#melena ryzik
Photo
taken by Maggie Shannon for New York Times They Scream! We Scream!
1 note
·
View note
Text
Too Good to Be Ignored: Women Who Reached the Top in Sports
The New York Times' Melena Ryzik profiles Ann Maria De Mars: Judo expert, CEO, statistical consultant -- and mother of mixed martial arts star, Ronda Rousey!
0 notes
Text
Antonio Velardo shares: Unfurling the Unusual Costumes of ‘Poor Things’ by Melena Ryzik
By Melena Ryzik
The designer Holly Waddington breaks down how Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter evolves onscreen, from her childish knickers to her cage-like wedding dress.
Published: January 2, 2024 at 05:01AM
from NYT Movies https://ift.tt/XFyda61
via IFTTT
View On WordPress
0 notes
Photo
"Can’t Decide Whether to See ‘Barbie,’ ‘Oppenheimer’ or Both? Our Barbenheimer Quiz Can Help." by Melena Ryzik via NYT Movies https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/19/movies/barbenheimer-quiz.html?partner=IFTTT
0 notes
Link
By BY MELENA RYZIK from Movies in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/movies/rita-moreno-interview.html?partner=IFTTT
The actress discusses being the subject of a new documentary, and spending eight-plus decades in the spotlight.
Rita Moreno: Pathbreaker, Activist and ‘A Kick in the Pants’ New York Times
0 notes
Text
The Economics of Visual Effects By Melena Ryzik February 27, 2013 New York Times
LOS ANGELES – There’s a high-stakes fight brewing here, between the digital artists who create the movie-magic effects that many blockbusters depend on and the studios that employ them. Audiences got a taste of it on Sunday, when Bill Westenhofer, a visual effects winner for “Life of Pi,” was played off the Oscar stage with the “Jaws” music, just as he was talking about the bankruptcy of the film’s effects house, Rhythm & Hues.
In a related protest, more than 400 people, many of them laid-off Rhythm & Hues workers, demonstrated just a few blocks from the theater where the Oscars were taking place, voicing their grievances against the industry. According to Deadline.com, they protested working conditions (long hours without equivalent pay) and the foreign subsidies that draw jobs overseas. Some talked of unionizing. A plane bearing the banner ““BOXOFFICE + BANKRUPT = VISUAL EFFECTS VFXUNION.COM” was scheduled to fly over the Dolby Theater during the Oscars red carpet.
Rhythm & Hues is not the only casualty of the business. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the German company Pixomondo, which won an Oscar for “Hugo” last year, is closing its London offices because of financial strain, and shutting its Detroit office in November. At a time when the entertainment industry is sustained by tentpole movies driven by visual effects, it seems bewildering that so many are floundering. (The site Before VFX illustrates what blockbusters would look like without the digital add-ons.)
Many thought that playing off Mr. Westenhofer was poor form, especially after an introduction by the cast of the effects-heavy “Avengers.”
“It’s particularly galling that the FX guy, speaking about a protest that was happening outside that directly addresses the financial realities that are starting to damage the FX community in a way they may not be able to fully recover from, was cut short at a ceremony where they actually had a computer-animated character give away an award on live television,” Drew McWeeny, an editor at HitFix, wrote.
In an interview in the press room at the ceremony, Mr. Westenhofer elaborated on his speech.
“The visual effects are definitely in a challenging position right now, and we’ve got to figure out how to make this business model work, because there are artists that are struggling right now,” he said. “And I wanted to point out that we aren’t technicians. Visual effects is not just a commodity that’s being done by people pushing buttons. We’re artists, and if we don’t find a way to fix the business model, we start to lose the artistry. If anything, ‘Life of Pi’ shows that we’re artists and not just technicians.”
Backstage, Ang Lee, the best director winner for “Life of Pi,” also took up the cause of the effects workers. “I refuse to think those are technicians that work, hundreds of them work by the computers. We create something that’s visual art,” he said. “The bad news, it’s too expensive. It’s very hard.”
“Once it gets cheaper and easier,” he added, “more filmmakers are going to dive into that and create something more and more interesting. And that language will establish the audience in the future.”
2 notes
·
View notes
Video
youtube
ScreenTimes: Little Women | Scheduled for 9 Dec 2019
Melena Ryzik, New York Times culture reporter, hosts an advance screening of the eagerly awaited new film adaptation of “Little Women,” followed by a Q&A with screenwriter-director Greta Gerwig and stars Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Saiorse Ronan and Eliza Scanlen.
26 notes
·
View notes
Link
The New York Times really, truly loves Rocketman. In addition to the pre-premier article, the Critic’s Pick review, and the interview with Elton and Bernie, they’ve now published an extensive piece on the Rocketman costumes.
“Julian was just brilliant,” Elton John (the real one) told Melena Ryzik in an interview with The New York Times. “They weren’t copies, but they were so like the things I wore, not just onstage. He observed my life during the ’70s very closely and he got it right, without being imitative to a boring degree.”
