Culture

Cockburn loves a little drama, but it’s proving difficult to work out who the real villain is amid the continued theatrics of the Don’t Worry Darling cast. The film concerns a 1950s housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community. Don’t Worry Darling (Cockburn feels compelled to ask why there is no comma) was directed by Olivia Wilde, and started filming what seems like decades ago One thing is certain: the crew saved their best performances for the movie's premiere at the Venice Film Festival instead of the actual thing. The film has been branded a disappointment by critics, who claim that Harry Styles, Wilde's boyfriend who plays a lead role, is "charisma-free.

By now, you’ve probably heard about Amazon’s new mega-series, aka "Jeff Bezos’s answer to Game of Thrones." There is probably no property more beloved in fantasy circles than JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, superbly filmed by Peter Jackson at the beginning of the millennium. But Hollywood — and its latest cousin, streaming television — finds itself unable to let go where there is the prospect of a hit. So first we had the endlessly protracted and deeply boring Hobbit series, and now we have Amazon’s new venture into Tolkien’s universe, the grandiosely titled Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

In April, director Robert Eggers told GQ that “every time period interests me except for the one we’re living in.” The director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman will never make a movie set in modern times: “I get enough of the kitchen sink in my kitchen sink... For whatever reason, it just does not inspire me. And you can’t shoot something that doesn’t inspire you.” That’s a good attitude for a director to have, but it’s alarming how many American filmmakers are either uninterested, unwilling or unable to make work that speaks directly, not only to our present moment, but to our future and its possibilities, however limited and grim. Who can blame anyone for being hopeless now?

It’s hard not to feel slightly odd when standing in front of a Milton Avery painting. Take his 1943 work Hors d’Oeuvres as an example. The painting — currently on show at London’s Royal Academy’s exhibition, Milton Avery: American Colorist — is large, at nearly a meter across, and the background is what appears to be a coastal landscape, with a greenish sea and the curve of a bay appearing in the upper right-hand corner. In the foreground of the painting is a cream table and on it, a blue platter of food: the “hors d’oeuvres” of the work’s title. So far, it might be hard to understand what is so disconcerting about this painting.

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: yes, Idris Elba punches a lion in this movie, and yes, that part’s pretty great. If only the rest of Beast reached those heights. Director Baltasar Kormákur (no stranger to survival thrillers, after previously helming Everest and Adrift) has put together a late-summer actioner that’s entertaining enough, but probably a little too tame for its own good. Following the unexpected loss of his wife to cancer, American doctor Nate Daniels (Elba) brings his two daughters Mer (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries) into the African bush to visit Nate’s old friend Martin (Sharlto Copley, in full great-white-hunter mode).

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but I actually didn’t hate the ending of Game of Thrones. Sure, the showrunners fumbled some of the character arcs and made some odd decisions (King Bran? Really?). But the broad thematic arc of the series was perfect. Daenerys’s dark turn into madness and mass murder and the subsequent destruction of the Iron Throne served as a hopeful proclamation that, even in our bloody, jaded, pornified world, the true faith lives on. The show understood, on some level, that neither the ideal redistribution of power nor its unfettered aggrandizement could ever be our salvation. Martin made his name as the anti-Tolkien, but it was all a ruse. If his intentions were truly insidious, his story would “look fairer and feel fouler.

We live in an age in which everything sounds so grave. Our democracy is in peril! Covid numbers are going up! It’s a cause for rejoicing, then, that one of the best new series treats that most serious of subjects — namely, homicide — with such a deft and delightful touch. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, which was created by co-star Steve Martin and John Hoffman, expands the honorable tradition of the Thin Man series and Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, movies that used the murder-mystery format as a pretext for their sophisticated urbanites to poke around in other people’s residences and speculate wittily on who done it. The series wraps up its second season on Tuesday.

I should have known when the Disney+ logo splashed across the screen. The last time I saw it, what followed was an impassable disclaimer warning me of the microaggressions I might endure watching a pair of Asian cats. I should have known when we landed again in San Fransokyo — the setting of Disney’s Big Hero 6 and new spinoff, Baymax! — and the cast looked like bad stock art from the Oberlin College DEI handbook. I should have known. But, there I was, two sick kids (two and six) running 102-degree fevers, upset and crying, nestled on either side of me on the couch. We just needed a break. Something wholesome; simple; happy. This was Disney’s sweet spot. Earlier this month Disney+ reported reaching 221.

