Lon

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.

This Bar Missed Its Patrons. Its Idea To Reach Them Touched Others Around The World

Food For Thought, , ,

by Kat Lonsdorf

Chances are you miss your favorite bar: The chatter, the live music, or the pour of the drink made just so. You’re not alone. 

With bars shuttered all over the world, that sense of community has now been absent for over a year. But one bar in Mexico decided to do so something about it, by recreating some of those sounds at your favorite bar for those confined at home. And that idea? Well, it took off around the world.

The bar is in Monterrey, Mexico. Started in 2012 by Oscar Romo and a few friends, it was a little neighborhood spot, with live music next to a long, wooden bar and a small patio outside.

Back then, Monterrey was emerging from a horrific string of violence from the drug cartels waging war across northern Mexico. The city was starting to come back to life, and people were finally feeling safe.

“It was a time for everyone to start interacting again, you know?,” Romo remembers.

So Romo and his friends gave Maverick a slogan: “Un Lugar de Encuentros,” or “A Place For Encounters.”

Maverick, before the pandemic, when the bar was packed with customers.
Courtesy of René Cárdenas

For the next eight years, Maverick blossomed into a cornerstone of the neighborhood, a spot where artists and musicians, writers, and others in the community could meet to unwind.

Until the pandemic hit.

“Everything was closed,” says Romo with a sigh. “We were not allowed to sell anything for two months. So the impact, it was tremendous.”

The bar was hurting. Financially, obviously, but also because that sense of community that they had worked so hard to build had evaporated overnight. Romo says it was really painful.

“I didn’t realize how important it was, you know? Those normal things that you have in life that you take for granted — and now they’re not there,” he says. 

So Romo decided to do something about it, and this is where things got interesting.

Romo enlisted the help of René Cárdenas, in charge of marketing at Maverick. Cárdenas thought of the silence of the pandemic and he soon came to a realization: It was the sounds of the bar that really brought the sense of community home.

“People come here because of the conversations, because of the atmosphere, because of the music, because of the sense of being with strangers,” Cárdenas says.

So, he decided to record each of those sounds individually. 

Like, a bartender working.

And people talking.

And street noise.

And serving drinks.

And they put all the sounds on a website, called IMissMyBar.com. The idea was customers could put all the sounds together, and feel like they were in Maverick, while sitting around their homes, drinking their cocktails (preferably bought to-go from the bar, of course). 

This is what it sounded like.

“But then as we were making it, we said, like, maybe this idea is bigger than us,” Cárdenas remembers. 

So they modified the website to make it something where anyone, anywhere could play around and try to best recreate the bar they miss the most.

It worked. 

The website has been getting noticed — Maverick has been getting calls from everywhere: India, Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom. 

Thousands of miles away, Max Wolff, the general manager of a cozy cocktail bar called Swift in London, was going through the same feelings of loss as his counterparts in Maverick.

“I think at first it seemed to me like it was meant to be funny, but it doesn’t seem funny anymore. It seems absolutely tragic,” Wolff says.

And when Wolff heard the sounds in the web site, he was instantly drawn to it.

“There’s no other time where you’d interact with those same people that you do in a pub. You get such a cross-section of society. And that’s the fun and exciting bit,” says Wolff. “There’s no Zoom call that can replace that.”

He shared the site with his customers. London is still in total lockdown, and bars like Swift are completely empty. Wolff says the city has lost part of its spirit — and sharing the sounds created by the Maverick team was about taking some of it back.

“We’ve now spent a year being told we’re not even allowed to breathe the same air of strangers. When bars open again, are we still going to be programmed to think, ‘Oh, no, I don’t want to share this table, I don’t want to share this dance floor?’,” Wolff wonders.

It isn’t just those chaotic and surprising interactions that are missing. Bars all over the world are in danger of disappearing. Just in the United States, an estimated 100,000 bars and restaurants have closed during the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Marcio Duarte is one of those struggling bar owners around the world. He runs a small bar named Machimbombo in Lisbon, Portugal. 

“Business here is gone, like anywhere else right?” says Duarte. “Ninety percent of the bars here that were struggling, they will not exist after the pandemic.”

