WION caught up with actor Adil Hussain about his new film 'The Illegal' which was in the running in the Best Picture category at the 2021 Oscars before the final nominations were announced.

Adil Hussain on his new film 'The Illegal', Indian films at Oscars and more

Zeytin likes to walk through the streets of Istanbul at night, Nazar easily befriends strangers while Kartal lives a construction site in the bustling Turkish city. The trio are the focus of new documentary "Stray" which depicts daily life in Istanbul through the eyes of three dogs that roam its streets, searching for food, wandering along the Bosphorus and stumbling upon a women's rights march.

Istanbul stray dogs get own starring roles in new film

Disney's "Raya and the Last Dragon" topped the U.S. box office this weekend, earning an estimated $5,150,000 in 2,261 locations.

'Raya and the Last Dragon' leads US box office estimates

Disney+’s “WandaVision” began with a bold, disorienting move, taking viewers and depositing them without explanation into an unsettling bubble of 1950s television.

I am referring, of course, to the show’s practice of releasing new episodes only once every week.

Releasing TV installments on a schedule — “Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel,” as the show’s superhero predecessor “Batman” promised — was standard practice in the days of black-and-white TV, and still is on most traditional networks. But the age of Netflix has led accustomed streaming fans to getting full seasons all at once, and some WandaViewers did not care to wait for what an IndieWire review referred to as “inconvenient weekly installments.”

“WandaVision” is not the first streaming show to face complaints for not feeding its audience on the all-you-can-eat plan. Last year, Eric Kripke, showrunner of Amazon’s dystopian superhero drama “The Boys,” defended the decision to release Season 2’s episodes weekly, against some fans’ objections, “to have time to sort of slow down a little bit and have conversations about everything.” (“The Boys” did release its first three episodes on its premiere date, “WandaVision” its first two; Disney is also following the weekly model with its latest Marvel series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”)

Slow down? We are not much of a slowdown society these days. If people can have something, they increasingly believe they should, in Costco-size portions, to be savored or swallowed anaconda-like as they see fit. Who the hell is anyone else to tell us to chew between bites? We’ll chew when we feel like it!

Fans’ increasing expectation of — and creators’ occasional pushback against — the binge model resonates with other tech-driven arguments over how art should properly be enjoyed. Should the audience or the artist decide how the work is best experienced? Are you violating the artistic intention of an album when you listen to it on shuffle? Are you a cretin for watching a movie on your phone when the director insisted it be viewed on a big screen?

Certainly, advocates of “I want it all, now” can sound entitled, like kids on the Wonka factory tour grousing that the gobstoppers aren’t coming fast enough. But there can also be a kind of high-handedness to the defense of weekly airings, as if the communal watercooler ritual were somehow more authentic, and as if viewers needed to be guided toward the correct choice lest they, like children failing the marshmallow test, make the wrong one.

Maybe a more useful way of looking at the weekly and binge models is that neither is inherently better. Instead, they’re one more set of storytelling tools — like shooting in front of a studio audience, or not — creatively suited to different kinds of stories.

Release schedules, like many aspects of TV, are a case of the creative format following the business model. In the days of rabbit ears TV, you watched a show when it was beamed at you or not at all. Weekly (or daily) schedules built habits and fan bases.

When Netflix entered the original-series business in the early 2010s, it could have followed some form of scheduling. Instead, dropping full seasons at once was a way of branding it as a forward-looking business — this ain’t your grandma’s TV! — and a way to find viewers where broadcast TV wasn’t. (By letting viewers watch at their leisure, Netflix laid claim to the vast stretches, like Fridays and Saturdays, when fans had a lot of time and less marquee scheduled programming.)

For an era — well, a few years — this defined streaming TV. And the different formats led to different creative forms. Traditional TV serials broke stories into structured units with tune-in-next-time endings. Binge series are often looser in episode structure, sometimes to the extent that whole seasons can feel like extended “episodes.” (Or extended movies, such as Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” whose season titles — “Stranger Things 2” and “Stranger Things 3”— recalled the film franchises that inspired the series.)

Eventually some competitors, including Hulu, Apple and Disney, separated themselves from Netflix with old-school weekly schedules, at least for some series. And Disney+, with its first streaming phenomena, showed that the traditional TV schedule works best for shows that play like traditional TV, with tight episode construction and careful maintenance of suspense.

Mystery, in particular, lends itself well to the waiting game. In “WandaVision,” part of the mystery was the show itself: What were these weekly “sitcoms,” really, and who was in charge? The effect wasn’t ruined by bingeing (I recently rewatched it with my wife, who caught up on it over a couple of days), but it really benefited from giving it a long-term lease in your head.

Disney+’s “Star Wars” western, “The Mandalorian,” was a different sort of mystery. Each episode arrived with little information about what it was or where it was going. (The existence of its pint-size breakout star, Grogu, aka Baby Yoda, wasn’t even revealed until the end of the first episode.) Every installment dropped you into a new world, on a new adventure, without warning; it felt like watching a serial short before the main feature at an old-timey movie parlor.

But “mystery” here doesn’t have to mean genre mystery. This was the case with “Mad Men,” whose creator, Matthew Weiner, has said, with justification, that it wouldn’t work if released a full season at a time. Its artfully withholding storytelling and its willingness to drop the viewer in unexplained circumstances made watching feel like allowing yourself to be blindfolded and kidnapped once a week. (Of course, that hasn’t stopped bingers from mainlining it during the pandemic.)

Bingeing, on the other hand, benefits certain kinds of immersive long-form TV that Netflix has gotten adept at: more straightforward miniseries, such as “The Queen’s Gambit,” and the visual equivalent of page-turner novels, such as “Bridgerton.” In some cases, a binge also helps gloss over weaknesses or repetitions that you might linger on with more time to dwell on them. (In general, I’m thinking of serial stories here; sitcoms, anthologies or procedurals with self-contained episodes feel less affected by the choice.)

There are also business dimensions to the debate, particularly the argument that spreading a season over months can allow a show to build word-of-mouth and grow, whereas binge-series just crash and recede, like waves on an endless content ocean. But business and artistic choices are two different things.

HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” for instance, might not have become the same mass phenomenon if it had dropped its seasons Netflix-style. But (unpopular opinion alert!) it plays better as a binge. All those slow-rolling character arcs are clearer, the ending feels better foreshadowed — even Daenerys’ years wandering Essos don’t seem quite so interminable.

NBC’s afterlife comedy “The Good Place,” likewise, always felt to me like a binge show trapped in weekly form, with the end of each episode igniting the storyline of the next, in the chain-smoking fashion of so many Netflix shows.

On the other hand, the first season of Amazon’s corporate mystery “Homecoming” might have built more suspense if it had been doled out over weeks. And on the other hand, Apple TV+’s alternative space-race drama “For All Mankind,” a slow burn of a series whose current season builds to two gripping final episodes, might have been better dropped all at once; I could see it losing viewers on the long, digressive journey before the payoff.

Regardless, it’s good to see streaming platforms experimenting with their schedules; hopefully, they’re starting to see “To binge or not to binge?” as one creative choice among many. It made sense for Netflix to prove that the binge model could work, which unlocked a form of TV storytelling whose rules creators are still figuring out.

But just because you can make TV a certain way now doesn’t mean you always should. Sometimes, good things come from those who make you wait.

Disney+’s “WandaVision” began with a bold, disorienting move, taking viewers and depositing them without explanation into an unsettling bubble of 1950s television.

