I recently graduated from the California State University Northridge school of Cinema and Television Arts with an emphasis in film production. Currently I'm working for an online jazz station; McQsJazz.com and it's pretty cool. On the side I'm working on breaking into the industry. One step at a time.
For one day on Sept. 3, movie tickets will be just $3 in the majority of American theaters as part of a newly launched National Cinema Day to lure moviegoers to the box office.
Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
NEW YORK — For one day, movie tickets will be just $3 in the vast majority of American theaters as part of a newly launched “National Cinema Day” to lure moviegoers during a quiet spell at the box office.
The Cinema Foundation, a non-profit arm of the National Association of Theater Owners, on Sunday announced that Sept. 3 will be a nationwide discount day in more than 3,000 theaters and on more than 30,000 screens. Major chains, including AMC and Regal Cinemas, are participating, as are all major film studios. In participating theaters, tickets will be no more than $3 for every showing, in every format.
Labor Day weekend is traditionally one of the slowest weekends in theaters. This year, the August lull has been especially acute for exhibitors. Cineworld, which owns Regal Cinemas, cited the scant supply of major new releases in its recent plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
But, if successful, National Cinema Day could flood theaters with moviegoers and potentially prompt them to return in the fall. Before each showing, ticket buyers will be shown a sizzle reel of upcoming films from A24, Amazon Studios, Disney, Focus Features, Lionsgate, Neon, Paramount, Sony Pictures Classics, Sony, United Artists Releasing, Universal, and Warner Bros.
“After this summer’s record-breaking return to cinemas, we wanted to do something to celebrate moviegoing,” said Jackie Brenneman, Cinema Foundation president, in a statement. “We’re doing it by offering a ‘thank you’ to the moviegoers that made this summer happen, and by offering an extra enticement for those who haven’t made it back yet.”
After more than two years of pandemic, movie theaters rebounded significantly over the summer, seeing business return to nearly pre-pandemic levels. Films like “Top Gun: Maverick,”“Minions: Rise of Gru,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness“ and “Jurassic World Dominion” pushed the domestic summer box office to $3.3 billion in ticket sales as of Aug. 21, according to data firm Comscore. That trails 2019 totals by about 20% but exhibitors have had about 30% fewer wide releases this year.
Organizers of National Cinema Day described the event as a trial that could become an annual fixture. While some other countries have experimented with a similar day of cheap movie tickets, the initiative is the first of its kind on such a large scale in the U.S.
One of the toughest things for an established TV show to do is surprise you.
Specifically, to surprise by revealing something new about characters fans think they know, after years of watching episodes and growing attached to their favorites.
That’s a big reason why I have so enjoyed this fourth season of Netflix’s monster hit Stranger Things. And it’s why the last two episodes, dropping today, amp up the energy of an already propulsive season, revealing the full scope of the danger our heroes (and heroines) face while highlighting new complications among them all.
The show has always turned on an improbable premise: A nerdy gang of young kids keeping horrible creatures from an alternate universe from consuming our world — with help from a few bumbling adults. That core crew — teen buddies Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will — has expanded every season and is now an endlessly eccentric gang that feels like every underdog from every ’80s teen flick jammed into one bustling storyline.
For its fourth season, the series has more than doubled down on just about everything — building out the show’s fictional universe, adding engaging new characters and setting up a bombastic showdown for these last two episodes that offers its biggest spectacle yet.
The show’s new Big Bad – a disgusting assembly of decayed flesh and tentacles named Vecna – has been killing young people from the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down, and the show’s growing crew of young protagonists need to take him down. Eventually, they realize they must work from multiple locations, including from within the Upside Down itself, to try to defeat him.
Fans online have feverishly traded theories about these last two installments — episodes eight and nine — which include a whopper of a season finale clocking in at more than two hours long. Questions abound: Does an important character die (with lots of fans putting money on Joe Keery’s underachieving, magnificently coiffed dreamboat Steve Harrington)? Does a certain kid with a bowl-cut hairstyle reveal feelings beyond friendship for his boyhood buddy?
Most importantly, is this season’s story really worth a final episode longer than some feature films?
Relax. I won’t reveal the answers to most of those questions. But I will note they are answered in the episodes just released, which also continue the series’ unerring knack for wrapping up one world-threatening crisis while unveiling the seeds of the next one, due to unfold in the show’s upcoming fifth and final season. And yes, this last, supersized episode is well worth the time.
Final episodes score by taking big swings
I’ll avoid obvious spoilers here, but there will be some talk about details from the first seven episodes Netflix released in May. That fractured release strategy seems to have worked as intended — keeping fans buzzing about the series for weeks, anticipating the season’s end and maintaining Stranger Things‘ high rank among the 10 most-watched U.S. TV shows on the service. It’s also Netflix’s most-watched English language show.
The show’s creators and showrunners known as the Duffer Brothers — Ross and Matt — took a big swing at the beginning of the fourth season, using a tactic often employed by TV shows where you have a close-knit group of characters who have been together a while. You separate them.