Marcio Duarte, owner of Machimbombo, a small cocktail bar in Lisbon, Portugal, stands outside his establishment. Business has been tough amidst nightlife restrictions during the pandemic.
Courtesy of Marcio Duarte

Like in many cities around the world, nightlife has been largely banned in Lisbon, though the restrictions are finally starting to lift.

Duarte’s bar has been hanging on by pivoting to selling food during the day, but it’s been tough.

So when he came across IMissMyBar.com, he put it on surround sound speakers. It gave him hope.

“It encouraged me! It’s a beautiful thing — it’s living, it’s alive that experience, and we will chase that again,” Duarte says with a smile. “I know for God’s sake, the day we open the bar the happiest person there will be me, equally with everyone.”

Oscar Romo, at Maverick in Mexico, says he’s been surprised at how the website he helped create has taken off around the world.

To him, it speaks to the importance of bars like his in the social fabric – and how IMissMyBar.com helped bring that reality home. 

“What we want also is for people to realize how important are bars in our lives, really, not just from the drinking perspective, but from the social life,” Romo says. “It’s like please — don’t forget about us. Don’t forget about how a bar improves life in society.”

For Actor-Activist Sacha Baron Cohen, Being Called A ‘Bouffon’ Is A Good Thing

Film,

by Elizabeth Blair

British actor and satirist Sacha Baron Cohen is having a very nice year, as his fictional character Borat might put it.

He recently took home the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy and he’s nominated for two Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay for Borat Subsequent Movie Filmand Best Supporting Actor for The Trial of the Chicago 7 . While these two movies might not seem to have anything in common, Cohen’s over-the-top characters and outrageous pranks are intended to challenge people’s beliefs and take on the powerful, not unlike Abbie Hoffman, the counterculture revolutionary he portrays in The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Like him or not, Sacha Baron Cohen is both a sophisticated clown and social activist. The clown part started early watching legendary British satirists Peter Sellers and Monty Python. “The reason I became a comedian was really from seeing Life of Brianwhen I was about 8 years old,” says Cohen of the Monty Python movie.

Cohen’s social activism was ignited when he studied the American Civil Rights movement at Cambridge University. His dissertation was called ‘The Black-Jewish Alliance: The Case of Mistaking Identities.’ That’s when Abbie Hoffman became one of Cohen’s heroes.

“I was just really in awe of Abbie,” he says, “somebody who was really an authentic protester who was ready to die to fight against injustice.”

Hoffman also knew how to entertain. In 1968 he was one of the men accused of conspiring to incite the riots that broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Hoffman’s courtroom antics were legendary: He did a headstand on the defense table and, along with his friend and fellow defendant Jerry Rubin, showed up dressed in judicial robes. He was both charming and outspoken in press conferences.

“He really understood the power of humor and wit and comedy to reveal the ills of society,” Cohen says.

To prepare for the part of Abbie Hoffman, Cohen listened to Hoffman’s speeches and press conferences and read transcripts of the trial. As a writer himself, Cohen was in awe. He even suggested lines to Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed The Trial of the Chicago 7. “And Aaron very kindly would say, ‘Thank you very much, but we’re going to stick with the script,'” Cohen jokes.

There was no possibility of sticking with the script when Sacha Baron Cohen was making his other Oscar nominated movie, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. A cross between the satirical correspondents on The Daily Show and the slapstick of The Three Stooges, Cohen impersonates a naive, backward journalist from a mythical version of Kazakhstan. Cohen describes Borat as a “racist,” “misogynist,” “anti-Semite.” When real people spend time with him, thinking they’re being interviewed for a foreign documentary or some other pretext, their true beliefs often emerge. “They have a camera in front of them and they can reveal themselves to either be horrific or good or a mixture,” Cohen says.

“Hillary Clinton drink the blood of children?” Borat asks QAnon followers Jerry Holleman and Jim Russell. “That’s what we’ve heard” and, “it’s been said,” they respond.

Without ever breaking character, Cohen spent almost a full week living with Holleman and Russell and, he says, grew fond of them.

“Sure, they’re conspiracy theorists and many liberals see them as the enemy, but I liked them,” he says. “A lot of people who’ve seen the movie really liked them, too. And what you realize is that these are good, ordinary people who’ve been fed a diet of lies and conspiracies by politicians and social media.”

For Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Sacha Baron Cohen is a “voraciously curious” satirist “who uses his art to expose the hypocrisy of people in positions of authority, of popular culture… and he really forces you to confront your own prejudices.”

In 2019, the ADL gave Cohen its International Leadership Award. In a speech that now has more than 2 million views, Cohen berated the tech giants that control social media calling them, “the greatest propaganda machine in history.”

“Sacha Baron Cohen is also an activist who is willing to put himself out there and to use his craft to drive a conversation and to generate change,” Greenblatt says.

Cohen and a small team of writers are nominated for the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Even though the movie demands constant improvising, Cohen says they wrote a 90-page script before they started shooting. In addition to writing lines for both Borat and Borat’s daughter Tutar, he says, “we wrote the lines that we hoped the real people would say and we had a read-through.”

They brought in major Hollywood screenwriters who Cohen says thought the script was “great.” Then they asked him, “‘Who are you going to get to play Mike Pence or Rudy Giuliani?'” When Cohen explained they would be playing themselves, “people just said, ‘Alright, you’re completely mad and you’ve wasted the last two hours of our life. Thank you very much,'” he says.

In a scene from the movie that made headlines, Borat’s daughter Tutar, played by Maria Bakalova, poses as an interviewer questioning Giuliani in a hotel.

“For sure I was freaking out before that famous scene in the hotel in New York with Rudy Giuliani,” remembers Bakalova, who is nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. “Because he is an established enough public figure and he is a politician and I’m not even American.”

Bakalova says that throughout the filming, Sacha Baron Cohen was constantly making changes: “There was a script that was ever-evolving every single day. They were writing new scenes and new jokes because Sasha is also a perfectionist so… there is always going to be probably a better joke.”

Cohen is serious about the craft and power of comedy, holding fast to something he learned in his early 20s. “I learned under this legendary clown teacher, which sounds like a joke in itself, but there is a legendary clown teacher, Philippe Gaulier, and he taught this really obscure form of satire called bouffon,” Cohen says. “Bouffons were kind of the dispossessed in society in the medieval ages. They’d live outside of the towns and then, once a year, they were allowed in the villages, in the towns, and they would put on these bouffon plays and the idea was to undermine the establishment.”

Cohen says Gaulier once told him, “You are a bouffon.”

“I was quite shocked,” says Cohen, “But I suppose, yes, I never sought the approval of people I don’t respect.”

How else could Sacha Baron Cohen spend years pulling off wildly ambitious pranks that raise awareness, sometimes get him sued, and win him Oscar nominations?

Nina Gregory edited and Kelli Wessinger produced this story for radio.

‘Calls’ Is A Suspenseful Audio Drama With An Effective Visual Boost

Arts, ,

by Linda Holmes

One way to think about the new Apple TV+ drama series Calls is as a podcast. Specifically, a podcast that’s a descendant of the suspenseful radio drama, only it’s played through your TV. A mix of science fiction, thriller and mystery, Calls is made up of a series of phone calls you listen to, accompanied by minimal graphics on screen: dots and names to represent people, sound waveforms to represent their voices, running captions of everything they say. The general visual feel will be familiar to anyone who watched swirling, bending curves in bright colors dance and bounce on a dark background in the age of the screensaver. There’s not a lot to it. 

The mystery begins at the end — a common tactic — with a baffling and frightening occurrence, and then it doubles back to explore what exactly has happened to get us there. There are nine episodes total, each in the 15-20 minute range, and the cast is big and impressive: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Rosario Dawson, Mark Duplass, Aubrey Plaza, Nick Jonas, and Pedro Pascal are just a few of the folks who show up. The episodes are standalone short stories that gradually reveal a larger tale. A guy on the phone with his girlfriend, a doctor on the phone with her sister, a man on the phone with a neighbor — all experiencing a baffling anomaly that disrupts their lives in different ways.

Calls comes by its unconventional format honestly — this was always an audio project. It began with a ten-minute short film with the barest visuals by writer and director Timothée Hochet, who posted it to YouTube and then wrote and directed a French television series based on it. This version is, in turn, based on the French show, and was written and directed by Fede Álvarez, who made Don’t Breathe as well and The Girl In The Spider’s Web. 

