Author: rb809rb

It’s no secret that Charli xcx is a cinephile, so it wasn’t a shock when the avant-garde pop star revealed that her latest album would feature iconic horror auteur David Cronenberg — especially considering its title is “Music, Fashion, Film.” But what is surprising is just how impactful his contribution is to the wider meaning of the record.

The 83-year-old “Crash” and “The Fly” director closes out the 11-track, 30-minute album with a spoken-word monologue on the second-half of final song “No One Lasts Forever.” Up until that point, Charli takes listeners on a ride through her biggest genre leap yet as distorted guitars and sparse production take the place of bright synths and autotune. It’s a far cry from the club-ready bangers of “Brat,” and in many ways a reaction to its massive success — there’s the tongue-in-cheek “Rock Music,” containing a declaration that the dancefloor is dead; the pounding “Camera,” in which she contemplates her burgeoning acting career; the vapid-but-in-an-ironic-way “Wink Wink,” where she insists “people can change.”

But it’s not just Charli’s sound that has taken a heavier turn. Between seemingly surface-level lyrics about going shopping and wishing she was a pop star in 2007, Charli attempts to answer hard questions about an artist’s purpose. Track six, “I’m Afraid,” gives a taste of this as she laments the pitfalls of public life: “All this pain makes me believe/ I’m a better artist now/ An excuse I tell myself to act selfishly.” Throughout the record, Charli is really contemplating her role as an artist and the motivations behind making art — and whether it even matters, because the world is probably ending and we’re all going to die anyway.

Nothing captures this existential question more than “No One Lasts Forever,” which starts off as one of the most upbeat songs on the record but soon ventures into deeper waters. “That’s why I’m not scared of anyone/ ‘Cause nothing’s gonna last forever/ But you need to discover that feeling/ Of the crushing highs and lows of ego,” she sings over synths a bit more reminiscent of her “Brat” era.

It’s also the longest track on the album, by far, at five minutes and 42 seconds. Cronenberg doesn’t come in until around the three-minute mark, where he casually speaks — as if directly to Charli — seemingly about a near-death experience.

“As I was laying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all,” Cronenberg begins. “I thought about people, I thought about life, and that’s why I like being close to my house. Somehow, that was comforting even though it makes no sense, you know? But no, I wasn’t thinking about art. And I wasn’t thinking about art as endurance, as immortality. I mean, we could talk about immortal artists of various kinds, and it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years, and that’s fantastic. But experientially, for them? They are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.”

Cronenberg ends his part by saying, like a mentor giving advice to his student: “Hear me assuring you that oblivion is freedom. They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.”

The last minute-and-a-half of the track consists of that last line repeated again and again, overlaying on itself. It’s a mantra delivered as an elder who’s been through it, reassuring Charli that whether or not her art survives isn’t the most important thing — after all, she won’t be around to know. As an extremely successful director, considered the originator of the entire body-horror genre, there are times when Cronenberg must have felt unstoppable. But he’s also experienced immeasurable grief, with his wife of 38 years, the film editor Carolyn Zeifman, dying in 2017 (something he explored in his most recent feature, “The Shrouds”). Beyond just his art, it’s his life experience that makes him credible to speak these words — and they bring all of us back down to earth.

Instead of just being a gimmicky feature to fulfill part of the album’s title, Cronenberg’s words get to the core theme of “Music, Fashion, Film.” More than a rejection of Charli’s mainstream success disguised as a reinvention, the record is proof that true artists are constantly changing, growing, refusing to fit into a singular box. But as important as the art may seem in the moment, ultimately, it’s not. Because nothing is forever. And, if you let it, knowing that can set you free.

When Lady Gaga first ascended to supernova celebrity, with the release of “The Fame” in 2008, there was a time when she kept her face hidden — under the elaborate masks she wore in videos, and even in interviews, for which she would also show up masked. It was a highly elaborate act of camouflage, but the ruse worked. She was only 22, yet she created an aura of mystery around herself, conjuring “Lady Gaga” as a larger-than-life character. (When you heard that she was really Stefani Germanotta from New York City, you would think: Really, who is that?)

Sia, born in Australia 10 years before Lady Gaga, had a career that predated hers as well. But by the time Sia hit her solo stride in the late 2000s, she didn’t simply borrow from the Gaga mask playbook. She concealed her face to the point that the mystery became part of who she was. “Sia: Nostalgic for the Present,” which opens tomorrow and is showing in select theaters for a limited run, is a performance film that was originally created for Sia’s 2016 Nostalgic for the Present tour, and in the entire movie you never once see Sia’s face.

She’s right there in front of us, standing and singing on a platform at stage left, hidden under a half-blonde, half-black wig with bangs that hang down to her lips. There’s an oversize white bow on top of the wig, and she wears a white dress that resembles a nurse’s uniform from the early ’60s. Sia’s greatest songs, like “Unstoppable” and “Titanium” and “The Greatest,” are anthems of strength, power, fortitude, invincibility, and watching the movie it’s fascinating to behold how her facelessness feeds that quality. She’s an abstract figure, a pair of lips singing, and this creates the sensation that the power she’s singing about doesn’t emanate from her. She’s channeling a force larger than herself — the rising specter of feminine triumph. She’s merely the vessel.

