Category: Entertainment

There’s only one hole in “The Fox,” a shrewdly conceived and meticulously plotted black comedy in which a magical ditch exists where people can deposit their lovers and have them come out the other side far more malleable in terms of the partners they’d want them to be. The issue becomes throwing in a little too much, both for the characters and for writer-director Dario Russo, who may have a few too many good story ideas to fully flesh out. Yet, he delivers a promising and imaginative feature debut.

Hailing from Causeway Films, the Australian production outfit behind “The Babadook” and “Talk To Me,” the film portrays a different kind of terror running through the outback. “The Fox” follows two deeply discontented couples in a small town where both friends and potential love interests are in short supply, leading to some marriages of convenience. There may be fewer scenes in the Causeway oeuvre more chilling than a wordless opening when Kori (Emily Browning) gives a contemptuous once-over to the pile of greasy food in front of her at a pub while her boyfriend Nick (Jai Courtney) is fetching some pints. As she is wondering if this is her future, he slides an engagement ring next to French fries upon his return. The son of the wealthiest landowner in town, Nick promises security, but not much else. In fact, Kori’s already been cheating on him with her animal control bureau co-worker Derek (Damon Herriman), though she doesn’t have much affection for him either, and worries about the affair being discovered by his wife Diana (Claudia Doumit) when the two go jogging together in the mornings.

But it’s not any of the townspeople who risk spilling the beans. Rather, it’s the surrounding wildlife who see and hear everything. They’re terribly gossipy, most specifically a fox voiced by Olivia Colman and a magpie given a gruff timbre by Sam Neill. The filmmaker shows a strong handle over the film’s fanciful tone and fitfully filthy sense of humor, and he’s credited with composing the film’s score full of squawking brass instruments and skittish strings in addition to writing, directing and editing. He also has the good sense to not overdo the conceit, since clearly the animals are not hyperreal CG creations but well-crafted animatronics that make it even funnier when they start to talk to the anxiety-ridden humans, with the fox informing Nick about the hole where he really might make an honest woman out of Kori.

The result has the potential to tear Nick apart in every way imaginable, and surely will send a few viewers running to the exits. The notion of Kori as a feral creature to be tamed is also sure to rub some the wrong way. But it’s really sold by a fully committed Browning and Courtney, who continues to show a different set of muscles than the ones he’s known for when poking fun at wounded masculinity as he did in “Dangerous Animals.”

However, there are some ways in which “The Fox” doesn’t seem to go far enough, beginning with some introductory narration from Colman about how peculiar humans look to animals with their unique ability to be miserable all the time. While Russo continually bends the narrative in surprising directions when it transpires that the hole has a deeper history than the central quartet could know, the film can feel as if it’s occasionally losing the plot when it only sporadically returns to that original idea. It does yield one great scene of a post-hole Kori wondering why Nick’s father is so dour with nothing but open pastures around him and seemingly too few of the talking animals who can be counted on for an unexpected observation and a laugh. Still, when Russo looks to find human nature in another species, he seems to get the best of both worlds as he puts a finger on how that abstract feeling of being all alone in a relationship can lead the mind to wander to funny places. In “The Fox,” those places are even funnier than usual.

In the best of all worlds, the Oscars are exciting: fun and suspenseful, moving and meaningful. At their most supreme, they leave you with the feeling that movies matter. In the worst of all worlds, the Oscars are boring: blasé and predictable, overrun by kitsch, with no seeming import. But then there’s the in-between version, which is what we got tonight. The Oscars this year were not boring, because the winners felt like they mattered (and were good choices), and the people who put the show together have learned — by listening to the gripes about boring Oscar telecasts — how to sand off the rough edges and avoid the missteps and keep the spectacle moving.

But the Oscars tonight weren’t exciting, either. They were a bit rote. Not because they were badly executed, or larded with segments that made you groan (by my count, there were none), but because they tended to take the safest route possible. The set, with its tall wall of slatted windows revealing plants on the other side, resembled nothing so much as an open-air steak restaurant in the lobby of an oversize corporate hotel. (After a while, the backdrop shifted to sushi restaurant.) It was pleasing and comfortable and a bit generic, like the show itself. Conan O’Brien came out and did an entertainingly sharp monologue, from his Ted Sarandos diss (“This is his first time in a theater!”) to his AI shoutout (“I’m honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards!”) to the inevitable benign tweak of Timothée Chalamet (“I’m told there’s concern about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities”) to a joke of pure juvenilia that was just…funny (“Between ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Bugonia,’ it’s been a big year for movies that sound like off-brand lunch meat”).