What makes this an interesting effort arises out of the fact that it’s very different to write for audio drama than for television or film. There are a bunch of reasons that’s true, but one is that audiences need more and different signposting — voices that are different enough, characters calling each other by name, other cues that audio writers develop the ability to add seamlessly — to keep track of what’s going on. If you’ve ever listened to just the sound of a scene from a show or a film you’re not familiar with, you’ve probably noticed that you can lose your way very quickly, and if people are talking over each other or raising or lowering their voices, the complications can increase. (This is also why, for instance, if a news report on television plays the audio of a taped phone call, they’ll caption and label who’s talking and what they’re saying.) Audio writing is not just TV writing without the screen, and it requires tackling a different set of challenges. 

This represents one way to approach some of those challenges. Even though the visuals in Calls are minimal, they’re meaningful and thoughtfully chosen. They help orient the listener so that one voice can drop in and another can drop out with a different kind of fluidity. When a person is represented by a name and a dot, connected to another name and another dot by a waveform, sometimes they’ll both stay in place on the screen. But sometimes they move, gliding closer to each other, sliding farther apart, or being joined by someone who can barely be heard in the background, whose name and dot may be fuzzy or distorted. A name might appear next to a dot only once the person on the other end of the call learns who they’re talking to. 

It helps — it helps give information, certainly, but it also gives a fullness to the show that this audio alone wouldn’t quite carry. In the same way music enriches a scene on film, these visuals enrich a scene done with audio. You certainly don’t always need them to follow the action, but they complement the storytelling quite well, and they may be a helpful assist for people who don’t have a lot of practice listening to audio drama and would prefer to try it with training wheels. 

Apple itself seems to be treating this as if it were a podcast — they didn’t offer any photos as part of their press materials, as they normally would with a TV show. That’s a shame, because while the audio is the focus of the production, what’s intriguing about this otherwise good-but-not-great story is that it has some of the charm and simplicity of audio-only storytelling, with some of the advantages of visual cues. There’s nothing new under the sun, and certainly some podcast dramas continue to wrestle with things radio dramas have been playing with for decades. But where there’s a proliferation of TV projects that look increasingly similar to each other sprawled across streaming services of which you could say the same, it’s appealing to see anything that’s different. And in different ways, Calls is the most familiar, and the most unusual, piece of TV I’ve seen in a while.

In ‘Night Rooms,’ A Life Is Reviewed Through Memories And Movies

Arts, , ,

by Gabino Iglesias

Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms is a collection of biographical essays in which memories and movies — mostly horror ones — merge to create a narrative that explores identity, body image, fear, revenge, and angst.

Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film.

The essays in Night Rooms are numbered instead of titled. With films and the past as cohesive elements, the numbered essays add up to a somewhat fragmented biography that dances between Nutt’s childhood, full of a ballet and beauty pageants; her school years and into college, when loneliness became as much of a problem as other people; and into adulthood and marriage, at one point jumping from the first anniversary of her marriage to the fourth one in a single paragraph. Because she goes back and forth in time, the collection feels simultaneously split and cohesive, and we get to see how sometimes her past — her trauma, the movies she watched, and the things she experience — echo in her life years after.

Nutt’s style is slightly jarring, but it soon becomes familiar. Her short paragraphs tend to jump between subjects and times. However, like a great jazz musician, she always keeps the themes at the core in mind and, after what feels like literary improvisations and melodic deviations, she always returns to the central topic. For example, movies tend to live at the heart of the essays, and Nutt talks about the memory of watching those movies, quotes them, and often describes them without mentioning actors, titles, directors, or years — but does so in ways that they are immediately recognizable. They are used to give shape and hold up other things, and much bigger themes. Passages about the films are often breaks in the large narratives about herself, but the economy of language with which she creates those breaks adds a special touch to the book that makes it feel unified in its fragmentation and reminds readers of how movie scenes can be interrupted by at a specific moment to create tension.