Disney+’s “WandaVision” began with a bold, disorienting move, taking viewers and depositing them without explanation into an unsettling bubble of 1950s television. I am referring, of course, to the show’s practice of releasing new episodes only once every week. Releasing TV installments on a schedule — “Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel,” as the show’s superhero predecessor “Batman” promised — was standard practice in the days of black-and-white TV, and still is on most traditional networks. But the age of Netflix has led accustomed streaming fans to getting full seasons all at once, and some WandaViewers did not care to wait for what an IndieWire review referred to as “inconvenient weekly installments.” “WandaVision” is not the first streaming show to face complaints for not feeding its audience on the all-you-can-eat plan. Last year, Eric Kripke, showrunner of Amazon’s dystopian superhero drama “The Boys,” defended the decision to release Season 2’s episodes weekly, against some fans’ objections, “to have time to sort of slow down a little bit and have conversations about everything.” (“The Boys” did release its first three episodes on its premiere date, “WandaVision” its first two; Disney is also following the weekly model with its latest Marvel series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”) Slow down? We are not much of a slowdown society these days. If people can have something, they increasingly believe they should, in Costco-size portions, to be savored or swallowed anaconda-like as they see fit. Who the hell is anyone else to tell us to chew between bites? We’ll chew when we feel like it! Fans’ increasing expectation of — and creators’ occasional pushback against — the binge model resonates with other tech-driven arguments over how art should properly be enjoyed. Should the audience or the artist decide how the work is best experienced? Are you violating the artistic intention of an album when you listen to it on shuffle? Are you a cretin for watching a movie on your phone when the director insisted it be viewed on a big screen? Certainly, advocates of “I want it all, now” can sound entitled, like kids on the Wonka factory tour grousing that the gobstoppers aren’t coming fast enough. But there can also be a kind of high-handedness to the defense of weekly airings, as if the communal watercooler ritual were somehow more authentic, and as if viewers needed to be guided toward the correct choice lest they, like children failing the marshmallow test, make the wrong one. Maybe a more useful way of looking at the weekly and binge models is that neither is inherently better. Instead, they’re one more set of storytelling tools — like shooting in front of a studio audience, or not — creatively suited to different kinds of stories. Release schedules, like many aspects of TV, are a case of the creative format following the business model. In the days of rabbit ears TV, you watched a show when it was beamed at you or not at all. Weekly (or daily) schedules built habits and fan bases. When Netflix entered the original-series business in the early 2010s, it could have followed some form of scheduling. Instead, dropping full seasons at once was a way of branding it as a forward-looking business — this ain’t your grandma’s TV! — and a way to find viewers where broadcast TV wasn’t. (By letting viewers watch at their leisure, Netflix laid claim to the vast stretches, like Fridays and Saturdays, when fans had a lot of time and less marquee scheduled programming.) For an era — well, a few years — this defined streaming TV. And the different formats led to different creative forms. Traditional TV serials broke stories into structured units with tune-in-next-time endings. Binge series are often looser in episode structure, sometimes to the extent that whole seasons can feel like extended “episodes.” (Or extended movies, such as Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” whose season titles — “Stranger Things 2” and “Stranger Things 3”— recalled the film franchises that inspired the series.) Eventually some competitors, including Hulu, Apple and Disney, separated themselves from Netflix with old-school weekly schedules, at least for some series. And Disney+, with its first streaming phenomena, showed that the traditional TV schedule works best for shows that play like traditional TV, with tight episode construction and careful maintenance of suspense. Mystery, in particular, lends itself well to the waiting game. In “WandaVision,” part of the mystery was the show itself: What were these weekly “sitcoms,” really, and who was in charge? The effect wasn’t ruined by bingeing (I recently rewatched it with my wife, who caught up on it over a couple of days), but it really benefited from giving it a long-term lease in your head. Disney+’s “Star Wars” western, “The Mandalorian,” was a different sort of mystery. Each episode arrived with little information about what it was or where it was going. (The existence of its pint-size breakout star, Grogu, aka Baby Yoda, wasn’t even revealed until the end of the first episode.) Every installment dropped you into a new world, on a new adventure, without warning; it felt like watching a serial short before the main feature at an old-timey movie parlor. But “mystery” here doesn’t have to mean genre mystery. This was the case with “Mad Men,” whose creator, Matthew Weiner, has said, with justification, that it wouldn’t work if released a full season at a time. Its artfully withholding storytelling and its willingness to drop the viewer in unexplained circumstances made watching feel like allowing yourself to be blindfolded and kidnapped once a week. (Of course, that hasn’t stopped bingers from mainlining it during the pandemic.) Bingeing, on the other hand, benefits certain kinds of immersive long-form TV that Netflix has gotten adept at: more straightforward miniseries, such as “The Queen’s Gambit,” and the visual equivalent of page-turner novels, such as “Bridgerton.” In some cases, a binge also helps gloss over weaknesses or repetitions that you might linger on with more time to dwell on them. (In general, I’m thinking of serial stories here; sitcoms, anthologies or procedurals with self-contained episodes feel less affected by the choice.) There are also business dimensions to the debate, particularly the argument that spreading a season over months can allow a show to build word-of-mouth and grow, whereas binge-series just crash and recede, like waves on an endless content ocean. But business and artistic choices are two different things. HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” for instance, might not have become the same mass phenomenon if it had dropped its seasons Netflix-style. But (unpopular opinion alert!) it plays better as a binge. All those slow-rolling character arcs are clearer, the ending feels better foreshadowed — even Daenerys’ years wandering Essos don’t seem quite so interminable. NBC’s afterlife comedy “The Good Place,” likewise, always felt to me like a binge show trapped in weekly form, with the end of each episode igniting the storyline of the next, in the chain-smoking fashion of so many Netflix shows. On the other hand, the first season of Amazon’s corporate mystery “Homecoming” might have built more suspense if it had been doled out over weeks. And on the other hand, Apple TV+’s alternative space-race drama “For All Mankind,” a slow burn of a series whose current season builds to two gripping final episodes, might have been better dropped all at once; I could see it losing viewers on the long, digressive journey before the payoff. Regardless, it’s good to see streaming platforms experimenting with their schedules; hopefully, they’re starting to see “To binge or not to binge?” as one creative choice among many. It made sense for Netflix to prove that the binge model could work, which unlocked a form of TV storytelling whose rules creators are still figuring out. But just because you can make TV a certain way now doesn’t mean you always should. Sometimes, good things come from those who make you wait.

TV's battle of the binge: Why the wait can be worth it

Kate Walsh says her latest movie, "Sometime Other than Now," is a mature love story.

Kate Walsh's latest movie is a mature love story

The white Alba truffle is one of the most coveted and expensive ingredients in the world. The fungus grows only on the roots of tall oak trees in the forests of Piedmont, Italy. There's been no scientific method found to cultivate the truffle and the secret to their discovery lies solely with the locals, who are the subject of new documentary "The Truffle Hunters".

New documentary sniffs out dying Italian art of finding truffles

At a recent [unlock celebration?] party comprising close friends, my old and ever-opinionated buddy, renowned for calling out Bollywood’s antics, spotted &amp; buttonholed me &amp; took off. &nbsp;

“Boss, what is this fashionable crap – jhadoed from the West, no doubt – of putting the term Actress to sleep and replacing it with Actor? For Chrissake, can you imagine calling screen legends and dream girls like Garbo, Harlow, Taylor, Monroe &amp; Hepburn or even our very own Madhubala, Nutan, Suchitra Sen, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rehman ... Actors?! &nbsp;Why this sudden anxiety and insecurity to emphasise &amp; insist on individual identity? Yahan bhi activitism ghus gaya? Their talent and beauty have always been recognised, acknowledged, applauded &amp; rewarded, so what’s the problem, yaar?”&nbsp;

Other supporting voices soon joined in and the general drift was that men &amp; women are not the same &amp; an actor in a female role sounded both weird and sexless! Why this 'dramabaazi' and self-conscious attempt to flag-wave female entity? Even the revered Oscars have a Best Actress award, so why this pagalpan to re-write the rules of the game that was never leaning towards anything remotely sexist or degrading.&nbsp;

Daughter of the legendary beauty Suchitra Sen, Moon Moon Sen joins the party&nbsp;

"Why are we constantly posturing and aping the West to appear with it, cool &amp; liberated? What is this great image-makeover or perception change that one hopes to achieve? What value-addition and in what way does the term actress – after all these years of total acceptance – suddenly appear to rankle, de-value, demean the dignity, prestige, aura &amp; stature and bring new power by replacing it with the term actor? &nbsp;Pray, do tell!”

