Oscars-primping routine.)

That amounted to a success for the #AskHerMore campaign, started in February 2014 by the Representation Project and objecting to the fact that women on the red carpet are so often asked about fashion while men are asked about … basically anything else. Rock offered an explanation for that maybe-changing fact in his monologue: “They ask the men more,” Rock said, “because the men are all wearing the exact same outfits.”

09:22 PM lenika cruzLink

Alicia Vikander Wins Best Supporting Actress for The Danish Girl

No surprise in the Best Supporting Actress category—Alicia Vikander picked up her first Oscar (on her first nomination) for her role in The Danish Girl, beating out Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rooney Mara, Rachel McAdams, and Kate Winslet. Still, many critics have wondered whether she better deserved to win for her work in a different 2015 film—her performance as the mysterious A.I. Ava in Ex Machina.

09:19 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

James Bond: ‘Not a Grower or a Shower’

When it was released, I wrote that Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall” made for an unusually vulnerable, morose James Bond theme, and that some people would see it as complicating—or betraying—the 007 franchise’s traditional macho mystique. Now, we get Sarah Silverman introducing the song by delivering an acidic anti-Bond routine where she said she hadn’t seen Spectre and reported that Bond has an inadequate manhood. Smith wobbled a bit, both in pitch and in posture, as he sang.

09:15 PM David Sims Link

Chris Rock Addresses #OscarsSoWhite

Chris Rock walked onto the Oscar stage a man with a mission, and he largely delivered, with an incisive monologue that focused on the Academy’s all-white slate of actors this year and pulled no punches. One of his first bits focused on how vocal the protests were in 2016 compared to decades prior, despite Hollywood’s long legacy of systemic racism. “We had real things to protest at the time,” Rock joked. “When your grandma’s swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about Best Foreign Documentary Short.”

It was an intense joke, and one of many that seemed to land harder for viewers at home than the audience at the Dolby Theater. The camera cut, repeatedly and painfully, to (mostly white) actors and directors in the audience, often smiling thinly and clapping at jokes about the structural racism of their industry. “It’s not burning cross racist … Hollywood is sorority racist,” Rock said. “It’s like, ‘We like you, Wanda, but you’re not a Kappa.’” At one point, he noted how easy it was for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio to get varied roles compared to A-list black actors like Jamie Foxx; the camera switched right to DiCaprio, grinning and bearing it.

Not all of Rock’s jokes landed, and he made some strange digressions—at one point, he mocked Jada Pinkett Smith for boycotting the ceremony, saying she wasn’t invited. To close his speech out, he made fun of the growing trend to ask actresses on the red carpet about more than the dresses they’re wearing, a slightly thudding topic to wrap such a hard-hitting monologue. But in general, the opening was just what the ceremony needed.

09:09 PM Katharine Schwab Link

The Big Short Wins Best Adapted Screenplay

Charles Randolph and Adam McKay won Best Adapted Screenplay for their work on The Big Short, based on Michael Lewis's book about the 2008 financial crisis. McKay, who commented on the pervasive influence of big money in government in his acceptance speech, is also nominated for Best Director.

09:04 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Spotlight Wins Best Original Screenplay

The first Oscar of the night goes to Spotlight for best original screenplay. In their acceptance speech, the screenwriters Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer dedicated the film to “all the journalists who hold the powerful accountable.”

08:42 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

Lady Gaga and the Other Issue of the Night

The ceremony has been defined by questions about racial inclusion, but there’s another social-issue sub-theme: sexual assault. Joe Biden will introduce a performance from Lady Gaga, whose nominated song “Till It Happens to You” was recorded for The Hunting Ground, a documentary about rape on college campuses. Speaking on the red carpet, Gaga mentioned her own sexual assault as well as the statistics saying that one in five women will be raped in college. A number of other nominated films, like Spotlight and Room, also revolve around sexual predation.

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Whoopi Goldberg Is Not Oprah

Oh, no. This tweet—since deleted—is really not a good way to begin the Oscars ceremony. It is, however, a really good reminder of the ways #OscarsSoWhite extends beyond the Oscars themselves. —Megan Garber

Anticipating the 2016 Academy Awards

Prior to the start of the 2016 Academy Awards, there’s currently more speculation about what will be in Chris Rock’s opening routine than who the actual winners will be. Predictions for most of the major categories are settled—solid favorites include Leonardo DiCaprio, Brie Larson, and Sylvester Stallone—but in the year of #OscarsSoWhite and Academy rule changes, Rock’s monologue should be the main event. The word is that he’s been working through the material in small L.A. comedy clubs, and the primary question is just how hard-hitting he’ll be in a year when there have been more headlines about the all-white acting nominees than the movies themselves.

One of the few major awards that’s still anyone’s guess is Best Picture—though The Revenant came on strong late in the season, collecting the Golden Globe and the crucial Directors Guild Award, only its star DiCaprio seems guaranteed for success. Will Oscar voters pick that movie’s epic scale over the hard-hitting true story of Spotlight or the anarchic Wall Street satire of The Big Short? The Revenant has to overcome the fact that its director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, won Best Picture and Best Director last year for Birdman, and that kind of a back-to-back repeat is historically rare. But in a divided year, it’s currently in pole position. —David Sims

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Published on February 28, 2016 17:10

Live Coverage of the 2016 Academy Awards

10:18 PM
Katharine Schwab Link

Bear Story Wins Best Animated Short

Best Animated Short goes to Bear Story, a sad but beautiful film about a lonely bear who makes an animatronic diorama in order to remember his family after he was taken by the circus. After accepting the award, the first for their home country of Chile, the director Gabriel Osorio and the producer Pato Escala honored Osorio's grandfather, who inspired the film, and "all the people like him who have suffered in exile."