The writing in Night Rooms is intimate and Nutt doesn’t shy away from any topic. Relationships, drinking, depression, awkward moments from her childhood, and the idea that we can bring people back from the dead are all tackled with the same earnestness. Also, Nutt’s love for poetry, myths, and folktales bleeds into some of the book’s most honest moments:

Scream, Jaws, House of Wax, Beetlejuice, Poltergeist, It Follows, Rosemary’s Baby, and two Stephen King classics, Carrie and Pet Sematary, are just some of the movies that appear in Night Rooms. They show up as integral parts of certain memories or as narratives that frame an idea or a memory. Nutt remembers some of these movies “by their covers, a flicker of recognition, followed by blankness” while for others she can “recall entire scenes” even years after having seen them. They are mirrors Nutt holds up to real horrors, narrative devices that hint at the ineffable, and bits of darkness that somehow became part of similarly strange, or anxiety-inducing experiences.

While films in general dominate this collection, there are also things like TV shows, other essays, ballets, and poetry that enrich Nutt’s writing and serve as connective tissue or a scaffold for a lot of the ideas discussed. Poetry occupies important spaces and often gives Nutt the words she needs to get a point across. That said, the author’s own writing is full of a rhythm and musicality that often leads to poetic phrases:

The same style that will strike some readers as jarring at the start eventually morphs into a unique approach to the delivery of thoughts, memories, and ideas that will stick with them for a long time after reading Night Rooms. Nutt has a knack for short, sharp lines that skip the brain and go straight to the heart: “My heartbeat can be the most horrifying sound in a room if I can’t slow the organ’s rhythm.” Those make this collection a spectacle of different lights that shine through a fractured lens.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

With ‘Fierce Poise,’ Helen Frankenthaler Poured Beauty Onto Canvas

Arts, ,

by Susan Stamberg

Powerful, no? And gorgeous. Helen Frankenthaler did it in 1973 — 20 years after making a painting that took Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism a step further. In 1950 she was wowed by the ropes and squiggles of paint Pollock was wrestling onto unstretched canvas on the floor of his barn.

“She realized what was possible,” says Alexander Nemerov, author of the new biography, Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York. “She’d never seen that degree of freedom.” She quit doing careful faux Picassos, and, Nemerov says, “she made a kind of art that hadn’t been done before.”

Instead of roping and lassoing and dribbling paint a la Pollock, Frankenthaler poured pools of highly diluted pigments onto her raw canvases. The thinned-out acrylics soaked into the fabric — stained it in veils of color. In 1952, with Mountains and Sea, she had her breakthrough. The picture had a “brazen yet gentle freedom … ” Nemerov writes, “this sense of art spilling out.”

I love origin stories, and art historian Nemerov tells two good ones. Little Helen and her nanny went to a small park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art fairly often. When it was time to leave, Helen insisted on drawing a chalk line — “uninterrupted, unbroken” says the author — from the museum on 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue to her family’s apartment on East 74th Street and Park Avenue. That’s a long walk for a little girl. Especially bent over, and up and down curbs. But she was determined. Tells you a lot, doesn’t it? That she was strong-minded. And her family was rich — her father was a New York State Supreme Court justice.

(Her adult voice reminded me of East Side minked women I’d grown up overhearing on crosstown buses in the days when wealthy Manhattanites used public transportation. You can hear it yourself in my 1988 NPR interview of her. Rare. She didn’t give many.)

Archive: Hear The 1988 Interview

Helen Frankenthaler

You can see her colors getting stronger as the 1950s went on. But still they spill out so lightly and freely. “In a state of becoming” Nemerov says. So they look unfinished … incomplete … like notes for a painting. And beautiful. She was criticized for that. Larry Rivers, another big artist of the day, told her she wasn’t struggling enough, that life and art are connected to struggle. And meanly, Grace Hartigan, another of the ’50s artists trying to make their mark in that macho art world (Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Elaine de Kooning were others) once said her pal Frankenthaler’s art “looks like it was painted between cocktails and dinner.” Mean. She apologized years later.

Alexander Nemerov has a far more graceful way to describe the light and life in Frankenthaler’s paintings: “She was blessed with the power to portray that moment where a painting has just become a painting, but not so much that it turns into an atrophied fossilized rendition of life.”

I promised you two origin stories. The second feels very much like foreshadowing. Little Helen again — in the expensive Park Avenue apartment — had her own bathroom. She loved sprinkling her mother’s blood-red nail polish into some water in the sink to watch the patterns it made. Scolded? Punished? Doubtful.

