B10 The Boston Globe WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019
Names
‘I screamed YES’
Jenny Slate engaged to Ben Shattuck
Actress-authorJennySlatebroughthomeaprettysweetsouvenir
fromatriptoFrance:aring.
TheMiltonnativeannouncedherengagementtoMassachusetts-based
artcuratorandwriterBenShattuckonInstagramonMonday,writing
thatshe“screamedYES”whenhepoppedthequestion.
“HetookmetoFranceandmadeapicnicandmademefeelhappyand
freeandthenheaskedmetomarryhimandiscreamedYES,”Slatewrote.
“Iloveyou@benshattuck_art,youarethekindestandbrightestandIam
sogratefulandherewegoandkeepgoing.”
InanInstagrampostofhisown,Shattuckwrote,“Inanabandoned
castleinsouthernFrance,Iaskedthiswomantomarryme....InLA/MA
/Holland/Belgium/Francethankyou@jennyslateandUPUPUPto
moreadventures.” KEVINSLANE,Boston.comBy Ty Burr
GLOBE STAFF
TORONTO — Every movie has its
own sense of time. Specific scenes can
be edited to specific rhythms, of
course — legato, con brio, agitato,
what have you — but, overall, every
film revolves around its own narrative.
Its minutes, hours, days, and years are
its own.
At an event like the Toronto Inter-
national Film Festival, then, one’s in-
ner clock can take a beating. For in-
stance, when I went from the ram-
bunctious whodunit“KnivesOut”
straight into Wayne Wang’s hushed
and contemplative“ComingHome
Again”— and from there into the
manic Nazi coming-of-age comedy-
drama“JojoRabbit”— the experience
was enough to give me triple whip-
lash. The first film is paced at a brisk
and clever trot, fast enough to make
the audience work to keep up. The sec-
ond appears to move not at all, or not
when you’re looking at it directly. The
third takes off like a Roman candle to-
ward the sun, where it explodes or im-
plodes, depending on your point of
view.
“Knives Out” first, and not just be-
cause it’s the most purely pleasurable.
Writer-director Rian Johnson (“Brick,”
“Looper,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”)
has long loved to goof around with
genre, and here he revs up the classic
drawing-room murder mystery by ret-
rofitting it with the engine of an Alfred
Hitchcock suspense thriller.
And, oh, that cast. Imagine a game
of Clue with Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris
Evans, Michael Shannon, Toni Col-
lette, Don Johnson, Christopher Plum-
mer (in flashback as the victim), and
Daniel “James Bond” Craig, slicing a
big slab of Southern glazed ham as de-
tective Benoit Blanc, who could be
Hercule Poirot as rewritten by Tennes-
see Williams.
Goofy and delightfully smart,
“Knives Out” both honors the spirit of
movies like “Murder on the Orient Ex-
press” and sends them up, with the ac-
tors playing true to their character
types while caroming off each other,
riffing like nimble, self-aware billiard
balls. It opens in theaters at Thanks-
giving and it is a blast.
“Coming Home Again” couldn’t be
more different: an oblique and bitter-
sweet story of a young man (Justin
Chon) who quits his job and moves
back to San Francisco to care for a
mother (Jackie Chung) dying of can-
cer. Wang, who began his career in
1982 with the indie comedy-drama
“Chan Is Missing” before taking on
studio projects like “Maid in Manhat-
tan” (2002), is back in art-house land
here, and in comments before the To-
ronto premiere, the director spoke of
wanting once more to make movies
that breathed.
The new movie breathes at a
pained and meditative pace. The son
is carrying an unspoken burden of
love, hurt, and guilt; the mother has
her own issues, with how her life has
gone and how it’s ending. Wang’s cam-
era stands at a remove, watching the
two perform a complicated emotional
dance while preparing a series of Ko-
rean meals that make you wish the
movie had an accompanying cook-
book. The film’s a hard watch, and a
few more dots might have been con-
nected, but you have the sense that
Wang, at 70, is making exactly the
movies he wants to.
To jump from that film to the high-
wire act of Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rab-
bit” is to go from the sublime to thearok” (2017).
“Jojo” shows him reaching for the
brass ring: a World War II farce about
a naive young German boy (Roman
Griffin Davis, fantastic), whose all-in
love for the Third Reich is complicated
by the discovery that his mother (Scar-
lett Johansson) is hiding a Jewish girl,
played by Thomasin McKenzie, the
find of last year’s “Without a Trace.”