10:07 PM
Spencer Kornhaber Link

The Ongoing Trolling of Will Smith

Predictably, Hollywood has been the target of lots of #OscarsSoWhite jokes tonight. Less predictably, so have been Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, who are boycotting the ceremony. In his opening monologue, Chris Rock said Jada refusing the Oscars would be like Rock refusing Rihanna’s panties: There was no invitation in the first place. He also said that while it might be unfair that Will didn’t get nominated for Concussion, it also wasn’t fair how much money he made from Wild Wild West. Later, in a video purporting to pay tribute to Black History Month, Angela Bassett shouted out works like Enemy of the State and mentioned a “fresh” talent… and then revealed that she’d been honoring Jack Black. The gag, of course, was about Hollywood’s tendency to pass over black actors for white ones. But it was also about trolling Will Smith.

Here's tonight's Black History Month Minute.https://t.co/rPBKac5fdl

— The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 29, 2016

10:04 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Ex Machina Wins Best Visual Effects

I’m not one to seriously partake in the year Oscars prognostication, but ... I didn’t see that one coming! Sure, it didn't have the spectacle of Star Wars or The Martian, but it's nice to see a film as special—and frankly underappreciated—as Ex Machina score such a win. (Who could forget all the horrifying android-skin peeling scenes?)

10:00 PM Megan Garber Link

About That 'Let's Make the Acceptance Speeches More Substantial' Experiment...

Well … old habits die hard. This evening's speeches thus far have been extremely conventional. They have been chock-full of the same thing they have been in years past: thank-yous delivered to the winners’ family and friends and fellow nominees and “teams.”

In her acceptance of her Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Alicia Vikander spent her speech thanking “Working Title and Focus.” And “my dream team.” She sought out “Tom—where are you?—my director” in the audience. She sought out Eddie Redmayne, her co-star, to thank him and tell him that "you raised my game.” She thanked her “mom and dad” for giving me the belief that anything can happen.”

Conventional stuff, right? The list of Vikander’s thankees scrolled so quickly as to be almost illegible … but it didn’t seem to change Vikander’s speech. People want to express gratitude. And even when they try to use their time on the Oscars stage to make larger points—as Mad Max’s costume designer, Jenny Beavan, did—they are reminded of how limited that time actually is. “It could happen to us, Mad Max, if we’re not kinder to each other and we don’t stop polluting our atmosphere.”

09:58 PM David Sims Link

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing

09:46 PM KathArine schwabLink

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Film Editing

Margaret Sixel wins Mad Max: Fury Road's fourth Oscar of the night for Film Editing. It's not only her first Oscar but her first nomination. Sixel praised the “creative courage and guts” it took to get the movie made.

09:43 PM Lenika Cruz Link

The Revenant Wins Best Cinematography

09:33 PM Katharine Schwab Link

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Makeup

09:31 PM lenika cruzLink

Mad Max: Fury Road Wins Best Production Design

09:27 PM Megan Garber Link

The Victory of #AskHerMore

That amounted to a success for the #AskHerMore campaign, started in February 2014 by the Representation Project and objecting to the fact that women on the red carpet are so often asked about fashion while men are asked about … basically anything else. Rock offered an explanation for that maybe-changing fact in his monologue: “They ask the men more,” Rock said, "because the men are all wearing the exact same outfits.”

09:22 PM lenika cruzLink

Alicia Vikander Wins Best Supporting Actress for The Danish Girl

09:19 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

James Bond: ‘Not a Grower or a Shower’

Associated Press

09:15 PM David Sims Link

Chris Rock Addresses #OscarsSoWhite

Associated Press

Chris Rock walked onto the Oscar stage a man with a mission, and he largely delivered, with an incisive monologue that focused on the Academy’s all-white slate of actors this year and pulled no punches. One of his first bits focused on how vocal the protests were in 2016 compared to decades prior, despite Hollywood’s long legacy of systemic racism. “We had real things to protest at the time,” Rock joked. “When your grandma's swinging from a tree, it's really hard to care about Best Foreign Documentary Short.”

It was an intense joke, and one of many that seemed to land harder for viewers at home than the audience at the Dolby Theater. The camera cut, repeatedly and painfully, to (mostly white) actors and directors in the audience, often smiling thinly and clapping at jokes about the structural racism of their industry. “It’s not burning cross racist … Hollywood is sorority racist,” Rock said. “It's like, ‘We like you, Wanda, but you're not a Kappa.’” At one point, he noted how easy it was for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio to get varied roles compared to A-list black actors like Jamie Foxx; the camera switched right to DiCaprio, grinning and bearing it.

09:09 PM Katharine Schwab Link

The Big Short Wins Best Adapted Screenplay

09:04 PM Lenika Cruz Link

Spotlight Wins Best Original Screenplay

08:42 PM Spencer Kornhaber Link

Lady Gaga and the Other Issue of the Night

Link

Whoopi Goldberg Is Not Oprah

Anticipating the 2016 Academy Awards

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Published on February 28, 2016 17:10

Remembering Wally Yonamine

In the summer of 2000, at an airport in Honolulu, Kaname “Wally” Yonamine was explaining an exhibit that outlined his legacy of playing baseball in Japan in the 1950s to his granddaughter and a curious bystander. The bystander was fascinated, so much so that he wanted to take a picture of the display. But unaware he was in Mr. Yonamine’s presence, he asked him to step aside so he wouldn’t be in the picture.

Wally Yonamine said nothing.