And boy, did they separate them. Super powered, psychokinetic telepathic kid Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, lost her powers and moved to California with Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers and her sons Will and Jonathan. Dustin, Lucas and Mike, along with the other kids who helped foil an apocalypse together last season stayed in Hawkins, Ind. – a fictional town that never seemed much like an actual Indiana town to this native Hoosier. David Harbour’s depressive sheriff Jim Hopper was stuck in a Russian prison, thought dead until Joyce found out differently earlier this season.
To make all that work, the Duffers have balanced a multitude of storylines taking place in at least four different locations — a situation that only ramps up further in the last two episodes. As the eighth episode opens, Eleven has left California for a secret facility with the doctor who originally raised her and helped develop her abilities, Matthew Modine’s ruthless researcher Martin Brenner.
He’s one of the established characters who becomes even more compelling here, as we learn new details of his backstory with Eleven — she calls him Papa, the title of the eighth episode — while she works with him to regain her powers and take on Vecna.
These episodes work by embracing all the excesses that would drown a typical series, from absurd plot twists — like Joyce teaming with a conspiracy theorist friend of Hopper’s to rescue him from that Russian prison — to characters somehow finding each other exactly when they need to, on-the-nose homages to classic horror films like Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween and bombastic, effects-filled action sequences.
There is a lot of mayhem in this season. Famously, the show had to put a warning on its first episode, which dropped days after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May and featured the slaughter of children who grew up in the facility with Eleven.
But despite all the death, you rarely get the sense that the show’s core characters are at serious risk, despite the many threats they face. Stranger Things flirts with that idea in these final episodes, in a way that raises the stakes without violating the show’s central conceits.
Problems with the “confessional monologues”
Even with two inflated episodes, the Duffer brothers have a lot of narrative ground to cover in these last installments. So they resort to a device I’m going to call the “confessional monologue” — where one character turns to another and neatly, emotionally explains exactly the problem in their relationship, admitting their part in it and promising to do better.
This is something that happens often in the final episodes. And as satisfying as it can be for viewers to see these characters stop acting like knuckleheads and actually talk to each other, it also feels like a crutch — allowing the story to skip ahead into emotional resolutions that aren’t fully earned.
In one case, the confessional monologue is between two characters — I won’t name names — who vow to be more open with each other. Then they proceed to move onto the emergency at hand without actually talking about the emotional issue that prompted the confessional in the first place. Sigh.
Still, there is a lot I liked about the character development here. The deepening relationship between Hopper and Joyce. Steve Harrington’s efforts to transcend his womanizing. The odd triangle between Will, his friend Mike and Mike’s girlfriend, Eleven.
And it was surprisingly powerful to see these far flung groups of friends finally reunite in a bittersweet resolution.
I have no idea how the Duffer brothers are going to match what they pulled off in this season for their fifth and final run (they even reintroduced ’80s icon Kate Bush to a whole new legion of fans). But I can’t wait to be surprised by this inventive and bold series yet again.
Ariana DeBose accepts the SAG Award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a supporting role. She played Anita in “West Side Story.” Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
The Screen Actors Guild Awards happened on Sunday night — the first of the guilds to give out their big prizes this season. The guilds — your Screen Actors Guild, but also your Directors Guild and your Producers Guild and your Writers Guild — make particularly interesting predictors of Oscar season (unlike, for instance, the Golden Globes), because they are chosen by some of the same voters. That can make guild awards solid predictors, or at least as solid as any. For instance, before Parasite won what was originally considered a longshot best picture Oscar two years ago, it picked up a win at the SAG Awards, and that’s when its win for best picture started to look like a shot that was not quite so long.
1. Here comes Squid Game. The South Korean drama series about a game that offers participants the chance to get out of debt or literally die trying won big in television drama: Lee Jung-jae and Jung Ho-yeon won for lead actor and actress, and the show’s stunt ensemble won in their category as well. (The SAG Awards are one of the only places where stunt performers are honored, a regrettable omission elsewhere that was noted by my colleague Glen Weldon in a recent lament about the Oscars.)Sponsor Messagehttps://b8d20600aafcc9b003aed2333e03a023.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
When the Emmys come around in the fall, will Squid Game manage to beat out the lauded Succession, the cast of which won last night’s ensemble award? It’s always hard to know when popularity — hotness, if you will — is going to translate into awards recognition. Early signs for Squid Game (and thus Netflix) are good, but Succession is still a beast, and it had a very good third season. Should be a good fight.
2. CODA is getting some good momentum. CODA, the crowd-pleaser about a young girl named Ruby getting ready to leave for college (or not), won the award for its ensemble — the closest thing the SAG Awards have to best picture. And Troy Kotsur, who plays Ruby’s father, won the supporting actor award. Note that Kotsur was the first deaf actor to win a solo SAG award, and the cast was the first predominantly deaf cast to win.