I’m not entirely sure what the two-tone wig means (the duality of woman?), but everyone in the movie wears a version of it: the dancers, the actors (Kristen Wiig, Paul Dano, Ben Mendelsohn, Gaby Hoffman) who each appear in one dance video, as well as the choreographer, costume designer, and offstage crew members. They’re all wearing the wig, which looks like the fabled New York black-and-white cookie turned into a fashion emblem of talismanic power. “Sia: Nostalgic for the Present” is basically a 75-minute-long series of dance videos that were designed to be projected onstage during the tour, as the live performers mirrored the movements in the videos. The featured star is, of course, Maddie Ziegler, the whirling dervish of a child dancer who pranced and flung and gyrated her way through three celebrated Sia music videos; she was 14 when the Nostalgic for the Present tour unfolded.

This weekend, if you go to “Sia: Nostalgic for the Present,” what you’re seeing is a 10-year-old movie (and a promotional one at that), so it’s severely lacking in the shock of the new. There’s no getting around the fact that it’s a greatest-hits compendium. But though Sia’s last major hit was a decade ago, she had such an intuitive gift for crafting powerfully infectious pop songs that it’s hard to understand why she hit a wall. I think it might have had something to do with the mask/wig/hiding thing. Pop stars, especially the ones who have extended careers, are people who have a primal desire to put themselves out there. Whereas Sia clearly had a primal ambivalence about that. She was a camera-shy exhibitionist.

In “Nostalgic for the Present,” her voice is commanding, ringing out with those soul inflections that make her sound like Amy Winehouse if Winehouse were being produced by Giorgio Moroder. The dance performance that’s at the heart of the film is the sort of thing that felt transgressive back then, but now it looks like something out of a 2010s nostalgia reel. Maddie Ziegler, who was born in Pittsburgh and got her start on “Dance Moms,” flings her body around with a kind of airy gymnastic aggression, and she specializes in facial contortions meant to express the underlying ferocity of Sia’s music (and are sometimes just there as psycho flourishes to mess with the audience). Ziegler is like a mime crossed with Daryl Hannah in “Blade Runner,” but there’s also a touch of Sid Vicious to the way that she’ll mug and curl her lips like a teenage brat who’s gone off her meds.

The hits remain sublime. I retain a special adoration for “Chandelier,” a song of hedonistic assertion and underlying ambivalence that, for me, is filtered through its brilliant use as the centerpiece of the Broadway version of “Moulin Rouge!” I’m writing about Sia as if she had gone away, but as someone who loves her music, I see no reason on earth why she couldn’t now enjoy a comeback as ferocious as the one that Gaga had with “Abracadabra.” She wouldn’t even need to come out from behind the wig; that would play like gangbusters on the Grammys. But she’d have to rouse herself to do what she used to do: create a dance hook as shiny and fierce and glorious as titanium.

South Korean director Na Hong-Jin made his San Diego Comic-Con debut to preview his latest film, Neon’s alien action movie “Hope.”

Before the action auteur took the stage in Ballroom 20, a sizzle reel of his previous work — from his 2008 debut “The Chaser” to “The Yellow Sea” and “The Wailing,” all set to Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” — played for the rapt audience.

“Hope,” Na said, “is a continuation in terms of the same metaphor and the same meaning, but in terms of the style and the thought and the content is completely different. Any assumptions you have about my premises and my previous work, I would advise them to completely abandon it before [this one].”

“Hope” is set in the remote village of Hope Harbor, where a mysterious creature has wreaked havoc. Police and local hunters set out to track the beast and find themselves hunted instead. But not all is as it seems.

The alien action movie stars Hoyeon, who broke out internationally thanks to her Emmy-nominated turn in Netflix’s “Squid Game.” Na said was one of the best decisions he made in bringing the film, a 10 year passion project, to the big screen.

Hwang Jung-min, who leads the international cast, recommended Hoyeon for the role of a tenacious police officer. “He said that if you meet her, you realize how special of a person she is,” Na said, explaining that he immediately set up a meeting. The director and star read the script while eating takeout and she quickly signed on for the role. “The funny thing is: Hwang Jung-min actually has never met her, or didn’t even know her very well.”

Hoyeon appeared in a special video message to introduce two clips that would play exclusively for the Comic-Con crowd. The first is a tense sequence where Hwang as he and a group of men shoot their way through the wreckage of their town — only to finally come face to face with the gigantic alien preying upon them. The second was an extended look at a chase scene where one character played by must leap from his horse into the police car — all while being chased down the highway by one of the fanged creatures. After the pulse-pounding clips ended, director Na revealed that these weren’t the most difficult scenes to shoot: That honor belongs to another chase scene with the characters fleeing through the forest on horseback.

Na also praised Hoeyon’s performance in another scene and shared she spent six months learning to drive a manual stick-shift car. “After six months, she reached a point where she could perform those drafts at very different, difficult angles too,” he said. “So she was driving the car and doing all the performance herself, and I think the word ‘difficult’ is not enough to describe what was going on in that scene. My DP and I almost died of anxiety just watching her.”

Speaking of dying, during the Q&A portion of the panel, Na teased that “90%” of the characters in the film might perish… but he won’t reveal who. The exchange got a roar of laughter from the crowd.

“Hope,” which also stars Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton, premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where it electrified audiences. Neon hopes to replicate that same success when releasing the film in the U.S. on Sept. 9. In Cannes, Na revealed that he had plans for a sequel.

“I think you can readily imagine this sequel. And there’s a script that’s already been done that I’d like to shoot,” he said during his Cannes press conference. “So if I have the opportunity, I would indeed make a sequel if possible.”