20 notes
·
View notes
Text
Antonio Velardo shares: Buckle Up, Christmas Crowds: Sandra Bernhard Still Has Plenty to Say by Melena Ryzik
By Melena Ryzik
The comedian, actress and singer’s year-end shows at Joe’s Pub, which started 18 years ago, have been going strong, giving one of New York’s unique voices a chance to sound off.
Published: December 22, 2023 at 11:08AM
from NYT Arts https://ift.tt/GM9s10N
via IFTTT
View On WordPress
0 notes
Link
*I’m going to cut and paste the entire thing here as to avoid being stuck in a paywall for future readers.
Overlooked No More: Debra Hill, Producer Who Parlayed ‘Halloween’ Into a Cult Classic
Hill rose through Hollywood’s ranks, setting an example as a successful Hollywood producer at a time when there were few women in the industry.
May 22, 2019
Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
By Melena Ryzik
Perhaps the most famous babysitter in all of moviedom, Laurie Strode, the teen heroine of “Halloween,” is stalked by a crazed predator and survives — repeatedly. Laurie was resourceful and kind, “quiet but defiant,” said Debra Hill, who helped create the character.
Once a babysitter herself, with a taste for 1950s B-horror flicks, Hill wrote and produced “Halloween” with the director John Carpenter. Laurie endured as a symbol of female resolve, fending off her attacker and rebuilding her life.
“Here was a woman who didn’t run from danger, but stepped up to it,” Hill later told the author David Konow for his book “Reel Terror.”
Hill, those who knew her said, was equally audacious.
“Being a woman in show business is a scary situation,” Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred as Laurie and befriended Hill, said in a phone interview. “It’s a boys’ club, and she established herself, very early on, as a very thorough and capable producer.”
At the time, Hill was a rare female producer who grew to be a mentor for a pivotal generation of women in Hollywood — “part den mother, part cheerleader,” as Stacey Sher, her former employee and now a producer in her own right (“Erin Brockovich,” “Django Unchained”), put it.
Hill nurtured talent wherever she found it — the filmmaker James Cameron was once her visual effects guy; a second assistant director, Jeffrey Chernov, became a producer of “Black Panther” — and had the confidence not to fear that others would leapfrog over her if she gave them a steppingstone.
She later grew frustrated, friends and colleagues said, that the system in which she excelled as a producer did not welcome more women as directors. But even that did not dim her passion for the industry, and she spent the last few years of her life — she died in 2005 — working on a romantic thriller that would be her directorial debut.
Hill considered herself, above all, a storyteller, starting with “Halloween,” which she and Carpenter, her boyfriend at the time, wrote in three weeks. It catapulted them into major careers.
Released in 1978, “Halloween” had a shoestring budget, about $320,000, and went on to earn $70 million globally (around $200 million in today’s dollars), a record for an independent movie. A slasher classic that revitalized the genre, it’s now in the National Film Registry. Hill also championed Curtis, then 19, for “Halloween,” her first feature, presenting a model of female camaraderie in a male-dominated field.
Hill worked or was credited on most of the “Halloween” sequels — last year’s blockbuster installment, also starring Curtis, and made long after Hill’s death, was the 11th in the franchise — and collaborated with Carpenter on other seminal horror and sci-fi thrillers, including “The Fog” and “Escape from New York,” after their romantic relationship ended.
She was an exacting producer. As she told The Los Angeles Times in 1982: “I discovered very early that there are two ways for a woman producer to go. You could be aggressive, or you can be very nice. So I arrive on the set, in my tight jeans, and people wonder. Then they see I’m nice. Then, finally, they see I mean business.”
Curtis recalled that Hill scrutinized every receipt, keeping track of how many spools of thread and rolls of gaffer tape were used — and yet, said Curtis, Hill was “beloved” by her overwhelmingly male crews.
“She brought the proof that a woman can do anything in successful filmmaking that men do,” said Jeanine Basinger, a film historian. “They can make top box office blockbusters, they can make action films and genre films and horror films. She brought originality.”
In the 1980s Hill teamed up with Lynda Obst, a former studio executive, in one of the first female producing partnerships. Their movies included “The Fisher King,” “Clue,” based on the board game, which was Hill’s idea to develop for the screen, and “Adventures in Babysitting,” the directorial debut of Chris Columbus (“Home Alone,” “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”).
“Debra knew how to do every job on a set,” from positioning cameras to fine-tuning lighting, Obst said. She remembered Hill standing “with her arms on her hips, like Peter Pan arriving in Neverland,” surveying every shot. “She just was able to solve a problem, imaginatively.”
On “The Fisher King” (1991), when the director Terry Gilliam suddenly decided during a location scout that he wanted to create an elaborate dance with 1,000 waltzing extras in Grand Central Terminal, Hill figured out how to pull it off. The sequence was among the most lauded in the film, which earned multiple Oscar nominations and won one (best supporting actress, Mercedes Ruehl).
Debra Gaye Hill was born on Nov. 10, 1950, in Philadelphia, to Frank and Jilda Hill. Her mother was a nurse and her father, who had been a Hollywood art director before her birth, eventually became a salesman, including on a car lot. The family, among them Hill’s younger brother, Franklin Robert Hill Jr., known as Bob, moved often.