The film has been on a bit of a roller-coaster: When it came out at Sundance, it was lauded and sold for a ton of money; hopes were high. But maybe because it sold to Apple TV, still a service that doesn’t have the reach of something like Netflix, and maybe because its theatrical release came in August, when theatrical attendance was still pretty rickety, it seemed to fade a little in the public consciousness.
Until recently, it felt to me — this, admittedly, is myextremely unscientific gut instinct — that best picture would probably go to either Power of the Dog or Don’t Look Up, but it’s easy to wonder whether CODA might sneak in there. A crowd-pleaser does, after all, sometimes please just enough of the crowd.
3. Will Smith may be close. Will Smith has been nominated for Oscars twice before, for The Pursuit of Happyness and Ali. Some of his other performances have felt, for lack of a better word, awards-y, but have not been nominated: your Concussion, your Seven Pounds, and so forth. This year, he’s nominated for King Richard. He’s already won the Golden Globe — but as we’ve discussed in the past, that doesn’t tell you much. Now, however, he’s won the SAG Award, which advances the notion that we may be looking at the Will Smith Oscar year.
4. Your movie doesn’t have to be a big knockout for you to win. Full disclosure: The Eyes of Tammy Faye is still on my Oscar spreadsheet as “To Watch,” not as “Watched.” But that film was nominated for just two Oscars: Jessica Chastain for best actress and the film’s makeup and hairstyling. It’s not a huge haul, and the reviews were what we might call good-not-great. Nevertheless, Chastain won the SAG on Sunday, and like Will Smith, she’s on her third Oscar nomination. But if she beats out, on Oscar night, Nicole Kidman, Olivia Colman, Kristen Stewart and Penélope Cruz? That’s a big win for a movie that has not necessarily been prominent this season.
5. It’s an Ariana DeBose world. Ariana DeBose won for West Side Story on Sunday, continuing — as a couple of folks noted — a talent pipeline from Fox’s reality show So You Think You Can Dance. But more directly, DeBose is just on a huge roll, and while there aren’t a lot of “rising star” stories anymore where everybody seems to think the person is just luminous and fabulous, she’s got what feels like an extremely high approval rating at this point. She’s also the first Latina actress and the first openly queer woman of color to win for film. If you’re looking for a good story this Oscar season, look no further.
For more than three decades, Clive Wilkinson has been among the most sought-after office designers in the world. He has planned spaces for the likes of Microsoft, Disney, Intuit and other companies seeking unorthodox approaches to work life.
But he now has regrets about what is perhaps his most famous work: Googleplex, the tech giant’s posh headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
Wilkinson helped lay out Google’s campus after winning its design competition in 2004, leading him to work directly with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
“Larry and Sergey said at the time, ‘We don’t really have any reference point but the Stanford campus model,’ ” said Wilkinson.
In Mountain View, what emerged was a maze of well-lit nooks, bleachers and clubhouse rooms to encourage collaboration. The office would also become famous for its amenities: Gourmet meals. Fitness classes. Organic gardens. Massage rooms. Laundry services. Private parks. Volleyball courts. Swimming pools. And so on.
But looking back, Wilkinson thinks Google’s luxurious on-site perks have made workers too dependent on the company, a situation he calls “dangerous.”
“This notion that you can provide everything that would support a worker’s life on campus might appear to be extremely generous and supportive,” he said. “But it also has a whole range of potentially negative impacts.”
Wilkinson spoke in an interview at his glass-enclosed hillside home in West Los Angeles, which some have compared to a “spaceship on stilts.” His comments on Google’s campus came during an extensive conversation with NPR about how the pandemic may forever reshape office life and what it could mean for workers.
While Silicon Valley has long been known for offering unusual amenities to its workers, Google’s offerings set a high bar. Other tech giants began to roll out their own free meals, nature trails and private transportation services in efforts to attract and retain talent. But Wilkinson said as companies plan to bring workers back into the office, such arrangements should be reconsidered.
He said blurring the line between work and non-work keeps employees tethered to the office, benefiting the employer most of all. That, he argues, may seem to keep workers happy but can quickly spark burnout.
“Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It’s not real. It’s not really engaging with the world in the way most people do,” he said. “It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality.”
Employees have no reason to leave campus to explore local cafes, restaurants or grocery stores because everything is handed to them. To Wilkinson, overly coddling workers like this is “fundamentally unhealthy.”
That, he said, “hasn’t been recognized as one of the dangerous side effects.”
If an employer is trying to foster creativity, “you don’t want an overly comfortable workplace. You shouldn’t have sleep pods everywhere,” he said. “Creative work doesn’t happen in a condition of luxury. If you have that much luxury, you naturally want to fall asleep.”
At the same time, it is “a difficult one to pull apart,” he said. “Because once you made all those offers to your employees, how do you pull back from that situation?”