It’s this humility, along with his extraordinary achievements in baseball and football, that made Yonamine—who died five years ago, on February 28, 2011—one of the most remarkable figures in 20th-century sports. Born in Hawaii to Japanese parents, he was the first Asian player to play professional football in the U.S, spending a season with the 49ers in 1947. He is also considered the first American to play professional baseball in Japan after World War II, making him one of the most significant and underappreciated figures in Japanese American diplomacy.

After the devastating atomic bombs in the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima brought World War II to a swift end, Allied forces occupied Japan until 1952. Yonamine was considered a natural ambassador to help repair the relationship between the two countries, but the unique suspicion toward Americans in Japan at the time didn’t preclude those with Japanese heritage. The wounds of the war were fresh, and anyone intimately engaged in Japanese society and culture from the United States (particularly if they were of Japanese descent) had to work to be trusted.

Yonamine’s orders, approved by the then Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, were simple: Go to Japan and play baseball, a celebrated national sport. With no formal command of the language or the intricacies of the culture, he dove in.

He made his professional debut in Japan in 1951, having earned himself a spot with the Yomiuri Giants. He had to adjust to a number of new factors: the food the team ate, how they traveled, the etiquette of practice, how to communicate with the manager, the hierarchy. All of it required time, and more importantly, a humble soul. Yonamine had to prove that as a teammate he could accept these traditions and rituals with an open mind.

To his credit, he adapted to team culture without trying to change it. He honored it, followed its rules, and endured hazing, which over time, led to him gaining his team’s acceptance, and ultimately something even more valuable: its respect. Once he gained the latitude to have more of a voice on the field, he played with reckless abandon, employing an aggressive style on the bases.

Robert Fitts, the author of the biography Wally Yonamine, The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, explains Yonamine’s influence on the field. “Before he came,” Fitts says, “they played a passive brand of ball. The Japanese were shocked the first time Yonamine took out the pivot man on a double play, but soon his teammates, and then their opponents, began to imitate him.”

As Yonamine rose in the ranks, he never took his excellence for granted. On days off, instead of taking a well-earned break, he would work out with the minor-league team, often bringing his family along. If he didn’t get the results that he was looking for in the game, he would lean into a pitch from time to time to get hit intentionally just so he could get on base.

It wasn’t long before he’d earned the trust to mentor younger players, which sparked his passion for coaching and teaching the next generation. The legendary homerun hitter, Sadaharu Oh, got his big break after Yonamine was already established as a veteran player. Oh was a good young hitter who didn’t have a strong defensive position. Yonamine, as his teammate on the Yomiuri Giants, saw that Oh’s best position was the same as his, first base, so he suggested to the coaches that he play the outfield to help get Oh’s bat in the lineup. Oh would go on to hit a world record 868 home runs, and win nine championships, five batting titles, and two triple crowns.

It was Yonamine’s experiences on the road as an athlete in the ’40s and ’50s that crystallized his commitment to equality.

Yonamine retained the longest consecutive tenure of anyone in the history of Japanese baseball. His life in Japan spanned 38 years between playing, coaching, and managing. During that time, he won eight pennants, three batting titles, and an MVP award in 1957. A lifetime .311 hitter, he was inducted into the Japanese Hall of Fame in 1994, the first American to achieve that honor.

Even after he achieved great success, Yonamine was never complacent. As a father, he stressed the importance of education to his children, which he believed limited the amount that luck would drive their futures. Growing up in extreme poverty, he knew great sacrifice. He was once shot at when he was young for trying to steal a watermelon from a nearby farm. He also rejected a football scholarship to Ohio State University so he could help put food on the table for his family. He always regretted not having the chance to receive a formal education and because he knew he had to depend on his body for his career, he ate healthily and trained vigorously.

But family came first. “During the season, whenever he could, he would sneak off to come home,” his daughter Amy recalls. “When my sister Wallis was born, he was devastated that the manager warned him that he needed to be on that team bus instead of with his wife. The manager said to him, ‘Are you a midwife?’”

Nevertheless, when Yonamine was coaching the Chunichi Dragons, he would bring his kids out to the team city of Nagoya by bullet train from Tokyo for extended stays when school was out in the summer. Amy recalls how those visits slowly transformed coaching culture, to the point where other coaches would soon start bringing their families for the summer, too.

“People who had to abide by the idea that work always came before family began to see how powerful it was to be with family around work,” she says.

Many have referred to Yonamine as the Jackie Robinson of Japan. But he never fully accepted the comparison, saying, “Robinson had it tougher.” He had a great respect for Robinson and all of the change that came behind him in the ’60s. But Yonamine’s influence on baseball and on improving relations between the U.S. and Japan is hard to deny. In 1998 he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan for his efforts in diplomacy.

It was his experiences on the road as an athlete in the U.S. that crystallized his commitment to equality. On one particular trip, as the black players headed one way to their accommodations after a game, and the white players headed another, he was left standing in the middle, until finally a white player said to him, “Wally, you are with us.”

In these moments, diplomacy entered his blood, prompting him to seek ways for everyone to be on the same team, regardless of their color or heritage, as equals. Throughout his career, he brought people together by making them feel not just like part of his team, but part of his family.

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Published on February 28, 2016 05:00

Theeb and the Renaissance of Arab Cinema

Despite its precarious geopolitical situation, Jordan has become something of a go-to location for Western filmmakers whose stories take place in the Middle East, or some other arid region. It’s Arabia-lite: There’s enough sand and desert terrain to fit scripts calling for exotic settings, but little danger posed to cast and crew. In the past, films shot in Jordan have received extensive Oscar attention—Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, for example—but this is the first year that a Jordanian film, Theeb, has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Theeb is a simple story about a young Bedouin boy and his older brother, who serve as guides to a British soldier during the Arab Revolts. In some ways it feels almost like a postcolonial retelling of Lawrence of Arabia, but from the Arab perspective. Variety called it “a classic adventure film of the best kind, and one that’s rarely seen these days,’ while The New York Times commended the acting, which was done almost entirely by locals.” When Theeb, which was directed by the British Jordanian Naji Abu Nowar, received the Oscar nomination, it sent an online rumble through Jordan and the rest of the region. Jordan’s film industry is still in a stage of reemergence; in fact, Captain Abu Raed (2007) was the nation’s first independent feature film in 50 years. Theeb was the tiny-film-that-could, shot on a shoestring budget and starring actual Bedouins ad-libbing on screen in possibly the most authentically Jordanian movie ever made.