She was an adored child, told over and over again that she was special. Private schools. Bennington College. Beautiful (immense dark eyes, dark hair). Great confidence. No self-doubt, even about her art. Also depressive, Nemerov reports. Her beloved father died when she was 11; her mother took her own life when Helen was 25. “Art saved Helen,” Nemerov thinks.

Asked what the paintings are “about,” the biographer says, “that lyrical moment of possibility in life, which is not unmixed with sadness and even grief. It’s about feeling the world.”

ARTIST: Frankenthaler, Helen NATIONALITY: United States DATE_OF_WORK: 1958 MATERIALS: oil on canvas DIMENSIONS: 102 -3/8 x 104 -3/8 CREDIT_LINE: Anonymous gift

But the riot of colors in this picture from 1958 looks to me like an explosion of happiness. The painting bursts with it. Scroll back to the last work, Eden. Those numbers — 100s. No theories about them. But the red numbers in Before the Caves — 173 — are a love story. She’d recently married Robert Motherwell, a famous first generation abstract expressionist like Pollock, and they’d moved to a townhouse at 173 East 94th Street.

Alexander Nemerov’s book Fierce Poise describes that relationship, and an earlier one with Clement Greenberg — the leading art critic of the ’50s, who encouraged and helped her career. Plus the book has lyrical, powerful descriptions of paintings she was making. It ends with Frankenthaler on the brim of the great success and recognition she’d always craved and expected. A major retrospective at a major museum — The Whitney. Two months before the opening, at her 40th birthday party, a friend said Helen’s eyes were “sparkling with sheer excitement.” While the biography ends there, Helen Frankenthaler went on making art for the rest of her life. When she died in 2011 at the age of 83, she had become part of the pantheon of major 20th century artists.

Abstract expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler at work in her studio, 1969. She is the inventor of a technique whereby unprimed and absorbent canvas is soaked with paint giving a translucent effect. (Photo by Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Art Where You’re At is an informal series, usually showcasing offerings at museums closed due to COVID-19, or at museums you may not be able to visit. This essay on a new book is an exception, because (full disclosure) Helen Frankenthaler is one of the essayist’s favorite artists.

‘Soul’ Creators On Passion, Purpose And Realizing You’re ‘Enough’

Film, , ,

by Terry Gross

The Oscar-nominated movie Soul tackles passion, purpose and the meaning of life — topics that aren’t usually addressed in animated films. 

The movie centers on Joe, a middle school band teacher who feels unfulfilled because his ambition is to be a full-time jazz musician. On the day he lands the biggest gig of his career, Joe nearly dies — but then gets the chance to return to his body if he can figure out the purpose of his life. 

Pete Docter, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Kemp Powers, says the film was inspired by the emotional turbulence he experienced after writing and directing Inside Out.

“Having … so much success in [that] film, I found myself wondering: Why don’t I feel like my life is all wrapped up and solved in a nice bow? Why didn’t it fix everything?” Docter says.

Soul has generated success of its own. The film won the Golden Globe award for best animated picture, and is nominated for three Academy Awards. But Powers, who’s also up for an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for One Night in Miami, says Soul is actually meant to challenge conventional notions of success and failure. 

“We were trying to help not just Joe, but the entire audience, understand that it’s not about winners or losers and that everyone’s life has value,” Powers says. “That was really a powerful driving force from the very beginning.”

Docter says the film’s message is that life has meaning that goes beyond personal ambition. 

“The movie’s aim is really to say that we’re already enough,” he says. “We all can walk out of the door and enjoy life without needing to accomplish or prove anything. And that’s really freeing.” 

Interview highlights 

On Pixar approaching Powers to work on the film

Powers: It is pretty funny, because obviously when I got the call from my agent that Pixar was interested, they were looking for a writer to help them with a project … the first thing my brain said was, “Hmm, I’m guessing the story must have Black people in it.” I know that that can sound cynical, but look, that’s just the reality of this business, this industry. … It wasn’t very long ago — and when I say not very long ago, I’m talking just, like, three or four years ago — where it was very possible, if you happened to be white, to create and tell a story about anything you wanted to. And no one would so much as push you to even consult with people from that community, let alone invite them in and be partners.