“There’s a way that something that was built with good intentions can be slightly corrupted,” Warzel told NPR. “It’s not a terrible thing for employees to get nice perks, but what is it in service of? Making you a better worker? Or making sure your needs are met? Or keeping you stuck in this liminal work-like state for as long as possible.”
That said, plenty of Google’s some 144,000 employees appear to be just fine with the on-site luxuries their employer provides. Surveys routinely place Google at the top of lists for worker happiness and satisfaction with how much employees are paid. When the pandemic forced Googlers off campus, it appears it dented worker morale, and the company is responding with new cash bonuses.
When COVID-19 hit, some 2.5 million square feet of office space Wilkinson’s firm was working on was canceled or delayed. But he becomes defiant when asked whether the pandemic has killed the office.
“It’s ridiculous to say the office is dead,” said Wilkinson, “The office is the fermenting ground for people growing into successful adults. How would that ever be dead?”
Some have compared the glass-enclosed hillside home that Wilkinson built for himself in West Los Angeles to a “spaceship on stilts.” Jessica Pons for NPR
Studies suggest remote work will outlast the pandemic. But most companies in a new U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey said theyalso plan to maintain their office spaces. Wilkinson’s corporate clients are now returning. He says most of them are not ready to forgo the office. They are, however, eager for a facelift, one that makes sense in a hybrid work environment.
To a certain degree, he said, companies are winging it.
“People don’t know how much space they need anymore, so I think an awful lot of large companies are waiting to see what everybody else does,” Wilkinson said.
No one wants a depressingly empty office, something he calls “one of the biggest problems in the new workplace.”
He adds: “When you go in there, specifically because of hybrid working, is the place going to feel that it’s underpowered and it’s running on empty?”
And so he suspects, happily, that the pandemic has wiped out one particular type of office: the cubicle farm.
“Cubicles are like human chicken farming. They have always been bad for anything other than kind of factory farming kind of approach to the office,” he said. “Put people in tiny little footprint because it takes less money than an enclosed office and we can kind of keep an eye on them.”
Out with the old office, in with the ’boutique hotel’ feel
If jammed-together desks are out and Wilkinson cautions against swanky amenities à la Google, what does the post-pandemic workplace resemble?
Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee. An environment where it’s easy to hang out and chat.
“You might think you’re walking into the lounge of a boutique hotel,” Wilkinson said. “It’s an amazingly effective work environment, even though there’s no conventional kind of office furnishing or anything like that.”
He has noticed something else about the pandemic-era office plans he is now working on: companies are investing in outdoor spaces. Go ahead, answer your emails in the shade.
“Because now it’s seen as being healthy,” he said. “Health itself has suddenly become one of the top criteria about where you work.”
He said the future office will be a balancing act. It needs to be more attractive than working from home, yet not so attractive that workers don’t want to go home.
But not even the most seasoned corporate architect can predict the answer to the question at the center of it all: How many workers really want to return to the office, and how often do they want to be there?
“We’re having very interesting conversations with a lot of clients right now about, ‘Does the office need to be a bunch of project rooms? Does it need to be one huge cafeteria?’ ” he said. “We’re now building a lot of Zoom rooms, which is something we never did before.”
In the Marvel series Hawkeye, the stakes are low. Comfortably so. Cozily so, even.
The planet isn’t in peril (well, any more than baseline), and the multiverse doesn’t hover on the brink of extinction. Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), the sad-sack Avenger, just wants to get home in time to celebrate Christmas with his family.
The six-episode series (the first two episodes of which were screened for press), is small in scope, and self-contained, and the conflicts take place at ground-level. Nothing is dire, nor fraught with peril. The tone, as a result, is loose, amiable, downright chill.
Loosely based on a beloved run of comics written by Matt Fraction with art by David Aja, the series has Clint facing off against a gang of dim-bulb Russian gangsters he calls the Tracksuit Mafia. In the comics, Clint and young hero Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) share a long and complicated history. They team up because that’s just what Marvel heroes do.
In the series, however, a great deal of work is required to set up their first meeting, and then it takes even more furious narrative labor to justify their continuing partnership; it’s here that the series’ laid-back vibe grows sweaty with effort.
We get a lot of information about Kate: We learn that she is an accomplished athlete, that she is very wealthy, that her mother (an underused Vera Farmiga) runs a security company — and if you think that last fact won’t come in handy once Kate needs to locate someone, you haven’t watched a TV show in the past decade. What we don’t get, however, is a clear motivation for her to assume the role of urban vigilante in the first place.
Steinfeld finds a way to lean into her characters’ entitlement without making herself insufferable. (At one point, her mother informs her that the young and the rich believe themselves immortal, “and you’ve always been both.”) What’s missing from the performance is any sense of the drive and determination required for a life of hero-ing. This may, of course, turn out to be the character’s narrative arc, over the course of this season — the evolution from privileged dabbler into dedicated crimefighter — but there’s little evidence of that kind of personal growth in the first two episodes, in which Kate’s habit of talking to herself seems like the kind of “cute” characterizing detail that’d be more at home on the Hallmark Channel.