Yet, Theeb is just the latest in a spate of complex and artful films that have originated in the Middle East and North Africa within the past decade. The accessibility of production tools and advent of digital distribution has helped spur what some scholars and filmmakers tentatively say is the start of a golden age in Arab cinema. The evolution of filmmaking styles and production methods from the region, the social movements that have been fomenting there in the past decade, and the role that film has historically played in constructing Arab identity have all played a part in Theeb’s current success. Though Arab cinema still faces plenty of challenges—including limited funding channels, a dearth of film schools, and few public screening opportunities—many independent directors are creating works that, like Theeb, reflect the region and its inhabitants in new, boundary-pushing ways.

Of course, the Middle East and North Africa isn’t monolithic—it contains a diversity of peoples, states, and cultures, and the Arabic language itself is split into many dialects—but for the purpose of assessing the Arabic-language film industry, it’s helpful to look at Arab identity as congruous.

The events of Theeb take place roughly after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire post-World War I, when nearly the whole Arab world was divided between Britain and France through the Sykes-Picot agreement. As a result, most Arab countries didn’t make movies before their respective independence from colonial rule in the 20th century. It was then, between the 1920s and 1960s, that filmmaking became a powerful way to create distinct national and cultural identities. In her book Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, the film scholar Viola Shafik writes:

Getting into industrial film production was considered a national achievement in the former Arab colonies and protectorates. The acquisition of cinematic techniques was a sign of progress and offered a real opportunity to expand economically. On the political level, cinema was believed to create a platform for counter-representations, giving the formerly colonized a chance to challenge Western dominance, at least on the screen.

Egypt was at the helm of film production, and the period of time between the 1940s through the 1960s was especially fruitful. Many viewers and listeners outside of Egypt enjoyed Egyptian cinema, specifically the musicals and melodramas that were popular at the time.

Film industries in other Arab nations looked to Egypt for guidance, and productions were quick to adopt its funding model and replicate the popular styles and genres that were emblematic of Egyptian films. In the 1960s, however, the control over filmmaking shifted from the private sector largely to the government, which led to a decline in the quality and number of films being produced. Film production in the 1970s through the early 2000s was difficult across the Arab world, encumbered by a crisis in the public sector and hampered by increasing state censorship. “All Arab governments,” writes Shafik, “be they capitalist or socialist, have reduced the medium’s freedom of expression through legal restrictions.”

Theeb was the tiny-film-that-could, shot on a shoestring budget and starring actual Bedouins, in probably the most authentically Jordanian movie, well, maybe ever.

Despite the financial and bureaucratic obstacles that continue to restrict a free and independent Arab cinema, even 15 years ago there wasn’t the level of filmmaking there is today. “Since the late 1940s when independent sovereign Arab states began to emerge, the forces of social conservatism [have been] really powerful and governments have been repressive and inhibiting freedom of expression,” said Rasha Salti, who has curated film from the Middle East and North Africa (most recently for the Toronto International Film Festival). “There is very little investment in film, but at the same time the field is really flourishing.”

Within the past decade, contentious filmmakers have emerged with truly transgressive movies, even in the state of social and political havoc that has been representative of much of the modern Middle East.

In 2006, the successful Egyptian film The Yacoubian Building stirred up trouble for depicting an openly homosexual character—the Egyptian parliament demanded that the sex scenes be cut, and criticized the film for “spreading obscenity and debauchery.” In 2007, there was the Lebanese film Caramel, which also touched on themes of same-sex attraction in one of the primary female characters. But beyond challenging social mores, films have become politically daring: The 2015 Moroccan experimental film Starve Your Dog explored the former Interior Minister Driss Basri’s crackdown on freedom of speech in the 1970s and 1980s. Salti notes how remarkable this kind of representation is. “If you look at Arab cinema in the ’80s, ’90, 2000s, we did not dare to put the people who have tormented us on trial in this way,” she says. “To give [Basri] a voice, to have somebody incarnate him is incredible. It’s breaking a taboo, challenging a silence and a complacency that still plagues a certain generation in Morocco.”

Beginning in the early 2000s, there was a marked shift toward more provocative filmmaking, and a deliberate desire to grapple with the conflicts within the culture of the Middle East and North Africa. It’s a debate that transcends film, and its presence in movies only intensified before, during, and after the Arab Spring, when the region’s painful identity crisis played out on the global stage. In many ways, Arab cinema reflects this complex question of what it means to be Arab. It can feel like a pretty capricious ideological state, one that toggles between demands for cultural revolution and reinforcing conservative values. Nasser Kalaji, Theeb’s co-producer, echoed this sentiment.

“Before we explain our culture to the West we need to explain it to each other,” he said. “What are we? Are we progressive Arabs who want to live in civil society and in a secular society and in one that promotes art and music and culture? Or are we in a society that wants to be religious and apply Islamic Sharia and religious doctrine?”