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/opinion-why-film-critics-are-breath-of-life-but-a-kiss-of-death-for-the-masses-364981">Opinion: Why film critics are breath of life but a kiss of death for the masses</a>

34-year-old Bangalore-based housewife Ila Iyer takes it forward.&nbsp;

“For simple, middle-class Bollywood fans like us, we just don’t understand why this cardiac arrest over&nbsp;non-existent gender issues! Man-woman, hero-heroine, actor-actress - where does protest and woman-empowerment come into this or solid assertion of identity to celebrate the individual? Why and how does Best Actress become a Kalank to the female Performer &amp; Best Actor something liberating to be hymned &amp; celebrated since it appears to be in the same page? &nbsp;Why is everything so politicised, aggressive and hell-bent towards scoring brownie points? When beautiful, graceful and gifted Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor, Meena Kumari or Rakhee received a Best Actress award, remember there is appreciation &amp; applause not paralysis through analysis!”&nbsp;

Respected veteran film critic Saibal Chatterjee rounds off this train of thought, part-bewildered, part-amused.&nbsp;

“To me, it’s nothing more than a war-cry of APNA TIME AAGAYA! A superficial celebration of aligning with the new-age woman-empowerment thrust blitzing certain sections of society. While I am all for anything that goes towards upliftment of women’s dignity, this Actress-Actor insistence foxes me. How can an alphabetic change suddenly bring more value, clout, prestige and status to gifted actresses already saluted? It will be interesting to check it out with some thinking &amp; articulate actresses, who have opinions and don’t get influenced by the forces that are desperate to look and appear politically correct. I would imagine, great scripts with solid roles and super directors would be their primary concern – not Actors instead of Actresses!”

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/opinion-ok-you-watch-arthouse-films-but-does-it-make-you-superior-361949">Opinion: Ok you watch arthouse films, but does it make you superior?</a>

Not all rock with these takes of the no-big-deal guys, who believe this issue is a waste-of-time which should be channelised to more important matters, like making better films with solid content and gifted actors.&nbsp;

Kolkata-based Indrani Sen however doesn’t agree and lauds Shabana Azmi who is said to have brought this [actor not actress] subject up.&nbsp;

“Shabana-ji, brilliant actor and dedicated activist, is spot-on. &nbsp;It is a timely and symbolic gesture towards perpetuating female-empowerment &amp; self-assertion which is the flavour of the day. The term actress has outlived its simplistic utility and today suggests a bimbette, a glam dumb doll, sexy eye-candy for the hunk hero. An actor does not suffer this image perception at all. Since both are performers, why not go gender-neutral?”&nbsp;

Mumbai-based Sharmila Khanna follows. The 20-year-old Marketing Executive, a serious film-buff agrees.&nbsp;

“Whether or not this new term impacts fees, clout or image is another matter but throwing the hat into the ring is about demonstrating intent and seriousness of purpose.“ &nbsp;

Gifted film-maker Aparna Sen [36 Chowringhee Lane, Mr. &amp; Mrs. Iyer, The Japanese Wife] offers her evolved take.&nbsp;

“I am in complete agreement with dear soul-mate Shabana! &nbsp;At a time when the new-age woman is multi-tasking &amp; multi-layering and meeting with such stupendous success, why should gender influence profession?”

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/opinion-is-2021-the-year-of-actor-vs-star-showdown-360345">Also Read | Opinion: Is 2021 the year of Actor vs Star showdown?</a>

Critics note that grammatically it is incorrect to refer to the female gender of actor as female actor. The female for actor is actress, like tiger-tigress, master-mistress, etc. However, the trend is such that actresses are referred to as female actors for two reasons. One, gender neutrality. In order to be on the same page and at par with male actors.

This takes the male-dominated sting off and makes it a level-playing field.&nbsp;

Two, the word tiger is a common noun but actor is derived from the verb Act. &nbsp;The same rule doesn’t apply for actor as tiger. Besides, it’s considered an outdated term. &nbsp;

Another view is that actresses come into the same category as authoress, comedienne, manageress, lady doctor, male nurse that date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex, men.

As Whoopee Goldberg once said, “Actresses can only play women. I am an actor. I can play anything!”&nbsp;

Cut to a space beyond the battlefield. The word actor refers to a person who acts regardless of gender while actress refers specifically to a female. &nbsp;

The Dictionary states that originally the term Actor was used for both sexes.

“I was a professional actor for 40 years. Most of the women I worked with generally preferred to be referred to as actors, performers, artists, singers, dancers. The trend of identifying genders in job titles faded out in the late 20th century along with words like Stewardess [Flight Attendant] Waitress [Server]. Only Hollywood-type award shows sustain the gender-specific categories because of traditional slots which seem to have been writ on stone! At the end of the day, even in glam and glitzy Hollywood, remember all movie stars, male or female, belong to the same union – The Screen Actors Guild!” quips a veteran show personality from the West.

Your call esteemed readers!

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

At a recent [unlock celebration?] party comprising close friends, my old and ever-opinionated buddy, renowned for calling out Bollywood’s antics, spotted & buttonholed me & took off.

At a recent [unlock celebration?] party comprising close friends, my old and ever-opinionated buddy, renowned for calling out Bollywood’s antics, spotted & buttonholed me & took off. “Boss, what is this fashionable crap – jhadoed from the West, no doubt – of putting the term Actress to sleep and replacing it with Actor? For Chrissake, can you imagine calling screen legends and dream girls like Garbo, Harlow, Taylor, Monroe & Hepburn or even our very own Madhubala, Nutan, Suchitra Sen, Meena Kumari, Waheeda Rehman ... Actors?! Why this sudden anxiety and insecurity to emphasise & insist on individual identity? Yahan bhi activitism ghus gaya? Their talent and beauty have always been recognised, acknowledged, applauded & rewarded, so what’s the problem, yaar?” Other supporting voices soon joined in and the general drift was that men & women are not the same & an actor in a female role sounded both weird and sexless! Why this 'dramabaazi' and self-conscious attempt to flag-wave female entity? Even the revered Oscars have a Best Actress award, so why this pagalpan to re-write the rules of the game that was never leaning towards anything remotely sexist or degrading. Daughter of the legendary beauty Suchitra Sen, Moon Moon Sen joins the party "Why are we constantly posturing and aping the West to appear with it, cool & liberated? What is this great image-makeover or perception change that one hopes to achieve? What value-addition and in what way does the term actress – after all these years of total acceptance – suddenly appear to rankle, de-value, demean the dignity, prestige, aura & stature and bring new power by replacing it with the term actor? Pray, do tell!” Also Read | Opinion: Why film critics are breath of life but a kiss of death for the masses 34-year-old Bangalore-based housewife Ila Iyer takes it forward. “For simple, middle-class Bollywood fans like us, we just don’t understand why this cardiac arrest over non-existent gender issues! Man-woman, hero-heroine, actor-actress - where does protest and woman-empowerment come into this or solid assertion of identity to celebrate the individual? Why and how does Best Actress become a Kalank to the female Performer & Best Actor something liberating to be hymned & celebrated since it appears to be in the same page? Why is everything so politicised, aggressive and hell-bent towards scoring brownie points? When beautiful, graceful and gifted Audrey Hepburn or Elizabeth Taylor, Meena Kumari or Rakhee received a Best Actress award, remember there is appreciation & applause not paralysis through analysis!” Respected veteran film critic Saibal Chatterjee rounds off this train of thought, part-bewildered, part-amused. “To me, it’s nothing more than a war-cry of APNA TIME AAGAYA! A superficial celebration of aligning with the new-age woman-empowerment thrust blitzing certain sections of society. While I am all for anything that goes towards upliftment of women’s dignity, this Actress-Actor insistence foxes me. How can an alphabetic change suddenly bring more value, clout, prestige and status to gifted actresses already saluted? It will be interesting to check it out with some thinking & articulate actresses, who have opinions and don’t get influenced by the forces that are desperate to look and appear politically correct. I would imagine, great scripts with solid roles and super directors would be their primary concern – not Actors instead of Actresses!” Also Read | Opinion: Ok you watch arthouse films, but does it make you superior? Not all rock with these takes of the no-big-deal guys, who believe this issue is a waste-of-time which should be channelised to more important matters, like making better films with solid content and gifted actors. Kolkata-based Indrani Sen however doesn’t agree and lauds Shabana Azmi who is said to have brought this [actor not actress] subject up. “Shabana-ji, brilliant actor and dedicated activist, is spot-on. It is a timely and symbolic gesture towards perpetuating female-empowerment & self-assertion which is the flavour of the day. The term actress has outlived its simplistic utility and today suggests a bimbette, a glam dumb doll, sexy eye-candy for the hunk hero. An actor does not suffer this image perception at all. Since both are performers, why not go gender-neutral?” Mumbai-based Sharmila Khanna follows. The 20-year-old Marketing Executive, a serious film-buff agrees. “Whether or not this new term impacts fees, clout or image is another matter but throwing the hat into the ring is about demonstrating intent and seriousness of purpose.“ Gifted film-maker Aparna Sen [36 Chowringhee Lane, Mr. & Mrs. Iyer, The Japanese Wife] offers her evolved take. “I am in complete agreement with dear soul-mate Shabana! At a time when the new-age woman is multi-tasking & multi-layering and meeting with such stupendous success, why should gender influence profession?” Also Read | Opinion: Is 2021 the year of Actor vs Star showdown? Critics note that grammatically it is incorrect to refer to the female gender of actor as female actor. The female for actor is actress, like tiger-tigress, master-mistress, etc. However, the trend is such that actresses are referred to as female actors for two reasons. One, gender neutrality. In order to be on the same page and at par with male actors. This takes the male-dominated sting off and makes it a level-playing field. Two, the word tiger is a common noun but actor is derived from the verb Act. The same rule doesn’t apply for actor as tiger. Besides, it’s considered an outdated term. Another view is that actresses come into the same category as authoress, comedienne, manageress, lady doctor, male nurse that date from a time when professions were largely the preserve of one sex, men. As Whoopee Goldberg once said, “Actresses can only play women. I am an actor. I can play anything!” Cut to a space beyond the battlefield. The word actor refers to a person who acts regardless of gender while actress refers specifically to a female. The Dictionary states that originally the term Actor was used for both sexes. “I was a professional actor for 40 years. Most of the women I worked with generally preferred to be referred to as actors, performers, artists, singers, dancers. The trend of identifying genders in job titles faded out in the late 20th century along with words like Stewardess [Flight Attendant] Waitress [Server]. Only Hollywood-type award shows sustain the gender-specific categories because of traditional slots which seem to have been writ on stone! At the end of the day, even in glam and glitzy Hollywood, remember all movie stars, male or female, belong to the same union – The Screen Actors Guild!” quips a veteran show personality from the West. Your call esteemed readers! (Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