Clint’s motivation, on the other hand, is crystal clear from the jump — guy just wants to get home. His storyline, however, goes weirdly lumpy pretty quickly, as his search for a missing superhero outfit(!) sends him through Manhattan alleys in the dead of night as well as through a gaggle of nerds in Central Park in the full light of day. And while all this is going on, Linda Cardellini, who plays his wife, fulfills her Marvel contract with several scenes’ worth of “Don’t worry, we’re fine, you go and do your hero thing,” phone calls to him.
The lighter side of Marvel
Despite its focus on street-level crimefighting, the world of the series is more bright and breezy than grim and gritty, made moreso by its Manhattan-at-Christmastime backdrop (see above, in re: Hallmark Channel).
The Tracksuit Mafia — lifted straight from the Fraction/Aja comics — makes for a not-particularly threatening villain, but then, they’re not meant to. Keep your eye on the oily Jack (Tony Dalton), who’s canoodling with Kate’s mom, and who will doubtlessly turn out to be the season’s true Big Bad.
For lovers of the comic, the series nails specific aspects — the ones that count. Clint’s demeanor, for one thing. Renner captures the character’s (literally) beaten-down quality, his willingness to assume the role of punching-bag, if it means protecting someone else. Clint spent so much time getting banged up in the comic that he sported bandages in every panel — that aspect gets a nice shout-out. The comic’s standout character — a one-eyed dog who loves pizza — is brought over to the small screen and is, by any reasonable measure, a good boy.
Most importantly, the relationship between in Clint and Kate is faithfully rendered. The chemistry Renner and Steinfeld share is palpable, but — importantly — it’s not sexual in nature. For the story to work, their two characters need to meet at a place of mutual respect and understanding not clouded by desire, either requited or un-. In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the banter between the two leads often — too often — felt forced and leaden; here it moves at a fast clip.
Hawkeye isn’t the most formally innovative of Marvel’s TV slate (that’d be Wandavision), or the weirdest (Loki) or the most imaginative (What If …?). But it’s smart enough to use its small-fish-in-a-big-pond energy to tell its modest, breezy story without apologizing for it.
It’s true that in the first two episodes, most of that energy is spent maneuvering the characters into position. But here’s hoping that business is finally done, and the rest of the season will allow them, finally, to break into a run.
The universe is so much bigger than what people can see, and astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan is trying to figure out that which we can not see. Producer Rebecca Ramirez talks with Priya and reports on the theory about some of the secret scaffolding of the universe: dark matter.
Our team would love to hear your episode ideas. Email us at [email protected].
This episode was edited by Gisele Grayson and produced by Rebecca Ramirez with help from Indi Khera. Indi also checked the facts. Marcia Caldwell was the audio engineer.
The signature Paul Schrader image is of a lonely middle-aged man nursing a glass of booze and writing in his diary, pouring out all his dark thoughts and guilty secrets. In the 1992 film Light Sleeper, it was a drug dealer having a midlife crisis. In the more recent First Reformed, it was a minister radicalized by the threat of climate change.
Schrader likes to burrow deep inside these men and their tortured souls, but there’s an amusing randomness to the way he assigns his characters their respective issues. His absorbing new picture, The Card Counter, is no exception: It stars Oscar Isaac as a professional gambler who used to be a military man stationed at Abu Ghraib.
We don’t know all this right at the start. Isaac’s character goes by William Tell, a silly gambler’s pseudonym. When we first meet William, he explains that he spent years in prison for some unspecified crime. It was behind bars that William learned how to count cards. Now he spends his days hopping from casino to casino, playing blackjack and poker and doing just well enough to beat the house without cleaning it out. At night he returns to his motel room, writes in his diary and tries to keep his demons at bay.
Early on, William meets a gambling agent named La Linda, played by a delightful Tiffany Haddish, who wants him to join the big leagues. Haddish and Isaac have a sly chemistry that goes from flirtatious to sizzling in no time, even though William initially rebuffs La Linda’s professional overtures.
Eventually Schrader brings William’s past to light, through a series of encounters that seem contrived at first but gradually bring the story’s central conflict into focus. At a casino one night, William spies Maj. John Gordo, played by Willem Dafoe. Gordo was his former superior years ago at Abu Ghraib and taught him everything he knows about torturing and interrogating suspects. But while William was later court-martialed and went to prison, Gordo got away scot-free and now works as a private security contractor.
That same night, William meets a college dropout named Cirk, played by Tye Sheridan, whose dad was also trained by Gordo; he was dishonorably discharged and eventually killed himself. Now Cirk wants revenge against Gordo and asks William to help him.