Like other forms of art, filmmaking functions as a tool to navigate identity, to either reinforce or tear down cultural markers. Theeb’s executive producer is Nadine Toukan, who has been a force in funding and creating Arab films in the past two decades. She describes the recent boom in complex storytelling as “a beautiful opportunity for a whole generation of Arabs to reengineer a pan-Arab environment to collaborate on the arts. There’s a generation of Arab storytellers who are absolutely fed up by being not represented or misrepresented by the other.”

Despite the buzz surrounding Theeb and other Arab films, huge challenges remain. The landscape for distribution in the Middle East and North Africa is bleak: There are few cinemas in the region, and many of the films that have found acclaim overseas will not be seen by an Arab audience. Most television stations are run by the state, and unconventional films are either rejected or heavily censored. Video on demand offers some hope, as does the prolific illegal DVD trade in the Middle East and North Africa—which is not profitable, but at least accessible. In a progressive and exciting move, Theeb is getting an unprecedented theatrical re-release in the region.

Like other forms of art, filmmaking functions as a tool to navigate identity, to either reinforce or tear down cultural markers.

Shafik says this genre of Arab auteur cinema—which includes films like Theeb, Caramel, and Starve Your Dog, that have emerged primarily in the past decade—is unique in that it uses cultural heritage as storylines, indicating a new search for cultural identity. However, the success of these films in reconciling conflicting ideals in the Arab world—past and present, tradition and modernity, East and West—has been restricted by their reach in the region. “The intellectual efforts of this type of filmmaking have been addressed primarily to Western audiences,” she writes. “Its success at Arab box offices has remained limited.”

It’s not just distribution woes: Production money is tight, the burden of representation is high, and skeptics are plenty. There are few training programs for filmmakers in the Middle East and North Africa, and the region’s only MFA program in the cinematic arts closed its doors in 2013. Censorship is vigorous, and the consequences for creating counter-cultural films are high (the director and actors in the 2015 Moroccan film Much Loved received death threats, and the film was banned in Morocco). Just as the levels of innovation and risk-taking creativity remain high, so are the barriers to entry.

It’s unclear if Theeb will go on to win the Oscar; although Abu Nawar recently won a BAFTA for Outstanding Debut for directing the film, the field has some heavy favorites. But its presence among the nominees, and the fact that it’s representing Jordan, which had almost no original film production to speak of until 10 years ago, is significant. It speaks to an increased interest and investment in the arts, and a bold desire to upend the narratives projected onto the modern Middle East.

Most of these stories aren’t framed as a response to any Western dogma: They exist wholly unto themselves as indigenous works. The through line of this movement has mirrored that of the excited beginnings of the Arab Spring a few years ago—a glow of optimism and the world paying attention—but this time, the outcome is unclear. At the very least, the forward momentum and the figurative drum roll are undeniable to many filmmakers. “The ideal situation is not going to present itself for Arab cinematic arts,” Toukan told me. “So we are just going to have to will it into existence.”

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Published on February 28, 2016 05:00

February 27, 2016

The Witch and the Modern Single Woman: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Critics Love the Horror Film The Witch. Why Don’t Viewers Think It’s Scary?

Katy Waldman | Slate

“We penalize films that thwart our expectations—and The Witch has a more poetic and more patient logic than many of its horror brethren. Not every scary utensil gets lodged in a warm body. Vague terrors—sexuality, adulthood, the psychological trauma of original sin, the quiet malice of the American wilderness—only sometimes coalesce into creatures. At times they stay as insidious as mist.”

The Single American Woman

Rebecca Traister | The Cut

“That unmarried women are not rallying around Clinton, who not so long ago was one of the most visible symbols of threateningly powerful womanhood in America and who has devoted a significant chunk of her career to issues of early-childhood education and health-care reform, is somewhat baffling. But remember, this is not a symbolically motivated movement. Single women may not be looking for a feminist hero.”

Love and the History of TV’s Attractiveness Gap

Pilot Viruet | Vulture

“Aside from the laughs, you could argue there’s something toxic about these pairings and the unrealistic expectations they promote, most obviously for reasons Apatow has long been criticized for popularizing in his films: the male fantasy that you, too, can be a lazy zhlub with barely any redeeming qualities and still get a super-hot wife willing to put up with it.”

The Original Six: The Story of Hollywood’s Forgotten Feminist Crusaders

Rachel Smye | Pacific Standard

“And yet, in the midst of all this lamentation, we don’t seem terribly focused on how we got here, why things are still so bad for women in the dream factory, in an era when Beyoncé stands on stage in front of a giant glowing ‘Feminist’ sign. Feminism is no longer a dirty word in Hollywood; celebrities use it all the time. So where are the stories about the women who have been working for decades to close this gender gap, long before feminism was a branding tool?”

Champions of Zen

Chavie Lieber | Racked

“It’s been cited as a $27 billion industry, a number that is simultaneously hard to believe and easy to understand, if you’re going to include all the coveted gear and green juice that yoga studios sell. Yoga has been welcomed with open arms by Americans hopping on the wellness bandwagon, but competitive yoga remains controversial: People either love the idea or utterly despise it.”

What Literary Discourse Offers in an Age of Extremism

Je Banach | Electric Literature

“While extremists train soldiers in dogma and weaponry, literary discourse allows us to break down barriers and educate people of all different backgrounds to combat extremism, terrorism, racism, intolerance, and hate by allowing people globally to be part of a process of conversation that calls for us to engage with others and otherness—to disagree with others and allow others to disagree with us and to step out into the world at peace.”

‘You Will Be Tokenized’: Speaking Out About the State of Diversity in Publishing

Molly McArdle | Brooklyn Magazine

“No one in this industry has to be convinced that books matter. No one who managed to make it onto this banana farm would be here, underpaid and often underrepresented, unless books—literary or otherwise—mattered deeply to them. But if people in publishing genuinely believe that books save people’s lives, their output shows they believe only certain lives to be worth the trouble.”