Opinion: "Please don't call me an actress but an actor"

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

This story contains spoilers for the seventh episode of 'WandaVision.'

If you are a fan of the Disney+ Marvel series “WandaVision,” there are five words that have been stuck in your head for the past week: “It was Agatha all along.”

The 62-second earworm appears in Episode 7, “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” and its purpose is simple: It explains what Wanda and Vision’s nosy neighbor, Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), has been up to this entire time. It has also taken on a life of its own, having spawned numerous trap, rock and rap remixes in the days since the episode debuted Feb 19.

“None of us knew this was going to be the song,” said composer Robert Lopez, 46, who created the songs for the series with his wife of 17 years, Oscar and Grammy-winning lyricist Kristen Anderson-Lopez, 48. “We woke up that morning to find that it was all over the internet, and it was like, ‘This is awesome.’”

It isn’t the first time the songwriting power couple has created an infectious earworm, having written tunes such as the Oscar- and Grammy-winning song “Let It Go” for the Disney animated movie “Frozen” and the Oscar-winning ballad “Remember Me” for the Pixar animated film “Coco.” They’ve won a pile of Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and Grammys between them. (Lopez, who co-conceived and co-wrote the hit musicals “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon,” is in rarefied air as the only double EGOT — someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, twice over.)

But it is a minute-long riff on “The Munsters” theme that has burned itself into the brains of the collective internet over the past week.

 
“It’s got an ‘Addams Family’ twist with an electric harpsichord,” Anderson-Lopez said. “It’s super-duper cool and feels like something you’d find in a haunted house.”

Sung by Hahn and a chorus of male backup singers (including Lopez), it delivers the dramatic revelation that Agnes is the powerful witch Agatha Harkness — and that it is she, not Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), who is behind all the oddities happening in sleepy little Westview. (Having killed a dog, she reveals, was among her dastardly deeds.)

When the song debuted on Spotify and iTunes on Tuesday, it leaped to the No. 1 slot on the iTunes soundtrack charts. (The trap remix created by hip-hop artist Leland Philpot is “the most glorious thing,” Anderson-Lopez said.) 
 
In a phone interview from Connecticut on Wednesday, Anderson-Lopez and Lopez shared how the track came together, their trick for getting their own songs out of their own heads and why Hahn’s character is “perfidious” rather than “hideous.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Did you have any idea “Agatha All Along” was going to blow up like this?

ROBERT LOPEZ: No, not at all. We were sort of sad that we were winding down and we didn’t know if we’d have any hits come out of this thing. But my goodness.

Q: What part of the song came to you first?

LOPEZ: We have a theme — the “WandaVision” motif — that’s in every single song. So that was how we began with “Agatha.”

KRISTEN ANDERSON-LOPEZ: But, in a way, “Agatha All Along” was there all along. We’ve been spoon-feeding a tritone that’s called the devil’s interval — the&nbsp; 'duh-duh-duh'&nbsp;— throughout the series. And then ultimately, when the big reveal happens with the 'DUH! DUH! DUH!', everyone had been hearing it steadily, so it felt like an old friend.

Q: Where did you look for inspiration for the song?

LOPEZ: We started with a different idea for a version of the song more along the lines of “That Girl.”

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: But it just wasn’t right; it just wasn’t churning my blood the way that I wanted it to. So then we thought: It’s a show about witches, right? So let’s embrace it. What other shows are about witches and Goth figures? “The Addams Family,” “The Munsters,” the “Monster Mash” — all these Halloween-y kind of songs that have this grinding, growling bari sax.

LOPEZ: We also have an electric harpsichord, which is what they use in “The Addams Family.” That’s the thing going dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit — the repeated chorus.

Q:Who does what when you’re writing a song?

LOPEZ: It changes with every song. Sometimes we’ll write it together in the same room, sometimes one of us will write the whole thing and the other one will take credit. In this case, Kristen wrote the full lyrics and gave them to me on a sheet of paper, and then I went to town with music.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: I would wake up in the morning, and sometimes I’d be so excited to write the songs that I would write them in the shower. Get out, get a towel, scribble them on a piece of paper with drips, blurring ink — and Bobby would compose them by 10 a.m., and we’d record them after lunch, and then get notes at like 5 p.m.

Q:“Perfidious” is quite the lyric! Where did that come from?

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: We knew we didn’t want to say "hideous," because Agatha is still hot. So I looked at a rhyming dictionary and was like: “'Perfidious!' It’s so great! It’s so perfect!”

LOPEZ: We always have an SAT word in the lyrics somewhere because people appreciate learning a word. And if they already know it, they appreciate being able to brag that they know it.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Right! “Frozen fractals …” [from “Let It Go”]

Q: Your neighbors were not fans of one of your last hits, “Let It Go.” Has reaction been more favorable this time around?

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: It’s still early — they’ve had less than a week. But I’m starting to feel the trickles on Twitter. I’m getting messages saying, “Thank you so much for ‘Agatha All Along,’ now please remove it from my head!” and “It’s been five days, now take it back, please!”

Q: Do the songs you write get stuck in your head, too?

LOPEZ: Of course! You wake up in the middle of the night with it pounding in your ears. But having a song that gets in people’s heads is such an honor for us. It means what we created somehow magically connected across space and time and landed in another person’s neurons. It’s what was in our heads, and now it’s in their heads, and that’s something we now all share.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ:I woke up at 3 a.m. this morning with “She’s insidious / So perfidious” just going on a loop in my head. And so I replaced it with: “Don’t worry, / Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh, / be happy.”