Schrader drops in a few harrowing flashbacks to Abu Ghraib, tearing a hole in the movie’s calm, steady surface. We see prisoners being abused and interrogated in images filmed with a heavily distorting wide-angle lens — a visual abomination as well as a moral one. It’s likely no coincidence that The Card Counter is being released so close to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Schrader can be bluntly didactic when it suits him, but here he’s sincerely inviting the audience to reflect on the legacy of Sept. 11, including the crimes that Americans have committed in the name of justice.
William, who’s trying to distance himself from his past, wants no part of Cirk’s plan and tries to dissuade him from following through. He takes the kid under his wing, letting him tag along on his casino tour. He also takes La Linda up on her invitation to join her stable, hoping to make enough on the poker circuit to help Cirk out financially and get him back in school. But that’s easier said than done. As in so many of Schrader’s films, dating back even to his script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, a violent end seems inevitable, no matter how much our hero tries to avoid it.
This is a superb role for Isaac, who brings his usual sly, soulful magnetism to the role of a man who plots every move with suave precision. William is always crisply dressed in a shirt, tie and leather jacket. When he moves into a new motel room, he covers every piece of furniture with plain white sheets, as if he were trying to impose extreme order on the extreme disorder of his past. But in Isaac’s dark, haunted gaze we see a history of trauma that can’t be purged so easily. Once young Cirk enters the picture, William sees a chance to make further amends for his sins and do some good in the world.
That world seems awfully drab in The Card Counter, a nondescript suburban wasteland that time seems to have forgotten. The America that William gave so much of his life to serve doesn’t look so beautiful. But there’s one exception, when La Linda takes William out one night to visit the illuminated Missouri Botanical Garden, flooding the screen with vibrant colors that accentuate the actors’ dazzling rapport. As grim as things can get in Schrader’s movies, he’s also a romantic at heart, someone who sees in love the possibility of both risk and redemption.
Atticus Lish’s second novel, The War For Gloria, is an ambitious book with a lot to say about family loyalty and love.
The War For Gloria follows the author’s impressive debut, Preparation for the Next Life, a heart-wrenching story of love between an Iraq war vet and an undocumented immigrant, both extremely down on their luck.
In his second novel, Lish dives into a different kind of love — that between mother and son. The titular “war” is Corey Goltz’s battle to save his mother, Gloria, in the face of a terminal diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Gloria is a single mother and a free spirit; her son is a teenager. Throughout Corey’s life, the two have moved through a series of sketchy living accommodations in working class Boston and suburbs, including Gloria’s car. When “the weight of the time and the evidence of who she was would hit her,” Gloria wonders, “Will it ever be okay?” She gives the finger to Harvard Square, looking at “the privilege and hypocrisy.” Her “scream of rage was at herself.”
The War For Gloria is written in memory of Barbara Lee Works, Atticus Lish’s late mother. Lish, the son of the well-known literary figure, Gordon Lish, does not elaborate further.
As the book opens, Corey is a smart, inquisitive high school sophomore. Gloria works at a private company with a “social service function, helping people who had been in drug programs find work.” They live in a modest apartment overlooking the water in Quincy, Massachusetts.
As in Lish’s first novel, The War For Gloria is peopled with well-drawn characters who live in precarious economic circumstances. Corey, it seems, feels more comfortable with students who struggle with an absent or deceased parent. He has two friends — Molly, a star athlete and student, the son of a single father, Tom, who runs a construction business, and Adrian, a brilliant and strange kid headed for MIT, whose mother has a brain tumor.
Corey is the result of an on-and-off affair that ended a long time ago. His biologic father, Leonard, is a shadowy figure whom Corey comes to realize is a charlatan. Leonard is not the physicist, nor even the cop that Corey thought he was. Leonard has done nothing to provide for his son’s welfare or help raise him. He reenters Gloria and Corey’s life after Gloria’s ALS diagnosis, making everything worse.
The backbone of The War For Gloria is Corey’s unwavering commitment to his mother as she gradually loses motor functions and speech. Corey’s teenaged reasoning — all heart — does not result in what’s best for him. But with great compassion, he manages to care for his ailing mother. He says his mom is “great. You’re greater than you know.” He drops out of high school to work a series of odd jobs and be available when she needs him.
Leonard starts slumming in the apartment, taking up space and food and even “borrowing” Gloria’s car for a week so that she is forced to navigate public transportation in her compromised condition. Corey sinks into justified, unfettered rage toward his father, whose garbled explanation of ALS is the opposite of comforting. “It’s a bulbar palsy or prion disease or radium poisoning or dot dot dot.” Corey joins a fight club to toughen himself up. He hopes not only to make money as a fighter, but also to gain the strength necessary to bend his father to his will, by physical force if necessary.
Gloria’s former friend and lover Joan also reappears and helps for a time, but like other adults in Corey’s life, she too disappears.