How Two “Slavery With a Smile Controversies Are Changing the Conversation About Diverse Children’s Books

Sarah Seltzer | Flavorwire

“With #BlackLivesMatter protests connecting police brutality to racist violence dating back to slavery, and amid the current #OscarsSoWhite discussion about bias in the film industry, the world of children’s literature is very a much part of the larger cultural landscape. Even more so, it’s an area in which the compulsion to—sometimes literally—whitewash the ugly truth for the sake of supposedly fragile young minds may be particularly hard to root out.”

Pearl Jam’s ‘Jeremy’ and the Intractable Cultural Script of School Shooters

Daniel Wenger | The New Yorker

“Pearl Jam did not intend to transform a suicide into a mass murder. MTV, however, excised a central image from the video’s final scene—of Jeremy raising the gun to his mouth. The censored version gives us Jeremy at the front of the classroom with the gun at his side, and then his classmates at their desks, hands raised, white shirts blood-spattered. Many viewers assumed the worst.”

Hey Sci-Fi and Comics Fans: It’s Time to Embrace the Dark Side

Jeff Yang | NPR

“Some fans simply couldn’t accept that the color of an actor’s skin conflicted with the character they had in their minds, underscoring that even in the genres of speculative fiction and fantasy—stories unrestricted by space, time and the limits of physics!—differences in race and ethnicity remain a twilight zone too forbidding for many otherwise imaginative individuals to traverse.”

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Published on February 27, 2016 05:00

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Sad Sequel

You don’t have to look much further beyond the title of Netflix’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny to see the first problem with the sequel to Ang Lee’s beloved 2000 martial-arts film. Sword of Destiny, which arrives simultaneously in theaters and on Netflix this weekend, feels in every way like a knock-off. Yes, the film is fortunately directed by Yuen Woo-ping, the legendary choreographer who worked on Lee’s original film and many other landmarks of the wuxia (Chinese martial-arts) genre. But rather than building on the foundation laid by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the new film chooses to replicate the exact same story beats of its predecessor while trying, and failing, to top its fight sequences with some ill-advised computer assistance.

Hollywood and China: In Figures

This is only where the flaws begin. Even though Sword of Destiny was released in China first and is clearly geared toward a global audience, its predominantly Chinese cast speaks English throughout, as opposed to the Mandarin of the original. Michelle Yeoh was the only member of the original cast to return for the sequel, playing the mournful Yu Shu Lien, and still guarding the legendary “Green Destiny” sword that caused so much trouble 16 years ago. She’s surrounded with a new ensemble, though you wouldn’t know it from the plot: Everyone’s after the sword, and a romance plays out between two young rivals jousting to capture it. With all of the first film’s startling beauty and emotional subtlety lost, even Sword of Destiny’s established stars look uninspired in their roles.

The original film’s Chow Yun-fat, Zhang Ziyi, and Chang Chen have been replaced by a new grab bag of talent: The Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen plays Silent Wolf, a veteran warrior from Shu Lien’s past. The Glee cast member Harry Shum Jr. is Wei-Fang, a young bandit after the sword to repay a debt to the gangster Hades (Jason Scott Lee). The newcomer Natasha Liu Bordizzo is Snow Vase, a fighter under the tutelage of Shu Lien who becomes Wei-Fang’s romantic rival. They do their best with John Fusco’s limited script, but Sword of Destiny isn’t overly concerned with diving deep into its characters’ motivations. Everyone wants the sword, everyone’s nursing some haunting secret or past misdeed that they explain in voice-over as yet another fight sequence plays out, and every confrontation ends in an elaborate sword fight.

Sword of Destiny replicates the exact same story beats of its predecessor.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was made along similar lines—lots of wire-work fight sequences structured around a fairly simple story—but it struck deeper emotional chords, paralleling the story of two older masters who have achieved greatness at the cost of admitting their feelings for each other with two younger, wilder figures linked by their own doomed romance. It was a landmark moment for Western audiences, of course, who had barely been exposed to the wuxia genre before Crouching Tiger’s success, and ushered in wider appreciation for the form. But everything that made Lee’s film feel distinct is missing in the sequel.

Sword of Destiny, shot by Bryan Singer’s cinematographer Newton Thomas Siegel, is occasionally beautiful: Some fights take place against sweeping vistas of the Chinese countryside, and one climactic battle plays out on a frozen lake. But these set pieces are frequently marred by unnecessary CGI embellishment—the last thing Yuen Woo-ping’s still-extraordinary choreography needs. Taken on their own, the fights in Sword of Destiny are mostly top-notch, even if there’s little else in the story to elevate them beyond dazzling feats of athleticism.

The question remains as to why this project exists. Netflix’s approach to television has been a mix of fascinating creator-driven projects and cheap revivals of established brands, so perhaps its film division will work along similar lines. After all, last year’s Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Fukunaga, was a worthy and powerful exploration of the lives of child soldiers in Africa. Meanwhile, Sword of Destiny trades entirely on the name of its forbear, and everything about its execution, down to the decision to shoot English-language dialogue, feels artless.

There is one similarity it shares with Beasts of No Nation, however: The biggest draw for Sword of Destiny is its visuals, which makes it especially peculiar that it’s coming out on Netflix. Though it is getting a small cinematic release (about a dozen IMAX screens across the country), it will primarily be consumed at home, since most theater chains refuse to screen a film that comes out simultaneously on a streaming network. Since the only way to really enjoy Sword of Destiny is to drink in the gorgeous scenery, hopefully your TV has enough pixels. Otherwise, you’d be better suited kicking back on the couch and reliving the brilliance of the original Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon instead.