Yet one reason that Conan now rules the Oscars like the new Jimmy Kimmel, if not the new Billy Crystal, is that the jokes were trimmed of the cutting sharpness the Oscars have flirted with in the past. Conan struck a note of friendly winning mockery, and made a touching statement at the end of his monologue about the joy and optimism that movies incarnate. Then it was on to business as usual. 

We went into the show expecting suspense, because major categories were up for grabs, and that can produce its own horse-race tingle. The best actor category remained a nail-biter: It was one of the only times I can remember when right down to the wire, after the names had been read, I felt as if any one of four nominees (Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, Ethan Hawke, Wagner Moura) could win — and, making the whole thing a bit surreal (at least for me), the actor I personally would have chosen, Leonardo DiCaprio, was the only one out of the running. Jordan’s win provided the night with a much-needed catharsis, because this was really the Academy’s deepest acknowledgment of the power of “Sinners” — and watching Jordan’s beautiful speech, with its shoutouts to the past and its confidence in the future, you realized just how much of the film’s personality came from him.

But there were telling indications, early on, that “One Battle After Another” would be marching to victory, starting with the fact that it won the award for best casting, a new category that many predicted would go to “Sinners.” The triumph of Sean Penn, even though he didn’t show, only seconded that feeling. And by the time Paul Thomas Anderson took the best director prize, the trajectory of the night had begun to come clear. Anderson, as he’s been throughout the season, was the soul of pensive grateful modesty, though it felt like he’d taken a page from the Book of Chalamet when he admitted how much he wanted that director prize. And I would be amiss if I didn’t ask why, during his acceptance speeches, the director of “Boogie Nights” (still his greatest film, by the way) kept rubbing his gold statuettes, as if they were magic lamps he thought might disappear.

The two performances of numbers nominated for best song — the transcendent “Golden” from “K-Pop Demon Hunters” and a kind of international restaging of the “Pierce the Veil” sequence from “Sinners” during “I Lied to You” — were both killer. The reunion of Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman, from “Moulin Rouge!” (a movie now 25 years old), was tart and touching, though the “Bridesmaids” reunion (the cast members gathered to present the award for best score and wound up reading sexist notes “written” to them by Stellan Skarsgård) didn’t levitate in the same way. The In Memoriam section found room for major statements, from Billy Crystal’s pitch-perfect tribute to the populist artistry of his friend Rob Reiner to Barbra Streisand’s touching homage to her “The Way We Were” costar, Robert Redford. I have to say, though: How could this segment have omitted any mention of Brigitte Bardot? She became a right-wing troll, but she’s an essential part of film history.    

For all that, the crucial element missing from the evening was a more explicit salute to what “One Battle After Another,” as a movie, really meant. We didn’t need obnoxious political preaching — though I did like hearing Pavel Talankin, the co-director of the best documentary winner “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” speaking out against the “complicity” that allows fascism to take root. By contrast, Javier Bardem’s sloganeering (“No to war. And free Palestine!”) felt like a dated throwback to the era when Oscar celebrities would turn the podium into a soapbox. But “One Battle After Another” is a movie that has the politics of America today at the very core of its cinematic DNA. The film was not a piece of “resistance.” It was a piece of cathartic political art. In an evening where it took home six Oscars, that reality should have been at the forefront of the celebration of its triumph. Instead, if you tuned into the Oscars but hadn’t seen the movie they saluted most ardently, you might never have had the slightest idea of what the movie was about.   

Conan O’Brien wrapped up this year’s Oscars with a word of support to his pal Martin Short: “We Love You Martin Short!” he shouted from the Dolby Theatre stage as he signed off the telecast.

Short postponed his comedy tour with Steve Martin following the death of his daughter Katherine Short, who died last month at the age of 42 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

After his daughter’s death, Short and Martin postponed upcoming dates for their “The Best of Steve Martin & Martin Short.” It’s unclear when the tour will resume, although dates starting in April are listed on Martin’s website.

“It is with profound grief that we confirm the passing of Katherine Hartley Short,” Martin Short’s rep said last month in a statement. “The Short family is devastated by this loss, and asks for privacy at this time. Katherine was beloved by all and will be remembered for the light and joy she brought into the world.”