LOPEZ: That’s how you get it out of your system …

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: … replace it with another thing that’s been stuck in your head before.

This story contains spoilers for the seventh episode of 'WandaVision.' If you are a fan of the Disney+ Marvel series “WandaVision,” there are five words that have been stuck in your head for the past week: “It was Agatha all along.

This story contains spoilers for the seventh episode of 'WandaVision.' If you are a fan of the Disney+ Marvel series “WandaVision,” there are five words that have been stuck in your head for the past week: “It was Agatha all along.” The 62-second earworm appears in Episode 7, “Breaking the Fourth Wall,” and its purpose is simple: It explains what Wanda and Vision’s nosy neighbor, Agnes (Kathryn Hahn), has been up to this entire time. It has also taken on a life of its own, having spawned numerous trap, rock and rap remixes in the days since the episode debuted Feb 19. “None of us knew this was going to be the song,” said composer Robert Lopez, 46, who created the songs for the series with his wife of 17 years, Oscar and Grammy-winning lyricist Kristen Anderson-Lopez, 48. “We woke up that morning to find that it was all over the internet, and it was like, ‘This is awesome.’” It isn’t the first time the songwriting power couple has created an infectious earworm, having written tunes such as the Oscar- and Grammy-winning song “Let It Go” for the Disney animated movie “Frozen” and the Oscar-winning ballad “Remember Me” for the Pixar animated film “Coco.” They’ve won a pile of Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and Grammys between them. (Lopez, who co-conceived and co-wrote the hit musicals “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon,” is in rarefied air as the only double EGOT — someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, twice over.) But it is a minute-long riff on “The Munsters” theme that has burned itself into the brains of the collective internet over the past week. “It’s got an ‘Addams Family’ twist with an electric harpsichord,” Anderson-Lopez said. “It’s super-duper cool and feels like something you’d find in a haunted house.” Sung by Hahn and a chorus of male backup singers (including Lopez), it delivers the dramatic revelation that Agnes is the powerful witch Agatha Harkness — and that it is she, not Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), who is behind all the oddities happening in sleepy little Westview. (Having killed a dog, she reveals, was among her dastardly deeds.) When the song debuted on Spotify and iTunes on Tuesday, it leaped to the No. 1 slot on the iTunes soundtrack charts. (The trap remix created by hip-hop artist Leland Philpot is “the most glorious thing,” Anderson-Lopez said.) In a phone interview from Connecticut on Wednesday, Anderson-Lopez and Lopez shared how the track came together, their trick for getting their own songs out of their own heads and why Hahn’s character is “perfidious” rather than “hideous.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Q: Did you have any idea “Agatha All Along” was going to blow up like this? ROBERT LOPEZ: No, not at all. We were sort of sad that we were winding down and we didn’t know if we’d have any hits come out of this thing. But my goodness. Q: What part of the song came to you first? LOPEZ: We have a theme — the “WandaVision” motif — that’s in every single song. So that was how we began with “Agatha.” KRISTEN ANDERSON-LOPEZ: But, in a way, “Agatha All Along” was there all along. We’ve been spoon-feeding a tritone that’s called the devil’s interval — the 'duh-duh-duh' — throughout the series. And then ultimately, when the big reveal happens with the 'DUH! DUH! DUH!', everyone had been hearing it steadily, so it felt like an old friend. Q: Where did you look for inspiration for the song? LOPEZ: We started with a different idea for a version of the song more along the lines of “That Girl.” ANDERSON-LOPEZ: But it just wasn’t right; it just wasn’t churning my blood the way that I wanted it to. So then we thought: It’s a show about witches, right? So let’s embrace it. What other shows are about witches and Goth figures? “The Addams Family,” “The Munsters,” the “Monster Mash” — all these Halloween-y kind of songs that have this grinding, growling bari sax. LOPEZ: We also have an electric harpsichord, which is what they use in “The Addams Family.” That’s the thing going dit-dit-dit-dit-dit-dit — the repeated chorus. Q:Who does what when you’re writing a song? LOPEZ: It changes with every song. Sometimes we’ll write it together in the same room, sometimes one of us will write the whole thing and the other one will take credit. In this case, Kristen wrote the full lyrics and gave them to me on a sheet of paper, and then I went to town with music. ANDERSON-LOPEZ: I would wake up in the morning, and sometimes I’d be so excited to write the songs that I would write them in the shower. Get out, get a towel, scribble them on a piece of paper with drips, blurring ink — and Bobby would compose them by 10 a.m., and we’d record them after lunch, and then get notes at like 5 p.m. Q:“Perfidious” is quite the lyric! Where did that come from? ANDERSON-LOPEZ: We knew we didn’t want to say "hideous," because Agatha is still hot. So I looked at a rhyming dictionary and was like: “'Perfidious!' It’s so great! It’s so perfect!” LOPEZ: We always have an SAT word in the lyrics somewhere because people appreciate learning a word. And if they already know it, they appreciate being able to brag that they know it. ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Right! “Frozen fractals …” [from “Let It Go”] Q: Your neighbors were not fans of one of your last hits, “Let It Go.” Has reaction been more favorable this time around? ANDERSON-LOPEZ: It’s still early — they’ve had less than a week. But I’m starting to feel the trickles on Twitter. I’m getting messages saying, “Thank you so much for ‘Agatha All Along,’ now please remove it from my head!” and “It’s been five days, now take it back, please!” Q: Do the songs you write get stuck in your head, too? LOPEZ: Of course! You wake up in the middle of the night with it pounding in your ears. But having a song that gets in people’s heads is such an honor for us. It means what we created somehow magically connected across space and time and landed in another person’s neurons. It’s what was in our heads, and now it’s in their heads, and that’s something we now all share. ANDERSON-LOPEZ:I woke up at 3 a.m. this morning with “She’s insidious / So perfidious” just going on a loop in my head. And so I replaced it with: “Don’t worry, / Ooh, ooh ooh ooh oo-ooh ooh oo-ooh, / be happy.” LOPEZ: That’s how you get it out of your system … ANDERSON-LOPEZ: … replace it with another thing that’s been stuck in your head before.

Meet the songwriters behind the 'WandaVision' hit 'Agatha All Along'

Shortly after the Palestinian Intifada in the 1990s, British-Palestinian filmmaker Farah Nabulsi ceased her visits the West Bank where her family hailed from. Twenty-five years later, she returned to find a new reality that inspired her film 'The Present' which has been shortlisted for an Oscar nomination recently.

Oscar short-listed movie offers glimpse of Palestinians' life under Israeli checkpoints

It was a February day so overcast that noon looked like dusk, and Frances McDormand felt a little rattled. She told me this as we ambled down the main street of the small coastal town where she lives, a modest, hidden place so far from Hollywood that studio searchlights would have a hard time finding it. Still, someone had managed.

Earlier that day, the phone rang at McDormand’s house, and while she didn’t recognize the man on the other end, he certainly knew who &lt;em&gt;she &lt;/em&gt;was. When the caller told her he was watching “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the 2017 movie in which she plays an avenging mother named Mildred, McDormand realized she was on the phone with a fan who had tracked down her unlisted landline.

“It was the first creepy call I’ve gotten in 16 years here,” she told me. Though she hung up right away, McDormand now wondered what she might have asked him: “OK, what part were you watching? The scene where I threw the Molotov cocktail at the police station?”

Maybe the fan had hoped to speak with righteous Mildred, who harangues priests and cops and hurls fire bombs in the pursuit of justice. Instead, he reached Frances McDormand, a 63-year-old woman who chats up everybody she comes across in her small town, doesn’t like to think of herself as famous, and has won two Oscars.

This is the tricky thing about how persuasively McDormand embodies her characters: You think you know&lt;em&gt; her&lt;/em&gt; because you’re certain you know them. Whether it’s kindhearted Marge from “Fargo,” tetchy Olive from “Olive Kitteridge,” or bohemian Jane in “Laurel Canyon,” McDormand specializes in playing women with worldviews. You can tell right away what they like and don’t like, who they would be friendly with and who they can’t stand.