One other thing: The boy’s imagi-
nary best friend is Adolf Hitler, played
with vaudevillian gusto by Waititi
himself. “Jojo Rabbit” wants to be de-
mented and melodramatic at the same
time, and the director has the hyper-
active talent to give it a go. I laughed
at many of the gags even as I felt in-
creasingly queasy about where it was
all headed.
There are comparisons to be made
to “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1997 Roberto
Benigni film that many people love
and others actively despise. Like that
movie, “Jojo Rabbit” finds first come-
dy, then tragedy in the Holocaust; like
that movie, the jokes may seem less of-
fensive to some viewers than the sticky
sentimentality underlying the whole
thing.
Does this movie exploit and cheap-
en an unparalleled historic calamity,
or does it freshen a 21st-century audi-
ence’s understanding of the horrors?
The conversations around “Jojo Rab-
bit,” which opens theatrically in Octo-
ber, stand to be inflamed. Maybe that’s
all to the good. Every movie may have
its own sense of time, but it also has its
own set of moral values, and it’s up to
us to figure out how much weight they
hold in the real world.Ty Burr can be reached at
[email protected]. Follow him on
Twitter @tyburr.By Isaac Feldberg
GLOBE CORRESPONDENT
Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jes-
sica Parker are heading back to Broad-
way to star in a revival of “Plaza Suite,”
Neil Simon’s incisive comedy about
marriage. But first the pair will stage
22 performances at Boston’s Emerson
Colonial Theatre.
The pre-Broadway engagement
(Feb. 5-22) will mark a homecoming
for both “Plaza Suite,” which pre-
miered at the Colonial in 1968, and for
Parker, who made her Boston stage
debut there eight years later with “The
Innocents.” It’s separately a dramatic
reunion for its married stars, who last
shared a stage in a 1995 revival of
“How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying.” And for Broderick,
whose association with Simon runs
deep, “Plaza Suite” is also a chance to
honor the playwright, who died in Au-
gust 2018.
“It’s very strange that a million
years have passed, and no years have
passed,” Broderick told the Globe.
“Growing up when I did in New York,
I was very aware of Neil Simon, from
watching ‘The Odd Couple,’ ‘Barefoot
in the Park,’ and ‘The Goodbye Girl.’
And then, of course, I became aware of
him as a person, because I worked
with him. I’m thrilled to have another
chance to learn his words and play one
of his parts.”
A two-time Tony Award winner,
Broderick earned his first in 1983 for
“Brighton Beach Memoirs,” a play by
Simon; his first film role, in “Max Dug-
an Returns” that same year, was also
scripted by Simon. Broderick later
starred in Simon’s 1985 play “Biloxi
Blues,” reprising the role for a film ver-
sion three years later, and shared top
billing with Nathan Lane in a 2005
Broadway revival of Simon’s “The Odd
Couple.”
John Benjamin Hickey, a longtime
friend of Parker and Broderick who
won an acting Tony in “The Normal
Heart,” will direct the production.
“When we read it, we were stunned by
its relevant, timeless look at marriage,
at the intimacy, brutality, and hilarity
of what it means to be married to an-
other person,” said Hickey. From the
beginning, they hoped to take the
show to cities other than New York.
“It feels old-fashioned, in a good
way, to have an out-of-town tryout,”
said Broderick, who brought his first
plays with Simon through three cities
before reaching Broadway.
Added Parker: “It was important to
us to treat this play as a period piece,
and we wanted to create that same
feeling of when plays were produced
in that fashion.”
Parker, a two-time Emmy winnerbest known for “Sex and the City,” is
looking forward to getting back on-
stage. “Theater is a medium like no
other,” she said. “It’s a very special
place, and it’s the only place for an ac-
tor where the actor and the audience
are hand-in-glove, working together,
figuring each other out. You’re feeling
the room, they’re feeling the play;
there’s a conversation you can’t repli-
cate anywhere else, and that makes it
wonderfully exciting.”
Broderick shares her enthusiasm.
“The start of a play is very daunting,”
he acknowledged. “If you think about
it too much, you might not do it. Or at
least I might not. But it is one of the
great, pure forms.”Mike Nichols won a Tony for di-
recting “Plaza Suite” on Broadway in
1968, the same year he earned an Os-
car for directing “The Graduate.”
George C. Scott and Maureen Staple-
ton starred; both were Tony-nominat-
ed for their roles in the play, which ran
for three years and over a thousand
performances.
In reviving “Plaza Suite,” Hickey
hopes to do justice to a playwright he
considers one of the all-time greats,
worthy of being mentioned alongside
Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.
“I have two great stars in this play,”
he said. “But they’ll be the first to tell
you: The real star of this play is Neil
Simon.”