Short also recently suffered the loss of his “SCTV” co-star Catherine O’Hara, who died in January.

Short has been a frequent guest of O’Brien’s through the years, including on O’Brien’s “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast. Here’s an episode from eight months ago:

And he’s a time Short appeared on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” in 2002:

This repped the second year that O’Brien hosted the Oscars, which aired live Sunday night on ABC and Hulu. O’Brien opened the show by taking aim Hollywood figures including Timothée Chalamet, Ted Sarandos and more.

O’Brien also got serious at a point, noting that “tonight is an international event. If I can be serious for just a moment, everyone watching right now around the world is all too aware that these are very chaotic, frightening times. It’s at moments like these that I believe the Oscars are particularly resonant. 31 countries across six continents are represented this evening. And every film we salute is the product of thousands of people speaking different languages, working hard to make something of beauty. We pay tribute tonight not just to film but to the ideals of global artistry, collaboration, patience, resilience, and that rarest of qualities today, optimism.”

O’Brien opened the show with a pre-taped segment where he was made up as Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys from “Weapons,” and then ended the show with another pre-taped segment, in which he was offered the gig of hosting the Oscars “for life” — but then was sent to a nondescript office where he was poisoned with gas and then cremated, just like Sean Penn’s character in “One Battle After Another.”

The best feedback Hwang Dong-hyuk received when he first pitched “Squid Game” in 2009 was someone asking him how he could possibly have come up with something so absurd. “That was the most positive response I got,” he told a packed house Sunday at the Xiqu Centre, Hong Kong, where he opened the Asian Film Awards‘ day of masterclasses.

Hwang traced the origins of the series to a period of acute personal hardship. His first feature had failed commercially, a second project had fallen apart before production, and he was selling household furniture to cover living expenses. He spent much of his time in manga cafes, reading survival game comics in which protagonists gambled their lives for large sums of money. He wondered whether he could make something similar but distinctly Korean in character. Where most survival narratives featured protagonists with superhuman abilities, he wanted to tell a story about entirely ordinary people playing the simplest games imaginable – the kind any child had grown up playing, requiring no special skills or genius, only the will to keep going.

After a year of fruitless meetings with investors and actors who universally dismissed the project, Hwang made the decision to bury the script in his computer and wait. He made three more feature films in the intervening decade. When he returned to the idea in 2018 and reread the script, he said, he felt an immediate conviction that the time had come. “By 2019, the world had somehow come to look more like ‘Squid Game’ than it did when I first wrote it,” he said. Competition had intensified, the wealth gap had widened, and the economic pressures and social tensions he had imagined as extreme had come to feel entirely plausible. “People’s lives had become harder,” he said. “The story no longer seemed so far-fetched.”

The arrival of Netflix Korea was the final piece. Hwang had always believed the premise would resonate more easily outside Korea than within it – the survival game genre had never been commercially popular at home – and Netflix offered immediate access to a global audience. He also found the series format liberating. His original screenplay was a two-hour film in which the games crowded out nearly everything else. Expanding to eight hours allowed him to develop the backstories of characters like Sang-woo and Sae-byeok, and – crucially – to create the figure of Oh Il-nam, Player 001, the elderly man who turns out to be the architect of the games. “That character didn’t exist in the film version,” Hwang said. “The series gave me the space to build him, and with him the entire emotional logic of the final episode.”

Several games were also redesigned for international audiences. Some of the original choices had rules too culturally specific to be immediately comprehensible to viewers outside Korea. The replacements – marbles, the honeycomb candy carving game, the ddakji tile-flipping game – were chosen because any viewer anywhere could understand them within seconds. The giant doll in the Red Light, Green Light sequence, which became one of the series’ most iconic images, was designed with a deliberate choice. Rather than something conventionally threatening, Hwang drew on the image of a girl character named Young-hee, familiar to every Korean child from first-grade textbooks. “We wanted something cute,” he said. “I genuinely did not think people would find it frightening. Their reaction surprised me.”

The production design of the series reflected a philosophical choice rooted in Oh Il-nam’s psychology. Where most survival narratives set their action in dark, oppressive spaces, “Squid Game” used pastel colors and the aesthetic of a children’s play cafe. Hwang explained that Oh Il-nam built the games to recapture childhood joy – his own and others’ – and that the spaces he designed would therefore be cheerful and colorful, not menacing. The horror, Hwang said, came from what happened within those cheerful spaces, and the contrast made it more devastating.