Lish is a sensational literary craftsman, using the words in his toolbelt to construct narrative that is at once coolly dispassionate and red hot with emotion. Despite his unceasing maternal devotion, Corey is wracked by self-doubt. “He couldhave built the ramp, but didn’t…. He could have done yogic breathing and used prana to bring his mother peace.” Corey’s version of love:
“To truly love someone, you must be willing to do anything for them…. You must be able to face any fear, any pain. Killing was easy, fighting was hard, ALS was the hardest of all….”
Spoilers prevent a discussion of the last part of The War For Gloria. Suffice to say that the narrative descends into a level of violence for which I was unprepared. Corey is kicked around and abandoned in every sense of the word. I felt the book thinned out as it moved to its conclusion. I wasn’t sure what the violence contributed to the world Lish had so painstakingly and masterfully built. Perhaps that is Lish’s point. His Boston is one with seamy undersides and unhinged characters who act with malice and revenge. The result is a very dark novel.
I will be thinking about The War For Gloria for a long time. The book opens a disturbing window into a teenager’s losing battle to save his mother, our broken healthcare system, the power that humans have to inflict harm on one another, and one boy’s efforts to save not only his mother, but himself.
Martha Anne Toll is a DC based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing in Fall 2022.
Nearly 200 miles from the nearest ocean, nine surfers are bobbing beneath the Texas sun in what looks like a tropical lagoon.
Then a sound like a muffled jet engine fills the air, overwhelming a reggae song coming from shore.
One surfer starts to paddle, and a head-high wave rises seemingly from nowhere to carry him down the line toward the sandy beach.
Seconds later, two more waves materialize and two more surfers glide off.
One of them is 12-year-old Dane Grochowski.
“I pumped down the line and did a little snap, and kind of got caught behind the section” he says, when I wade out to ask him about his ride. “So I pulled into the barrel. But I wasn’t going to make it out.”
Welcome to the BSR Surf Resort in Waco, Texas, where the machine-made waves are so good they attract top professionals as well as casual surfers.
Hawaiian surfer Carissa Moore trained here and at a similar wave pool in Japan before she won a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics this summer.
Grochowski and his family made the trip from Pacifica, Calif. after seeing videos of the wave. “It feels like an adventure coming here ’cause it’s in the middle of nowhere,” Grochowski says.
The BSR resort has become an emblem of how a new generation of artificial waves is redefining inland surfing. It’s now clear that if you build the right wave, even in central Texas, surfers will come — and shred.
Compressed air and a computer
The BSR Surf Resort is the result of decades of progress in both the science and technology of wave making.
The wave here is generated by powerful fans that sit behind a concrete wall running along one side of the surf pool. The rest of the pool is bordered by a sandy beach, complete with cabanas and a lifeguard tower.
The fans compress air that is directed to a series of underwater chambers along the wall.
“There’s a proprietary way that that air gets released,” says Mike Schwaab, a surfer who is also the resort’s general manager. “It displaces water and that specific displacement, paired with the way that the concrete bottom is designed, is what creates a breaking wave.”
And a good one. The waves I rode during an intermediate session compared favorably to the ones I once surfed as a teenager in Southern California.
The system in Waco was designed by American Wave Machines in Solana Beach, Calif. It’s one of several companies that uses air pressure to generate surfing waves. Other companies use paddles, plungers, pistons, or even a hydrofoil dragged through the water.
In Waco, a computer algorithm controls the size, shape, and direction of each wave. “You can have a beginner wave, you can have an expert wave, you can have a wave specifically to get barreled,” Schwaab says, referring to a ride that puts a surfer inside the curl of a breaking wave.
Artificial waves have been around for decades. Disney World, for example, opened its Typhoon Lagoon Surf Pool in 1989. But the waves in these pools tended to be slow and mushy. They were designed for bathers, not surfers.
Then in 2015, 11-time World Surf League champion Kelly Slater unveiled a different kind of wave.
It breaks in an abandoned water ski park in central California. A massive hydrofoil is propelled through the water to generate the sort of fast, barreling wave that surfers’ dreams are made of.
But Slater’s wave, now controlled by the World Surf League, was never meant for the surfing masses. The machine produces about 15 waves an hour and riding just one costs hundreds of dollars. The Waco machine can make 120 waves an hour and costs surfers about $10 a ride.
That makes the wave pool commercially viable. Sessions in Waco are generally sold out weeks ahead of time. And the success is encouraging other resorts and water parks to add their own state-of-the-art surf pools.
A wave grows in Waco
Like many water parks, the one in Waco was built for a sport other than surfing.
“The dude that put it all together was a barefoot water skier and this whole place started based on barefoot water skiing,” Schwaab says.
It opened as the Barefoot Ski Ranch in 2012. Over time, the facility added a lazy river, an extreme water slide and a wakeboarding course built around an island that is home to a family of lemurs.
The BSR surf pool opened in 2018. Within weeks, a pro named Seth Moniz landed a back flip on the air section and the video went viral.
That attracted a lot of big-name surfers. But it also brought inexperienced surfers who wanted a good place to learn.