So while it’s easy to kind of take the cynical road, I saw it more as a really interesting opportunity, because when I flew up to Pixar and I sat down and I saw the nuggets of what would become Soul, I really fell in love with the story that Pete was trying to tell. And it was a story that felt like it was about me, and it was a story that really wasn’t about race. That was one of the things that really, really excited me about this. … I tell people, yes, Soul is a film [where] the majority of the characters are Black, but it’s not a “Black” film. We’re trying to tell this universal story through the specific prism of a Black man. And I think that was a really bold choice that I was relishing an opportunity to try to execute.

On Powers’ feedback to an early reel of Soul

Powers: In the early reels, [Joe] seemed like the least interesting person in the film. … Part of it was, I think, because there had been such extreme caution and such a fear of doing things that might offend someone or upset someone, that instead there really hadn’t been much done [on the character]. I didn’t know anything about the guy. I didn’t really know anything about his family. It seemed like Joe was just a very, very lonely man who didn’t know anyone and had no friends. And so that just meant that his life had to be filled in. And, of course, it’s just the nature of being at Pixar, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a director or a designer or an artist, you use your life as fuel. So it was very easy for me [to] say, “Oh, he’s supposed to be a 45-year-old Black man from New York. What a coincidence! That’s what I am!” [And then] to start filling in a lot of those gaps with my own personal experiences.

At different points in our lives and careers, we’ve all been … ‘lost souls,’ based on our definition of it. Because when you find something you enjoy and you’re passionate about and you actually are pretty good at it, it is so easy to take the extra step of hiding behind that thing and using it to not deal with so many other elements of life.

Kemp Powers

On researching depictions and beliefs about the soul for the film 

Docter: I talked to priests and rabbis and experts in Islam, Hinduism, as many of the main religions as we could find, to just see how these different traditions look at the soul and the afterlife and the world beyond our bodily forms. What we found was that most of them have a lot to say about what happens after we die — but very few talk about what happened before. So that meant we were kind of free to make stuff up, which is my favorite place to be. …

If you ask, “What is the soul?” most of them talk about the soul being ethereal, vaporous, non-physical, invisible. We wanted to hint at all that in our design — not only of the souls themselves, but the world they inhabit. And actually, interestingly, the first draft of the film … was a version entirely set in the “Great Before” [a fantastical place where new souls exist before they go to Earth]. There is no Earth-based stuff. It was all about observing life just through these memories and these visualizations of the world, trying to talk this other soul into going [to Earth]. But the more we developed it, the more we realized, if we’re going to talk about what makes life worth living, we’ve got to go interact with it. We got to get our hands dirty — smell, taste, touch, all those things that a soul can’t do.

On depicting “lost souls” in the film

Powers: Something that we discussed when making this film was that at different points in our lives and careers, we’ve all been … “lost souls,” based on our definition of it. Because when you find something you enjoy and you’re passionate about and you actually are pretty good at it, it is so easy to take the extra step of hiding behind that thing and using it to not deal with so many other elements of life. That’s why it was so important that when we introduced the idea of the lost soul — that someone could be lost — but then they could be found. … I’ve definitely found myself, based on our own definition of it, [as] a bit of a lost soul, someone who — to avoid facing all different elements of life — just [loses] myself in my work. 

On screening Soul for kids

Docter: On Soul, we got started to get worried, like, is this too much? Are kids going to be able to track this? So we brought in an audience full of kids. It was probably the second scariest screening, because they’re quiet. Kids are quiet. They don’t laugh a lot. So you’re like, “Oh, we’re dying! We’re dying!” But we found over the years, like especially the first time they watch something, they’re typically just sucking it all up and taking it in. … But afterwards we ask them questions like, “Did you understand this?” And what seems to happen again [and] again is the parents will say, “This film was too complicated for kids. This is not appropriate for kids.” And then the kid sitting right next to them will sit and explain the entire movie better than I could. They get everything. They’re very smart. 

Heidi Saman and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.

Lara Jean Says Goodbye In ‘To All The Boys: Always And Forever’

Film, ,

by Linda Holmes, Kiana Fitzgerald, and E. Alex Jung

TO ALL THE BOYS: ALWAYS AND FOREVER (L-R): LANA CONDOR as LARA JEAN, NOAH CENTINEO as PETER. KATIE YU/NETFLIX © 2021

In 2018, To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before was a breakout hit for Netflix. Based on Jenny Han’s novel, it followed Lara Jean Covey through the adventure of falling in love with one Peter Kavinsky. A sequel followed in 2020 and now, it’s time for the finale, which finds Lara Jean and Peter dealing with the complication of graduating and heading off to college.