Once, when house-hunting in Connecticut, their parents parked the children, then 10 and 11 or so, in a local movie theater. “I think Deb and I saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ four times a day,” said Bob Hill, a retired tugboat captain.
They later settled in Haddonfield, N. J., which Hill used as inspiration for the fictional Haddonfield, Ill., setting of “Halloween.” Horror, she observed, always struck in small, under-policed towns and sleepy suburbs, where it seemed, tantalizingly, like nothing could go wrong.
“The idea of pulling off the veneer and seeing what lies beneath has always intrigued me,” she told Konow, the author of “Reel Terror” (2012).
After receiving her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Temple University, she became a flight attendant, then lingered in Jamaica, getting involved with a jazz musician.
That led to writing liner notes for albums, her brother said, which evolved into more writing gigs. She landed in California and, through her father’s connections, worked as a production assistant and a script supervisor, or “script girl,” as it was then called, on low-budget movies (including Carpenter’s first feature, “Assault on Precinct 13”) before moving her way up to producer.
Off the set, Hill liked to give dinner parties, cooking for up to 20 people. (She made a mean matzo ball soup, said her friend Diane Robin, an actress, and poached her salmon in the dishwasher.) Hill would gather guests around her piano to sing and coax them to dance. Sometimes, she pulled out a baton and did a majorette routine that she had learned as a teenager. Later, because of the cancer that would take her life, her legs were amputated; undeterred, she threw a disco-themed birthday party and danced along in her wheelchair.
Hill was 54 when she died on March 7, 2005. Her directorial debut never happened, but in a speech she gave in 2003 in accepting an award from the organization Women in Film, it was clear she knew her importance in the industry.
“I want every producer, studio executive and agent in this room to include me in their directors list,” she said, “along with the women who have come before me, and the women directors who will come after me. If you need me, you’ll find me — I’ll be sitting by my pool, reading scripts and waiting for your numerous offers.”
In 2005 the Producers Guild, where she was a board member, named a fellowship in her honor, for women and men “whose work, interests, professionalism and passion mirror that of Debra Hill.” A dozen people have been recipients thus far, furthering her reach within the industry.
“There weren’t a lot of women to emulate or follow or learn from when I came to Hollywood in 1975,” Hill said in 2003. “Women struggled to have their voices heard, but I refused to struggle along with them. I realized that a woman can be successful in a man’s world.”
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
Ooohh I love this! Time talks. On the basis of sex.
Save the date. Dec 14 Buy Tix or LiveStream!
Wish I were closer to New York because wouldn't miss it for the world!
MORE INFO ▶
Melena Ryzik, culture reporter for The New York Times, hosts an advance screening of “On the Basis of Sex,” inspired by the true story of a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, followed by a conversation with actors Felicity Jones, Armie Hammer and Justin Theroux and the film’s director Mimi Leder. Jones plays the Supreme Court Justice in her early years as a struggling attorney and new mother, facing adversity and numerous obstacles in her fight to change the way courts view gender discrimination. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear the Academy Award-nominated Jones in conversation with Hammer, who plays her husband attorney Martin Ginsburg; Theroux, who plays the legal director of the ACLU, and Leder, the trailblazing Emmy and Peabody Award-winning director (“L.A. Law,” “ER,” “The West Wing,” “The Leftovers”) of the film.
#armie hammer#mimi leder#felicity jones#armie x felicity#justice ginsburg#justin theroux#rbg#rbgmovie#notorious rbg#rbgf#martin ginsburg#marty ginsburg#times#timestalks#cinephile#cinema#cinefilos#onthebasisofsex#on the basis of sex q&a#rogue one#on the basis of sex#cmbyn#call me by your name#the theory of everything#sorry to bother you
23 notes
·
View notes
Link
By BY MELENA RYZIK from Movies in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/movies/domestic-violence-law.html?partner=IFTTT
“And So I Stayed” examines how the courts treat women who kill their abusers. The movie played a role in one case that resulted in freedom after a conviction.
A Film Tries to Make a Difference for Domestic Violence Survivors New York Times
0 notes
Photo
Louis C.K.’s Grammy, After ‘Global Amounts of Trouble,’ Draws Backlash Melena Ryzik https://ift.tt/yBCY81s
0 notes
Photo
"Louis C.K.’s Grammy, After ‘Global Amounts of Trouble,’ Draws Backlash" by Melena Ryzik via NYT Arts https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/arts/television/louis-ck-grammy-backlash.html?partner=IFTTT
0 notes
Photo
"Louis C.K.’s Grammy, After ‘Global Amounts of Trouble,’ Draws Backlash" by Melena Ryzik via NYT Arts https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/arts/television/louis-ck-grammy-backlash.html?partner=IFTTT
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
that-otome-potato
Retainers deserve better!
olv-vd
Sin título
f8oftimbrown
What Is This Life Without Beauty And Grace
f8oftimbrown
What Is This Life Without Beauty And Grace
iamthejet-blog
The Afro Jedi Knight