On the series’ central theme, Hwang said the world of “Squid Game” is one in which people in a hyper-competitive society are conditioned to see those beside them as rivals rather than allies – while the people who actually designed the system watch from above and profit from it. He said he wanted the series to ask whether it was possible for people to recognize that their real adversaries were not their neighbors but those further up, and whether some form of collective response might be imaginable. He stopped short of prescribing an answer but said the question felt urgent.

The session also ranged across Hwang’s broader career. He studied journalism at university – his father, who died when Hwang was young, had been a journalist – but grew disillusioned after participating in the pro-democracy student movements of the early 1990s and finding that the Korean press was too conservative and pro-government to do the investigative work he had hoped it would. He began watching two or three films a day in a lost period after abandoning his journalism ambitions, and eventually went to study film at the University of Southern California. He recalled his first class there, in which the professor asked students successively how many expected to direct one feature film after graduating, then two, then three – and concluded that statistically, not one person in the room would likely make even one. “Looking back,” Hwang said, “the only person from that class who became a feature film director was me.”

His USC graduation short, “Miracle Mile” – about a sibling who travels to the United States to find a brother who had been adopted away, carrying a dying parent’s apology – led directly to his first feature, “My Father,” after a Korean producer saw the short and reached out. The story drew on a memory from his own life: a paternal aunt who had been given up for adoption to America when his family was too poor to keep her, and who returned to find her birth family when Hwang was around 19.

He described the production of “Silenced” – based on the real-life sexual and physical abuse of students at a school for deaf children in Gwangju – as one of the most grueling experiences of his career. He initially turned the project down, he said, but reconsidered after researching the case and concluding that a film might be the last chance to return it to public consciousness. He deliberately chose to make it as a work of narrative cinema – emotionally immersive rather than documentary in approach – on the conviction that audiences needed to care about the characters before they could feel the full force of the injustice. The film’s release led to real-world legal changes. But the psychological cost was severe. “I lost weight, I developed insomnia, I was in a bad way,” he said.

“Miss Granny,” the broad intergenerational comedy he made next – about a grandmother who is magically transformed into her younger self – was a direct reaction to that ordeal. It was also, Hwang said, a personal tribute to his mother and grandmother, who had raised him after his father’s early death. He said he had wanted to make a film that three generations of a family could sit down and watch together, each finding something to recognize in it. The film went on to be one of the top three highest-grossing Korean films of its year and spawned remakes across Asia, including versions in China, Vietnam and India. Hwang said he had been struck, while watching the various adaptations, by how each country’s version drew on its own era of popular music and its own cultural textures – the Indian remake especially, with its Bollywood-style musical sequences.

Closing the session, Hwang reflected on his affection for Hong Kong cinema, which he credited as a defining influence on his generation of Korean filmmakers. He watched Chow Yun-fat’s “A Better Tomorrow” ten times, he said, and when he was seriously studying film as a craft, it was Wong Kar-wai’s “Chungking Express” and “Days of Being Wild” that made the deepest impression. He expressed sadness that Hong Kong cinema had largely disappeared from Korean screens, saying that “Infernal Affairs” was the last Hong Kong film he had seen theatrically and that he had had little opportunity to follow the industry since.

On the question of how Korean content had come to dominate global popular culture, Hwang offered a structural rather than a mystical answer. Korea’s entire postwar economic development, he said, was built on an export mentality – the country had nothing and built everything by manufacturing and selling abroad. That orientation had transferred to the cultural industries over time, with filmmakers, musicians and drama producers gradually becoming more attuned to international audiences alongside domestic ones. He said he did not believe the phenomenon had happened quickly but was the accumulated result of a long habit of thinking outward – and that he himself had had that global audience in mind when he decided to take “Squid Game” to Netflix.

His advice to the aspiring filmmakers in the room was unsentimental. Film technique, he said, can be learned quickly – his own MFA program at USC deliberately avoided admitting film majors, preferring students from other disciplines who already had something to say. The hard part is not learning to use a camera but knowing what story you need to tell. He urged young filmmakers to read, travel, make friends and accumulate experience rather than focusing narrowly on technical skills – and to be honest with themselves about whether they were truly prepared for a path that offers no stability and demands the willingness to risk everything.