Since she rarely grants interviews, most people only see the real McDormand blazing an iconoclastic streak through televised awards shows, where she is barefaced instead of Botoxed and once wore her own jean jacket in lieu of borrowed couture. (In Hollywood, this mild noncompliance is tantamount to a declaration of war.) McDormand is highly skeptical of any ceremony where actors are done up like glamorous gladiators, and when her husband, filmmaker Joel Coen, was once asked to produce the Oscars alongside his brother, Ethan, McDormand suggested they set the telecast at Coney Island, which would have forced Hollywood glitterati to mingle with the freak show.

That irreverence is McDormand’s most endearing trait: On the day we met, she ducked into a liquor store to satisfy her craving for Fritos — “You know they’re gooood, right?” she teased — and before we sat together on a concrete wall by the coastline, McDormand clambered on top of it and used the length of her splayed body to measure a pandemic-appropriate distance between us. She makes a concerted effort not to treat herself like a precious movie star in the hopes that you won’t, either.

That’s why she lives where she lives and why, as she perched on the wall opposite me in an olive puffer jacket, she asked me not to divulge the name of her town. That morning’s phone call aside, “I get to live my more authentic self here,” she said, “and I don’t have to pretend to be anybody else.”

She nodded toward the beach, where a handful of people cavorted with their dogs and surfboards. “I don’t mind being&lt;em&gt; their&lt;/em&gt; movie star,” she said. “I’m just not going to be yours.”

STILL, THE LINE BETWEEN McDORMAND and her characters will only grow blurrier with the release of her intimate new film, “Nomadland.” In this sunset-dappled drama from the director Chloé Zhao, McDormand plays Fern, a widow who packs her things into a van and joins up with a tribe of older itinerant workers to spend their golden years working odd jobs all across the American West.

“Nomadland” would eventually require more from this private star than she is used to giving, but when McDormand first met with Zhao in early 2018, she was mostly curious what the up-and-coming director would think of her: “I was like, ‘Man, I just want to be relevant. Do you think I’m relevant?’”

Perhaps that’s a surprising admission for a woman who was then on the verge of winning her second Oscar, for “Three Billboards,” but McDormand had just entered her 60s and worried that good opportunities could prove harder to find. Even before that, most of her best-known roles had required some hustle to obtain, which is part of the reason McDormand has lately become a producer, too.

“Our industry is such an ageist industry,” Zhao told me by phone. “Someone like Frances McDormand who is just so authentically herself, who has not tried to erase those lines on her face or cover that up to fit into the industry — to me, she’ll be relevant forever.”

And it was exactly that authentic self that intrigued Zhao. In her previous films, “The Rider” and “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” Zhao had cast nonprofessionals and built character arcs for them that were inspired by their actual experiences. “Nomadland,” based on a nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder, would offer her the same opportunity: Real nomads from Bruder’s book, like Linda May and Swankie, were enticed to play pivotal supporting roles in the film.

But since Zhao wanted those women to simply be themselves in front of the camera, she decided that for the sake of coherence, McDormand would need to play a version of herself, too. “It’s very interesting, the layers of it,” Zhao said. “Fran is playing Fern, but even the name ‘Fern’ came from herself and who she thinks she might be if she hit the road.”

In fact, McDormand had long harbored a fantasy of turning her back on Hollywood, changing her name, and setting off in an RV upon reaching her 60s. “Chloé tapped into the truth of it,” McDormand said, “which was at different points of my life, I’ve said to my husband, ‘I can’t take this anymore, I’m dropping out.’”

“Nomadland” let McDormand play out that dream and a few others. Many of the people McDormand interacts with in the film had no idea she was a famous actress — they figured she was just another nomad, and spoke to her like a normal person in exactly the way that she craves.

In some ways, all that verisimilitude could be grueling, too — McDormand was surprised at how exhausted she would feel after long days of simply being present in front of the camera, reacting to the stories real people unspooled. Zhao also asked McDormand to put in actual hours at Fern’s odd jobs, like harvesting beets in Nebraska or working at a warehouse in California.

But the result is a performance that McDormand has never given before, one that has less to do with acting and more to do with simply &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt;. As Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang wrote in his “Nomadland” review, “McDormand doesn’t disappear into Fern; she’s revealed by Fern, and Fern is revealed by her.”

That sort of ineffable, hard-to-pin-down portrait was exactly Zhao’s intention. “I like to think that we have captured a great performance,” she said, “but also, an essence of Fran as well.”

Still, the director and her star sometimes disagreed on just how much of that essence to use. Details both large and small have been pulled directly from McDormand’s real life: Fern proudly shows off a set of plates that McDormand’s father bought her as a college graduation gift, and Zhao cast one of the actress’s oldest friends as Fern’s sister so the recriminations they air in the film could have a real weight.

But when Zhao floated the idea of finding a role in the film for McDormand’s son, Pedro, or suggested that Fern’s dead spouse, glimpsed only in a photograph, should be played by McDormand’s actual husband, Joel Coen, her lead drew a line in the sand. “I have to believe that it’s not just a documentary of me,” McDormand said. “I did create a character, just like I’ve created myself in 63 years, too.”

FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, McDormand has been fascinated by the formula through which one concocts a self-image. How much does it have to do with authenticity, and to what extent is it constructed by playing pretend?

“I would say probably fifth grade is the first time I can remember, ‘Oh, I know what they think I am, and I’m going to subvert it,’” she told me.

What they knew about McDormand then was that she was the adopted daughter of Vernon McDormand, a minister for the Disciples of Christ. That sort of role in that sort of family required a certain amount of public respectability, but as she got older, and an English teacher at McDormand’s school in Monessen, Pennsylvania, asked her to read the role of Lady Macbeth in a workshop, she found herself thrilled to leave propriety at the door.

“That was the hook,” McDormand said. “It was the power of being a really shy, slightly suspect seventh-grader who could stand in front of a group of people and keep their attention.” She loved, too, that Shakespeare’s female characters were as power-hungry as the men: “It’s like I used to say to Joel, ‘Why don’t you guys write better roles for women? In fact, why don’t you just write a role for men and then let me play it?’”

She had married Coen not long after making her screen debut in the 1984 noir “Blood Simple,” which he directed with Ethan. Twelve years later, the Coen brothers would give McDormand her signature role, one that could only be played by a woman: Marge, the chirpy, pregnant police chief in “Fargo.”

That film made her famous, a condition that McDormand considered a fire to be stomped out: After hiring a publicist, she almost immediately instructed him to turn down most requests.

“I made a very conscious effort not to do press and publicity for 10 years in what other people would think would be a very dangerous moment in a female actor’s career, but it paid off for exactly the reasons I wanted it to,” she said. “It gave me a mystery back to who I was, and then in the roles I performed, I could take an audience to a place where someone who sold watches or perfume and magazines couldn’t.”

To her, “Nomadland” is the culmination of that effort to keep herself unspoiled in the public eye. “That’s why it works,” she said. “That’s why Chloé could bear to even think of doing this with me, because of what I’ve created for years not just as an actor, but in my personal life.”

We traipsed back through town, and as we walked up a hill covered in overgrowth and eucalyptus trees, McDormand drew one final line: “So I’m going to pass my house, and then I’m going to leave you,” she said. She asked if I had dinner plans, and directed me to a farm stand I could stop by on the way home. “They’ve got gorgeous little gems and some good old arugula,” she said, “but no eggs right now because the chickens are all cold.”

As McDormand offered me kindly advice while standing in front of a felled eucalyptus trunk, I could have sworn I was talking to Fern, who is so practical and self-reliant. It reminded me of a story she had told me earlier: Not long ago, for the drive-in premiere of “Nomadland” in Pasadena, California, McDormand had decided to pull the van from the film out of storage. She thought it would be fun to sit in during the screening, but when she came face to face with the car she had lovingly named “Vanguard,” McDormand found herself overcome.

She had considered that van “the interior life of Fern, and therefore me,” she said, and to see Vanguard dirty and filled with junk after two years apart was almost too much to bear. An hour and a half into their reunion, Coen found McDormand still scrubbing the car, dripping sweat, insisting that she needed just a little more time with Vanguard. “I’m cleaning her,” McDormand told him. “I can’t let her go!”