“When I started I was a beginner,” says Brian Fillmore, a Texas native who landed a job as the wave pool’s manager. “Now I’m able to get barreled, do airs, [and I’m] working on perfecting my turns just like every other surfer.”
Inventing the “freak peak”
Surfers often talk about finding the perfect wave. But they don’t want to ride the same perfect wave over and over, says Dave Likins, the facility’s chief operating officer.
“If it’s not changeable, and it’s not something that’s going to be a little bit different each time, you’re eventually going to get bored,” Likins says.
So the Waco wave was designed to be customized, just by changing a computer algorithm.
“We had an event recently out here that Rip Curl did called the GromSearch, and American Wave Machines put a new wave in, a wave that nobody had seen,” Likins says.
The most radical wave in Waco is the Freak Peak. It’s produced when two swells collide to form a wedge that serves as a launch pad for the bold.
But even the standard waves in Waco can challenge surfers used to catching ocean swells.
Rebecca Carr, who traveled from California with her husband and their three kids, nearly gave up after her first session.
“You can only [catch it] in one spot, so you have to be good to get in these waves,” she says.
Carr figured it out, though. So did I, after botching a few waves.
And Carr says she and her family will definitely return.
“I grew up two hours from here in Granbury, Texas,” she says. “So this is our family vacation every year and it just turns out now we can surf when we’re in mid Texas.
It’s fitting that the best promotion for the approaching premiere of HBO’s Scenes From A Marriage was a seemingly candid exchange between its stars. The slow-motion clip, which went viral, shows Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac sharing an electric(-looking) moment on the red carpet at the Venice International Film Festival. The reason it’s so fitting is that this is a series that runs almost entirely on how much you want to watch these two very good actors work together, in scene after scene, with little to distract from their work.
The original Scenes From A Marriage miniseries aired on Swedish television in 1973. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, it told the story of a couple whose marriage crumbles over the course of several years. It was later condensed into a feature film released around the world.
In this five-episode version, created and written by Hagai Levi, Isaac and Chastain play Jonathan and Mira, who are still together when the series begins. He’s a philosophy professor and she’s a tech executive, and they have a little daughter they both love. Not long after we meet them, their marriage starts to disintegrate. They become involved with other people, there are old resentments, and there are constant shifts as to which of them, if either one, wants to save the relationship. That’s the story, really.
What Scenes From A Marriage feels like, more than anything, is a bare-bones acting exercise. It has a limited supporting cast (Corey Stoll and Nicole Beharie play a couple Jonathan and Mira are friends with in the first episode, and it’s the most you’ll see of anyone else) and it takes place almost entirely in their home. The series is cramped and stressful, despite — or because of? — how much of it is just two people talking (and fighting).
When Jonathan and Mira are at their worst, it’s tempting to see this as an extension of HBO’s run of shows about horrible affluent people being … horrible and affluent. To some degree, it is that. But the tone is much more intimate and less satirical than in something like The White Lotus or Succession, and the focus is so much on this one marriage that it doesn’t have those shows’ sprawl. It also doesn’t provide the opportunities other shows do to throw different characters together. Instead, you’re trapped with just these two and their arguments and their spiraling misery.
The positive side of the narrow focus is that Isaac and Chastain are fantastic performers who — and here we go back to that red-carpet clip — really do have tremendous chemistry. The negative side is that none of the writing raises questions about marriage that feel fresh enough to make the story particularly interesting. For all that the acting is exceptional, the story feels relatively pedestrian.
At the time the original Scenes From A Marriage was made, there was far less of an established genre of painful-divorce theater than we have now. This was pre-Kramer vs. Kramer and pre-War Of The Roses, just to name two American stories with wildly different undertones. To see a marriage turn ugly, to see people light into each other over every awful thing that’s ever happened, that’s not a novelty, and 2021 is not the year that 1973 was when it comes to divorce in the U.S. or Europe. Even reality television has blunted some of the sharp edges of a show that feels like eavesdropping.
One of the curious choices Levi makes is to include little introductory clips before each episode in which Chastain and Isaac arrive on set. Scenes From A Marriage was shot during the pandemic, so during these moments you see all the masks, all the distancing, all the other precautions. You see Chastain being brought to work by her driver, being called “Jess,” being lit, and even hearing the call of “action.” These little bits are certainly meant to do something, but it’s not clear what. In the absence of any other purpose, they seem uncomfortably like efforts to underline how serious the project is and how serious the making of it is and how serious the task of remaking Bergman is.
I don’t think people who sit down with this series will regret the time spent with these actors. There are moments that really do have an impact, and there’s some fine work lighting and shooting the house to emphasize the state of the relationship. (In one scene, Chastain seems to blend into the wall so seamlessly that she’s an unhappy beige blur.) But don’t expect to leave this show with much of a takeaway about marriage or relationships. As much as anything, it’s a study of how mundane the curdling of love can really be.