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Published on February 27, 2016 04:00

February 26, 2016

The Anxiety of Macklemore

Here’s a challenge. Listen to this new song by Macklemore—

—and see how far you can make it before feeling the urge to turn the song off, or do something more drastic. Do you recoil at the wet, chewing-like sounds that open the song? At the first few lines, where Macklemore shows preteen-like excitement at undoing his girlfriend’s bra? When he compares her belly to Gucci Mane’s? When he calls her his “boo-boo thing”? When he says she sometimes leaves the “bathroom door open when she boo boo-ing”?

Of course, everyone has different standards for schmaltz, and if you find Macklemore’s infantile take on dirty talk to be fun and cute rather than disturbing, blessings to you. Most people who’ve taken the time to diss the song online—Stereogum: “Macklemore’s ‘Spoons’ Is the Worst Song Ever Recorded”—have essentially just quoted its lyrics at length to provide evidence for its badness. Obscenity: You know when you see it.

But there’s another factor in understanding why a song like this makes some people want to die when they listen. If you make it to the second verse, you’ll hear Macklemore lay into his girlfriend for having watched some Game of Thrones episodes without him, and then giving up the fight as soon as she starts giving him a handjob, which causes him to come immediately. Vulnerability in art is usually a good thing, and so is honesty. But is there anything interesting about Macklemore’s embarrassment here? How much is gained in the gross-out, really?

The 32-year-old Seattle rapper had the good sense to relegate “Spoons” to bonus-track status on his new album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, his second collaboration with the producer Ryan Lewis and his first full-length since achieving superstardom in 2012. But the way that song gleefully sacrifices Macklemore’s dignity without regard for the listener’s is typical. Perhaps in response to the backlash his rise caused, he’s released an album that suggests he is living through the great millennial nightmare: laying your soul bare, and finding only banality.

The opener, “Light Tunnels,” uses the most bombastic tools in Ryan Lewis’s arsenal—galloping drums, orchestral swells, a guest vocalist cackling about stormy weather and such—as Macklemore narrates his night at the Grammys. On a song like this, you can understand why he’s popular. By all measures, what he’s doing is corny, and that’s why it works: The goosebumps that the song is designed to provide are more typical of Coldplay-style rock than of most mainstream hip-hop. As for Macklemore’s rapping, he does a solid job of putting you in the moment with him as he looks up tie-tying tutorials on YouTube, gawks at Taylor Swift from a few rows over, and gives his thank-you speech.

But what is the song’s drama really about? He says he did drugs a couple days earlier and sort of regrets it. He forgot his belt at the hotel—“this sucks.” He realizes awards shows are more about ratings and marketing than art. Fascinating. But toward the end of the song, he turns his criticism inward, realizing a contradiction in his desires: He’s “miserable here / But wanna make sure I’m invited next year.” And then:

I know now who I am when the lights go out and it falls down

And the curtain closes, nobody notices

Wanted to throw up the Roc, wanted to be Hova

Wanted to be Wayne with the accent from the ‘Nolia

Thought I’d feel better when the award show was over

Whoosh. The curtain comes down and Macklemore only feels like a wannabe. The real-life context for the song is that the 2014 Grammys ceremony was when Macklemore swept the rap categories over Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Eminem, and Jay Z. When Macklemore publicly apologized to Lamar for winning, he tacitly aligned himself with folks who argued that racism unfairly elevated him over the rest of the field. Two years later, “Light Tunnels” mines that psychological toll of that backlash for sympathy, but it also kind of endorses it. He really isn’t worthy, it sounds like.

This could be a thrilling and extreme premise for an album; perhaps in an alternate dimension, Macklemore’s music sounds like Xiu Xiu, or Nine Inch Nails, or Kendrick Lamar on “u”—which is to say, he looks into his own self-loathing unflinchingly, for horror’s sake. Instead we have something yet more unsettling, the spectacle of someone trying to carry on like a pop star when he’s revealed that he shouldn’t be one. The party songs are particularly bleak. “Brad Pitt’s Cousin” tries to make it seem like he loves being called the actor’s ugly relative, and opens with him bragging about his cat’s Instagram followers. “Downtown” takes the hip-hop trope of driving expensive cars and goofily transposes it into the hipster trope of driving a moped. “Dance Off” features Idris Elba (yes) making like Vincent Price on “Thriller” as Macklemore, not for the first time in his career, frets about the adequacy of what’s between his legs. In his world, music does not help you transcend your insecurities—it heightens them.

Which is both awkward to listen to and awkward to think about, considering Macklemore’s commercial success in comparison to other rappers. It’s one thing to take your weaknesses and turn them into boasts, to best your haters by embracing them. It’s another to continue working in a genre that you seem terrified of, that you can’t help but make fun of as you strain to demonstrate your self-awareness and humility. Obviously, Macklemore has a deep love for and knowledge of rap, and has brought in some very credible artists from the genre’s past (DJ Premier, KRS-One, Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee, Melle Mel) and present (Chance the Rapper, YG). But their presence is about all that separates some of these songs from Weird Al’s “White & Nerdy.” And no, this is not inherently the fate of all white rappers.

It’s one thing to turn your weaknesses into boasts. It’s another to continue working in a genre that you seem terrified of.

It’s an actual relief when Macklemore sticks to lecturing, as he did on his cloying but well-intended hit “Same Love.” The only two true message songs here are “Kevin,” a pro forma but deeply felt story about losing a friend to prescription-drug addiction, and “White Privilege II,” a sprawling, admirable, and unmusical airing of guilt. “St. Ides” has him reflecting on both his past alcoholism and the current gentrification in Seattle, and just shrugs at the thought of things getting better. “Growing Up” is the requisite advice letter to his unborn kid, centered on the idea that he’s scared because he still feels like a child himself, a relatable admission that will also fuel more comparisons between his music and Kidz Bop.