It isn’t easy to move on when you’ve made something that requires so much of you. Before we parted ways, I asked McDormand how she felt after making “Nomadland.” I thought she scoffed at me, but she was laughing at the very idea.

“Well, at what point?” she said. “&lt;em&gt;Is&lt;/em&gt; it afterwards? I don’t know!” Then she shoved her hands into the pockets of her puffer jacket and disappeared into the eucalyptus grove, taking Fern with her.

It was a February day so overcast that noon looked like dusk, and Frances McDormand felt a little rattled. She told me this as we ambled down the main street of the small coastal town where she lives, a modest, hidden place so far from Hollywood that studio searchlights would have a hard time finding it.

It was a February day so overcast that noon looked like dusk, and Frances McDormand felt a little rattled. She told me this as we ambled down the main street of the small coastal town where she lives, a modest, hidden place so far from Hollywood that studio searchlights would have a hard time finding it. Still, someone had managed. Earlier that day, the phone rang at McDormand’s house, and while she didn’t recognize the man on the other end, he certainly knew who she was. When the caller told her he was watching “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the 2017 movie in which she plays an avenging mother named Mildred, McDormand realized she was on the phone with a fan who had tracked down her unlisted landline. “It was the first creepy call I’ve gotten in 16 years here,” she told me. Though she hung up right away, McDormand now wondered what she might have asked him: “OK, what part were you watching? The scene where I threw the Molotov cocktail at the police station?” Maybe the fan had hoped to speak with righteous Mildred, who harangues priests and cops and hurls fire bombs in the pursuit of justice. Instead, he reached Frances McDormand, a 63-year-old woman who chats up everybody she comes across in her small town, doesn’t like to think of herself as famous, and has won two Oscars. This is the tricky thing about how persuasively McDormand embodies her characters: You think you know her because you’re certain you know them. Whether it’s kindhearted Marge from “Fargo,” tetchy Olive from “Olive Kitteridge,” or bohemian Jane in “Laurel Canyon,” McDormand specializes in playing women with worldviews. You can tell right away what they like and don’t like, who they would be friendly with and who they can’t stand. Since she rarely grants interviews, most people only see the real McDormand blazing an iconoclastic streak through televised awards shows, where she is barefaced instead of Botoxed and once wore her own jean jacket in lieu of borrowed couture. (In Hollywood, this mild noncompliance is tantamount to a declaration of war.) McDormand is highly skeptical of any ceremony where actors are done up like glamorous gladiators, and when her husband, filmmaker Joel Coen, was once asked to produce the Oscars alongside his brother, Ethan, McDormand suggested they set the telecast at Coney Island, which would have forced Hollywood glitterati to mingle with the freak show. That irreverence is McDormand’s most endearing trait: On the day we met, she ducked into a liquor store to satisfy her craving for Fritos — “You know they’re gooood, right?” she teased — and before we sat together on a concrete wall by the coastline, McDormand clambered on top of it and used the length of her splayed body to measure a pandemic-appropriate distance between us. She makes a concerted effort not to treat herself like a precious movie star in the hopes that you won’t, either. That’s why she lives where she lives and why, as she perched on the wall opposite me in an olive puffer jacket, she asked me not to divulge the name of her town. That morning’s phone call aside, “I get to live my more authentic self here,” she said, “and I don’t have to pretend to be anybody else.” She nodded toward the beach, where a handful of people cavorted with their dogs and surfboards. “I don’t mind being their movie star,” she said. “I’m just not going to be yours.” STILL, THE LINE BETWEEN McDORMAND and her characters will only grow blurrier with the release of her intimate new film, “Nomadland.” In this sunset-dappled drama from the director Chloé Zhao, McDormand plays Fern, a widow who packs her things into a van and joins up with a tribe of older itinerant workers to spend their golden years working odd jobs all across the American West. “Nomadland” would eventually require more from this private star than she is used to giving, but when McDormand first met with Zhao in early 2018, she was mostly curious what the up-and-coming director would think of her: “I was like, ‘Man, I just want to be relevant. Do you think I’m relevant?’” Perhaps that’s a surprising admission for a woman who was then on the verge of winning her second Oscar, for “Three Billboards,” but McDormand had just entered her 60s and worried that good opportunities could prove harder to find. Even before that, most of her best-known roles had required some hustle to obtain, which is part of the reason McDormand has lately become a producer, too. “Our industry is such an ageist industry,” Zhao told me by phone. “Someone like Frances McDormand who is just so authentically herself, who has not tried to erase those lines on her face or cover that up to fit into the industry — to me, she’ll be relevant forever.” And it was exactly that authentic self that intrigued Zhao. In her previous films, “The Rider” and “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” Zhao had cast nonprofessionals and built character arcs for them that were inspired by their actual experiences. “Nomadland,” based on a nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder, would offer her the same opportunity: Real nomads from Bruder’s book, like Linda May and Swankie, were enticed to play pivotal supporting roles in the film. But since Zhao wanted those women to simply be themselves in front of the camera, she decided that for the sake of coherence, McDormand would need to play a version of herself, too. “It’s very interesting, the layers of it,” Zhao said. “Fran is playing Fern, but even the name ‘Fern’ came from herself and who she thinks she might be if she hit the road.” In fact, McDormand had long harbored a fantasy of turning her back on Hollywood, changing her name, and setting off in an RV upon reaching her 60s. “Chloé tapped into the truth of it,” McDormand said, “which was at different points of my life, I’ve said to my husband, ‘I can’t take this anymore, I’m dropping out.’” “Nomadland” let McDormand play out that dream and a few others. Many of the people McDormand interacts with in the film had no idea she was a famous actress — they figured she was just another nomad, and spoke to her like a normal person in exactly the way that she craves. In some ways, all that verisimilitude could be grueling, too — McDormand was surprised at how exhausted she would feel after long days of simply being present in front of the camera, reacting to the stories real people unspooled. Zhao also asked McDormand to put in actual hours at Fern’s odd jobs, like harvesting beets in Nebraska or working at a warehouse in California. But the result is a performance that McDormand has never given before, one that has less to do with acting and more to do with simply being. As Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang wrote in his “Nomadland” review, “McDormand doesn’t disappear into Fern; she’s revealed by Fern, and Fern is revealed by her.” That sort of ineffable, hard-to-pin-down portrait was exactly Zhao’s intention. “I like to think that we have captured a great performance,” she said, “but also, an essence of Fran as well.” Still, the director and her star sometimes disagreed on just how much of that essence to use. Details both large and small have been pulled directly from McDormand’s real life: Fern proudly shows off a set of plates that McDormand’s father bought her as a college graduation gift, and Zhao cast one of the actress’s oldest friends as Fern’s sister so the recriminations they air in the film could have a real weight. But when Zhao floated the idea of finding a role in the film for McDormand’s son, Pedro, or suggested that Fern’s dead spouse, glimpsed only in a photograph, should be played by McDormand’s actual husband, Joel Coen, her lead drew a line in the sand. “I have to believe that it’s not just a documentary of me,” McDormand said. “I did create a character, just like I’ve created myself in 63 years, too.” FOR MOST OF HER LIFE, McDormand has been fascinated by the formula through which one concocts a self-image. How much does it have to do with authenticity, and to what extent is it constructed by playing pretend? “I would say probably fifth grade is the first time I can remember, ‘Oh, I know what they think I am, and I’m going to subvert it,’” she told me. What they knew about McDormand then was that she was the adopted daughter of Vernon McDormand, a minister for the Disciples of Christ. That sort of role in that sort of family required a certain amount of public respectability, but as she got older, and an English teacher at McDormand’s school in Monessen, Pennsylvania, asked her to read the role of Lady Macbeth in a workshop, she found herself thrilled to leave propriety at the door. “That was the hook,” McDormand said. “It was the power of being a really shy, slightly suspect seventh-grader who could stand in front of a group of people and keep their attention.” She loved, too, that Shakespeare’s female characters were as power-hungry as the men: “It’s like I used to say to Joel, ‘Why don’t you guys write better roles for women? In fact, why don’t you just write a role for men and then let me play it?’” She had married Coen not long after making her screen debut in the 1984 noir “Blood Simple,” which he directed with Ethan. Twelve years later, the Coen brothers would give McDormand her signature role, one that could only be played by a woman: Marge, the chirpy, pregnant police chief in “Fargo.” That film made her famous, a condition that McDormand considered a fire to be stomped out: After hiring a publicist, she almost immediately instructed him to turn down most requests. “I made a very conscious effort not to do press and publicity for 10 years in what other people would think would be a very dangerous moment in a female actor’s career, but it paid off for exactly the reasons I wanted it to,” she said. “It gave me a mystery back to who I was, and then in the roles I performed, I could take an audience to a place where someone who sold watches or perfume and magazines couldn’t.” To her, “Nomadland” is the culmination of that effort to keep herself unspoiled in the public eye. “That’s why it works,” she said. “That’s why Chloé could bear to even think of doing this with me, because of what I’ve created for years not just as an actor, but in my personal life.” We traipsed back through town, and as we walked up a hill covered in overgrowth and eucalyptus trees, McDormand drew one final line: “So I’m going to pass my house, and then I’m going to leave you,” she said. She asked if I had dinner plans, and directed me to a farm stand I could stop by on the way home. “They’ve got gorgeous little gems and some good old arugula,” she said, “but no eggs right now because the chickens are all cold.” As McDormand offered me kindly advice while standing in front of a felled eucalyptus trunk, I could have sworn I was talking to Fern, who is so practical and self-reliant. It reminded me of a story she had told me earlier: Not long ago, for the drive-in premiere of “Nomadland” in Pasadena, California, McDormand had decided to pull the van from the film out of storage. She thought it would be fun to sit in during the screening, but when she came face to face with the car she had lovingly named “Vanguard,” McDormand found herself overcome. She had considered that van “the interior life of Fern, and therefore me,” she said, and to see Vanguard dirty and filled with junk after two years apart was almost too much to bear. An hour and a half into their reunion, Coen found McDormand still scrubbing the car, dripping sweat, insisting that she needed just a little more time with Vanguard. “I’m cleaning her,” McDormand told him. “I can’t let her go!” It isn’t easy to move on when you’ve made something that requires so much of you. Before we parted ways, I asked McDormand how she felt after making “Nomadland.” I thought she scoffed at me, but she was laughing at the very idea. “Well, at what point?” she said. “Is it afterwards? I don’t know!” Then she shoved her hands into the pockets of her puffer jacket and disappeared into the eucalyptus grove, taking Fern with her.