The stars of “Sinners” recreated the “Pierce the Veil” segment from the film at the 98th Oscars with a stirring rendition of “I Lied to You” from an all-star cast of musicians led by Miles Caton and Raphael Saadiq.

Caton and Saadiq paid homage to Ryan Coogler’s film alongside an impressive array of musicians and performers including Misty Copeland, Eric Gales, Buddy Guy, Brittany Howard, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li, Bobby Rush, Shaboozey and Alice Smith. The performance was billed ahead of time as a tribute to the film’s “singular visual style.” Watch the performance here.

Saadiq set off the segment by strumming on the guitar before passing it to Caton, who sang the first verse with support, at one point, from Shaboozey. On a set resembling the film’s Club Juke, the subsequent all-star cast joined in — Brittany Howard on guitar, Alice Smith singing, and Misty Copeland dancing ballet as she came together with the ensemble to finish off the song.

Caton, who played the young version of Sammie in “Sinners,” has performed the song alongside Saadiq and composer Ludwig Göransson several times since the film’s release, including renditions on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and the American Cinematheque Awards. “I Lied to You,” of course, earned an Oscar nod for best original song, one of the record-breaking 16 nominations that “Sinners” achieved.

The “Sinners” soundtrack and score played an integral role in the film, inspired by music from the 1930s and ’40s and blues artists like Robert Johnson. “I Lied to You” is played in one of the defining scenes in “Sinners,” where Sammie sings the song at a juke joint as Black music’s lineage swirls around him. It was one of two “Sinners” songs submitted for Oscar consideration alongside “Last Time (I Seen the Sun),” a soulful duet performed by Smith and Caton and co-written by Smith, Caton and Göransson.

Outside of original song, “Sinners” was nominated for a record-breaking 16 awards, including best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress and original screenplay, among several others.

Amy Madigan seemed stunned to take the Oscars stage — understandably so.

She gave an all-out performance in “Weapons,” but that’s the kind of movie that generally doesn’t win Oscars even in an era more open to genre. What “Weapons” has to say about contemporary life is stated in a more minor key; its larger objective is terrifying the audience, and Madigan’s Aunt Gladys, alternating between grandiosity and quiet menace to become a horror-movie villain for the ages, was the chief delivery system for that terror.

So when she won best supporting actress, Madigan was understandably flummoxed, giving a charmingly off-the-cuff speech that rebuffed the notion that one isn’t supposed to read a list of names — after all, those names belong to the people that brought you there. Her humility seemed well-earned. Throughout the promotion cycle for “Weapons,” both in its theatrical run and its awards campaign, Madigan made the point that she’d felt counted out by Hollywood for years, and had grown accustomed to the phone not ringing. 

There’s a pain in that, but also an opportunity to prove one’s mettle. This performer, whose only previous Oscar nomination (for 1985’s “Twice in a Lifetime”) came before any of her four fellow nominees had been born, took the role of Aunt Gladys and imbued it with a richness and life that Zach Cregger could only have hoped would have sprung up from a character whose origins and motivations aren’t there on the page. 

Why Aunt Gladys is siphoning the life from those she enchants is both obvious (she needs their juice to keep on going!) and beyond what can be understood by us non-witchy mortals. Madigan makes it all coherent, even as she toggles between Aunt Gladys’ performance for the public as a somewhat batty woman who aims for lovability and her life behind closed doors as a malign force.

This isn’t the type of performance that usually wins: One might point to Ruth Gordon playing a similarly garish and threatening witch in “Rosemary’s Baby,” but that was nearly 60 years ago, and “Rosemary’s Baby” had enough prestige to land another nomination, for its screenplay. Madigan was so undeniable that she triumphed over four performers whose films were widely-celebrated across the Oscar nominations this year, while she was the only representative from “Weapons.” That’s how undeniable her work was.

And it came after Madigan herself had been denied for some time. (At 75, she is the second-oldest winner in the category ever.) Her work in “Weapons” already spoke for itself, but the fact of her striding onstage and being battily herself — and making us wonder both where she’d been all this time and what might still lie ahead for her — ought to serve an inspiration, of sorts. That it could inspire performers to know their best shot is a meeting away is obvious. It also should spark, in directors as imaginative as Cregger, a desire to find the next Madigan, someone whose name we only just recall and whose talent we deserve to rediscover.