The best song here, both as an ear-worm and as a work of writing, is “What You Need to Hear.” The first verse has Macklemore typically bummed about materialism and hedonism: “We are why we smoke some, so numb, so numb, so numb,” etc. Then Chance the Rapper, who opened for Macklemore a few years ago and gave one of the defining raps of Kanye West’s latest release, delivers the best verse of the album. He talks about agonizing over how candid to be in his raps, about wanting his daughter to have white girls for friends, and about white girls calling him the n-word at his shows. The chorus goes: “Imma tell you what you need to hear / cuz the truth would be too much.” The suggestion is that Macklemore’s been holding back all album, a thought that’s both plausible and frightening.

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Published on February 26, 2016 12:56

Land of the Falling Son

Writing in The Atlantic in 2011, Adam Pasick delivered the startling factoid that sales of adult diapers in Japan were set to exceed that of children’s diapers by the year 2020. According to Japan’s biggest diaper maker, he added, the transition actually happened in 2011.

That Japan’s population is aging is hardly a secret. But the speed with which it is happening was laid bare on Friday when the country’s census revealed the population had shrunk by nearly a million people in just five years. As many noted, it was the first decline since Japan’s census started in the 1920s.

“Some areas have felt the dips more keenly than others,” wrote Amy Wang at Quartz. “While Tokyo and seven other prefectures saw an uptick in population, the remaining 39 saw the opposite; Fukushima, hit by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, posted the biggest loss—roughly 115,000 people.”

Of course, Japan is not alone. Plenty of other countries, particularly across Europe and Asia, are aging. The global population is getting older as well. In the United States, after two decades of hovering above or at two births per woman, the birthrate dipped below that threshold in 2010 and has continued to drop ever since.

As my colleague Olga Khazan noted in 2014, the difference is that America remains a nation of immigrants, which helps keep the country (and its workforce) young.

Immigrants not only help inflate our overall population, but they also tend to have more children than Americans do. Mexican-American women, for example, have 2.5 children on average, and white American women have 1.8. And it’s immigrants who will contribute the most to U.S. population growth in coming decades.

Japanese officials, who have trudged down an increasingly nationalistic path in recent years, have touted the country’s homogeneity. Accordingly, immigration has been limited, and the foreign population, as Joshua Keating points out, is only 2 percent.

That isn’t expected to change dramatically soon, either. According to the government, 40 percent of the country will be 65 years or older by the year 2060.

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Published on February 26, 2016 12:05

The Potential Promises Of DAPA

If the more than 3.6 million undocumented adults with children who are U.S. citizens were legally allowed to work––as they would be under President Obama’s plan the U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear––it would raise the income of those families by 10 percent. It would lift 6 percent of them out of poverty. And it could improve the lives of their 4.3 million children.

Those are some of the findings of a new report by the Migration Policy Institute and the Urban Institute. The report looked at the changes that freedom from deportation and a legal job would make for undocumented parents (or a parent), with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen.

Obama announced the Deferred Action for Parents of American and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), in 2014. The executive action would have prioritized whom the government deports, giving a pass to parents of U.S. citizens, and also allowed them temporary work permits. Within hours of the announcement, Republican vowed to shut it down. Twenty-six states challenged DAPA, and Texas brought a federal suit.

Texas’ argument––in part––says DAPA creates an unjust burden because it would force the state to issue and process driver’s licenses for the formerly undocumented. The Texas federal court ordered DAPA stopped. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the injunction, and last January the U.S. Supreme Court said it would review the decision.

It’s a mystery what will happen at the Supreme Court because of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. A split decision would affirm the injunction. Or the court could decide to put off a decision until Scalia has a replacement. But if DAPA passed––the hypothetical part of the report, which was released this week––it would certainly mean a significant lifestyle change for those 3.6 million parents, as well as the 7 million others who live with them, according to the report.

About 85 percent of all children with a DAPA-eligible parent are U.S. citizens, and one of the stronger arguments for DAPA is that deporting parents could hurt the futures of millions of these minors.

Nearly all of DAPA-eligible fathers, and half of the mothers, work. Mothers are far less likely to be deported than fathers, so when a child’s parent is deported, the family takes a financial hit. A 2010 report looked at 190 children of recently deported parents and found families lost 70 percent of their income in the following six months after deportation. That often led to loss of housing, lack of food, changes in the children’s behavior. And to replace lost income, mothers often look for a job, which creates longer-term pressures on the children.

DAPA-eligible fathers earned about $30,000, whereas a similar immigrant parent with green card makes $40,000. After controlling for factors like age, education, and marital status, the report found DAPA-eligible mothers would earn 7 percent more than they do now, and a father’s wage would double that, lifting 6 percent of families above the federal poverty line. With 1.8 million families with a parent eligible for DAPA, that could mean 100,000 families out of poverty.

But if someone moves up on the scale, argues Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation For American Immigration Reform, then an already-legal worker moves down. Mehlman takes issue not with the numbers in the report, but with the logic its numbers support.

If it’s wrong to break up families, and right to help the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens, then Mehlman said you’ve rewarded the illegal decisions the parents made in the first place. Yes, he said, “they’re the parents of American citizens. But they have willfully violated the law to create this situation.”

The MPI report also cites measurable psychological benefits to passing DAPA: relief from stress of impending deportation, of wage-theft, and sub-minimum pay, as well as an almost total inability to complain about your condition.

“Taken together,” the report’s authors wrote, “the effects of parental unauthorized status have implications for child health and development from infancy to adulthood.”

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Published on February 26, 2016 11:24

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