What Frances McDormand would (and wouldn’t) give to 'Nomadland'

Everyone has a breaking point, and Allison Janney's character in the new comedy " Breaking News in Yuba County" reaches hers and finds solace in the spotlight. Janney plays Sue Buttons, a meek suburban housewife who feels insignificant until her husband goes missing and she gets a taste of attention on the six o'clock news.

Allison Janney searches for her husband and attention in 'Breaking News in Yuba County'

Singer and actress Zendaya says she's never yet forgotten to thank a loved one at a big event and she's certainly not likely to after making the intimate "Malcolm & Marie." Zendaya, 24, whose work on the young adult drama "Euphoria" made her the youngest woman to win a best actress Emmy, stars with John David Washington in the film arriving on Netflix on Friday (Feb 5).

'Malcolm & Marie' found inspiration from pandemic lockdown

The American Film Institute on Monday (25 JANURARY 2021) announced its top 10 films of the year, including Pixar’s jazz themed “Soul” and two of Chadwick Boseman’s final films: the August Wilson adaptation “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and Spike Lee’s Vietnam drama “Da 5 Bloods,” both of which are Netflix films.

‘Soul,’ ‘Ma Rainey’s’ among AFI’s top 10 films of the year

Godzilla goes head to head with King Kong in the fourth film in Legendary's MonsterVerse and sequel to 2019's "Godzilla: King of Monsters".

Godzilla fights King Kong in trailer for fourth Legendary MonsterVerse film

Action thriller "The Marksman" took the top spot at a quiet U.S. box office for the second weekend in a row, trade magazine Variety reported on Sunday (January 24).

'The Marksman' tops troubled box office

As the rest of the world was shutting down to stave off COVID-19, U.S. star Anne Hathaway found herself starting up a whole new movie project - a rom-com heist caper set in the pandemic still raging around her.

Anne Hathaway races to release 'Locked Down' COVID-19 rom-com

Fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been eagerly awaiting the next phase - officially known as Phase 4 - ever since the culmination of previous movies in the franchise in 'Avengers: Endgame'.

"It’s going to be freaky" - 'WandaVision' breaks mold of MCU

2020 was a box office flop. With theatres shut and releases postponed, Hollywood saw an 80% slide in its box office revenue. Box offices across the World saw a slide in ticket sales. 2020 was a disaster. Will its sequel be any different?

Gravitas: The impact of the Pandemic on Hollywood

The female directed and driving film "I'm Your Woman" may have the Time's Up and #MeToo movement to thank for it being produced.

'I don't know if this movie could have been made...' without the #MeToo movement - Rachel Brosnahan

An iconic rivalry forms an unlikely alliance in the trailer for "Tom and Jerry", dropped on Tuesday (November 17.) The blend of animation and live action is directed by Tim Story and stars Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Rob Delaney, Colin Jost and Ken Jeong. "Tom and Jerry" sees the classic characters in New York City as Jerry moves into a hotel just before a big wedding and the event's planner (Moretz) decides to hire Jerry to get rid of them.

Beloved rivals team up in trailer for "Tom and Jerry"

Regina King has stepped away from her usual place in front of the camera, and positioned herself behind it for her feature film directorial debut "One Night in Miami".

First trailer for Regina King's acclaimed film "One Night in Miami"

Superhero movie "Wonder Woman 1984" will debut in U.S. theaters and on AT&T Inc's HBO Max streaming service on Christmas Day, an unusual release plan prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.

'Wonder Woman 1984' heading to HBO Max and theaters on Christmas Day

"Layered" and "truthful" are the words Jude Law and writer/director Sean Durkin are using to describe their new film, "The Nest." Law star alongside actress Carrie Coon in the drama set in England during the 1980s and follows a couple navigating a marriage rooted in lies.

Jude Law earns an acting nomination for his 'layered' performance in new film 'The Nest'

Lucasfilm has teamed up with Lego to create a new holiday special titled 'The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special'. It pokes fun at the original while carrying on the story from 'Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker'.

Star Wars teams up with Lego to create new holiday special

The Emmy-winning 'Star Wars' spin-off 'The Mandalorian' is back for a second season at the end of October on the Disney+ subscription streaming service.

The Mandalorian and Baby Yoda are back in trailer for second season of hit Star Wars TV show

Subscribers to the world's largest streaming service can now watch "Poacher", a Kenyan drama about elephant poaching and "Oloture", a Nigerian thriller about a journalist whose world falls apart after she goes undercover as a sex worker.

New African-made films on Netflix go beyond Hollywood stereotypes

A dream team of international stars headlines new espionage thriller "The 355", but no release date has been set yet by studio Universal Pictures.

'The 355' Trailer: International star team, but no release date yet

Walt Disney Co postponed the release of Marvel superhero movie "Black Widow" by six months until May 2021, the company said on Wednesday (September 23).

Disney delays releases of 'Black Widow' 'West Side Story' until 2021

According to French media, Bond villain Michael Lonsdale died at his home in Paris at the age of 89 on September 21.

Bond villain Michael Lonsdale dies at 89

Hollywood star Johnny Depp took his latest project to Spain's San Sebastian's Film Festival on Sunday (September 20).

Johnny Depp attends photo call at San Sebastian Film Festival

What happens when social and economic disparity becomes unsustainable, Mexican director Michel Franco asks with his highly anticipated new movie "New Order" ("Nuovo Orden"). The distressing drama, which received its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday (September 10) evening, is set in a dystopian Mexican city.

Social inequality "explodes" in Mexican director Michel Franco's dystopian Venice drama

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