When Bryce Dallas Howard signed her contract for the Jurassic World franchise, she didn’t get as big of a deal as her co-star Chris Pratt. This is not shocking news. At the time, Pratt was already an established star, whereas Howard’s résumé was much thinner. She’d played some unnamed roles in a handful of movies and portrayed supporting characters in two Twilight films and Spider-Man 3, but had yet to break out in a starring role. Jurassic World changed all that. This prompted Pratt to step in for Howard and handle the negotiations for licensing deals related to the franchise, guaranteeing that he and Howard would be paid equally.

I was reprimanded by my parents for talking during the minute’s silence at Princess Diana’s funeral. In my defense, I was six years old at the time. Almost twenty-five years have passed since that fateful night in Paris, when the People’s Princess was pursued by the press one last time. In the years since, Diana’s legacy has hung over not just the British royal family, but the relationship between society and celebrity. Her death marked one of the first real moments of global introspection: was our paparazzi too invasive, our press too dogged? We now look back at the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Lindsay Lohan and ask the same questions. But it all goes back to Di.

On a Saturday in August, stuck in Manhattan  and growing less enamored of the thought, I holed up at the Park Avenue Armory to catch English director Robert Icke’s Hamlet (2015) and Oresteia (2017), playing in repertory. Icke is a darling young thing on the British theater scene, “acclaimed,” as the program informs us, “for his intelligent and accessible productions” of classic texts. Hamlet runs for three hours and forty minutes, Oresteia for three fifteen, which gives you some idea of what is meant (or not) by “accessible.” These are big, bold productions. But for what it’s worth, the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall proved accessible to a packed crowd.

The author Neil Gaiman is one of the comparatively few writers who really understands how to use social media. Not only does he have nearly 3 million followers under the handle @neilhimself, his bio self-deprecatingly insists he will "eventually grow up and get a proper job," though "until then, he will keep making things up and writing them down." Gaiman is a prolific tweeter, interacting with his millions of admirers in a joyful and unpretentious way. I once had an edifying conversation with him around the time that my biography of Lord Rochester, Blazing Star, was published. Gaiman is a fully paid-up Rochester aficionado, and was gracious and generous with his time and appreciation.

Although it’s not exactly my cinematic bag, I understand why people were looking forward to Batgirl. It is a superhero film (as so many are these days), but with a potentially interesting female lead, namely Barbara Gordon, aka "Batgirl," the daughter of Commissioner Gordon, Batman’s ally. The film attracted a starry cast, including J.K. Simmons as Gordon, Brendan Fraser as the sociopathic antagonist Ted Carson, aka "Firefly," and Michael Keaton gamely reprising his Batman role. It cost $90 million, was directed by the filmmakers responsible for the surprisingly entertaining Bad Boys For Life, and might have been expected to be a modest box office hit: at the very least, it should have provided a couple hours of undemanding entertainment.

It's been four years since pop superstar Taylor Swift went full lib. After years of speculation over her political leanings (her silence on issues led some to believe she was a secret Trump supporter), Swift urged her fellow Tennessee residents to vote against the "appalling" and "terrifying" Republican Marsha Blackburn for Senate. "I will be voting for Phil Bredesen for Senate and Jim Cooper for House of Representatives. Please, please educate yourself on the candidates running in your state and vote based on who most closely represents your values," Swift wrote in an Instagram post. Since then, Swift has been outspoken about her pro-choice, anti-gun, and anti-Trump views.

It was once a cliché of modern art that its principal aims included shocking its audience. Aesthetic aggression was the correlative of class warfare. It’s no accident, as the Marxists say, that avant-garde comes from the military lexicon. In painting, Gustave Courbet’s 1866 “L’origine du monde,” a rudely realistic, closely cropped view of an anonymous woman’s nude genitals, is often hailed as an early shot across the bow. Five years later, the artist would lead the Paris Commune in toppling over the Napoleonic Vendôme Column. For pugnacious creatives like Courbet and his descendants, consciousness-raising was always going to be a little bit uncomfortable. One can imagine how easily this gets out of hand.