Tickets are now on sale exclusively
for American Express card members,
with more opening up to the general
public on Sept. 25 at 10 a.m.Isaac Feldberg can be reached at
[email protected], or on
Twitter at @isaacfeldberg.At Toronto: three films, three very different senses of time
CLAIRE FOLGERCOURTESY OF TIFFKIMBERLEY FRENCH/TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION
From top: Daniel Craig, LaKeith Stanfield, Noah Segan in “Knives Out”;
Christina July Kim and Justin Chon in “Coming Home Again”; Roman
Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson in “Jojo Rabbit”Broderick, Parker to star
in ‘Plaza Suite’ revival
at the Colonial Theatre
LITTLE FANG
Spouses Matthew Broderick and
Sarah Jessica Parker last shared a
stage in 1995.Constant Readers, rejoice: On the
heels of the release of his latest novel,
which hit shelves Tuesday, authorSte-
phenKingis slated to speak with fans
during a special event at Somerville
Theatre next month.
On Oct. 10, the master of horror
will sit down alongside his son, author
JoeHill— who also has a new book of
short stories coming out, called “Full
Throttle” — to discuss their respective
works, according to Porter Square
Books, which is organizing the event.
Perhaps in keeping with their hor-
ror personas, tickets to the father-and-
son speaking en-
gagement will go
on sale Friday,
Sept. 13, the an-
nouncement
said.
“We hope
you’ll join us for
what is bound to
be a memorable
evening,” the
company said in
a statement on its
website, promoting the author double-
feature.
The Maine resident’s appearance at
the theater will center on the release
of “The Institute,” a nearly 600-page
tale about the “most sinister of institu-
tions,” where children with special tal-
ents like telekinesis and telepathy are
imprisoned and experimented on by
corrupt staff who are “dedicated to ex-
tractingfromthesechildrentheforce
of their extranormal gifts.”
“As psychically terrifying as ‘Fire-
starter,’ and with the spectacular kid
power of ‘It,’ ‘The Institute’ is Stephen
King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story
of good vs. evil in a world where the
good guys don’t always win,” accord-
ing to a description of the book on the
author’s website.
To remind fans that he wrote a new
book, King announced its impending
arrival with a tweet this week featur-
ing one of his most iconic monsters:
Pennywise, from “It.”
Beyond trying to get the word out
on social media, which has become
one of his central ways of communi-
cating with avid readers, King ap-
peared on “Good Morning America”
on Tuesday to discuss his 61st book.
During the start of the sit-down
with King, the camera panned to a
bookshelf stocked with many of the
author’s novels. When asked by
“GMA” cohost Amy Robach what it
was like to see that many of his books
together in one spot, King replied, “It’s
pretty scary, actually.”
“All of that came out of my head? I
can’t believe it’s still round,” he
quipped. STEVE ANNEAR
Patriots tight endBenjamin
Watsonagrees that black athletes
should consider leaving white col-
leges in order to attend historically
black colleges and universities (HB-
CUs), a stance first penned by The
Atlantic‘sJemeleHill.
“She had some great
points,” Watson told Fox
News hostLauraIngra-
hamduring a segment on
“The Ingraham Angle”
Monday night.
Ingraham, however,
clearly disagreed.
After Watson detailed why the
proposal raises an important point
— a large racial wealth gap exists
and having black athletes attend
HBCUs could help pump necessary
revenue into deserving communi-
ties — Ingraham equated the idea
to resegregation.“College sports would be a lot
different if we went down a color-
coded way of figuring out college
admissions,” she said. “That’s re-
segregating the country. Why do we
want that?”
As Watson tried to explain
why that’s not the case be-
cause segregation is gov-
ernment-mandated, In-
graham proceeded to cut
him off multiple times,
rolled her eyes, and ended
the segment.
Throughout his NFL career,
Watson has been vocal about the
state of race relations in America.
In 2015, he released a book titled
“Under Our Skin: Getting Real
About Race — and Getting Free
From the Fears and Frustrations
ThatDivideUs.”
NICOLE YANG, Boston.comStephen King
andauthorson
to talk to fans
in Somerville
Pats’ Watson got cut off on Fox News
while defending Jemele Hill article
Stephen King
self-consciously bonkers. The manic
New Zealand filmmaker has a cult fol-
lowing for the comic eccentricities ofmovies like “Hunt for the Wilderpeo-
ple” (2016), and he picked up a whole
new army of fans with “Thor: Ragn-NOAM GALAI/GETTY IMAGES FOR TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL/FILE