The audio was produced by Candice Lim and edited by Jessica Reedy.

You Actually Will Be Talking About ‘No One Is Talking About This’

Arts, ,

by Heller McAlpin

Writing is a calling for Patricia Lockwood, as she made clear in her sacred and profane, lyrical and bawdy 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy. While still in her teens, she took the vows of literature and became “a person who almost never left the house.” Art became her emissary. She confessed: “This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength.”

Now Lockwood has put that strength into her first novel, No One is Talking About This, which leaves no doubt that she still takes her literary vocation seriously. It’s another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight.

Her unnamed narrator is a social media star who achieved prominence when her post, “Can a dog be twins?” went viral. This led to speaking engagements around the world, at one of which a man asks, “This is your contribution to society?”

Even as Lockwood’s narrator acknowledges the difficulty of writing about what she calls “the portal” — especially without “a strong whiff of old white individuals being weird about the blues” — she attempts just that in the first half of this novel. In the second half, the portal’s hold on her vaporizes when real life intrudes urgently, in terrible and but also surprisingly beautiful ways. Important lessons ensue.

It’s another attention-grabbing mind-blower which toggles between irony and sincerity, sweetness and blight.

Lockwood deftly captures a life lived predominantly online in the “blizzard of everything,” this “place of the great melting,” with its vapid, mind-numbing, addictive culture. Her insider tour carefully showcases the “new shared sense of humor” and “elastic and snappable verbal play” that so insidiously morphs into jargon, dogma, and doctrine. This portrait of a disturbing world where the center will not hold is a tour de force that recalls Joan Didion’s portrait of the dissolute 1960s drug culture of Haight-Ashbury in her seminal essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

Like Didion — and Nora Ephron – Lockwood is a master of sweeping, eminently quotable proclamations that fearlessly aim to encapsulate whole movements and eras: “White people, who had the political educations of potatoes – lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish – were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every 40 years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again,” she writes. Unfortunately, much of her humor is too raunchy to be quoted here.

Although written before the January 6th attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, there’s an eerie timeliness to Lockwood’s observations about the dark side of social media. She addresses many of the issues raised by New York Times media columnist and former BuzzFeededitor-in-chief Ben Smith in a piece written after the siege, in which he reminds us that “evil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms” and the “almost irresistible gravitational pull” of “getting more attention from more people than you ever have.”

Lockwood’s media maven laments how a shared sense of irony and mockery turned on itself, and what was meant to be a source of connection and individuality became instead a disturbing source of disconnection, derision, and worse. She writes of a generation that “had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.”

Readers may well wonder where Lockwood is going with this. Some will be less charmed by the subversive humor than others. But hang in there. The novel shifts into another realm after the narrator receives a text from her mother about dire problems with her younger sister’s pregnancy.

In response to this wakeup call, Lockwood’s narrator becomes “a citizen of necessity.” She moves into the world of NICUs, a place where urgency is real, and wonders, “Why had she entered the portal in the first place? Because she wanted to be a creature of pure call and response: she wanted to delight and to be delighted.”

Instead, she finds something far more affecting, and what results is a sort of conversion story in which sincerity supersedes irony. “It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life,” Lockwood writes. “She wanted to stop people on the street and say, ‘Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!'”

It’s a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character’s emotional epiphany but are moved by it.

Lockwood acknowledges that her novel is based on her niece’s heartbreaking case — the first person ever to be diagnosed in utero with Proteus Syndrome, a one-in-a-billion disorder whose most famous sufferer was the Elephant Man. It’s a testament to her skills as a rare writer who can navigate both sleaze and cheese, jokey tweets and surprising earnestness, that we not only buy her character’s emotional epiphany but are moved by it.

Of course, people will be talking about this meaty book, and about the questions Lockwood raises about what a human being is, what a brain is, and most important, what really matters. “What did we have the right to expect from this life?” her narrator asks. “What were the terms of the contract? … Could we … could we post about it?”