Latest news with #Johanne
Straits Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
At The Movies: Dreams (Sex Love) a Nordic Bridget Jones's Diary, Heads Of State is cheerfully insane
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Dreams (Sex Love) (R21) 110 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on July 10 ★★★★☆ The story: Seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Johanne (Ella Overbye) falls badly for her very cool female teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) and pours her passion into a memoir. Dreams (Sex Love) capped Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud's 2024 Oslo Trilogy on queer relationships by winning the Golden Bear top prize at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. To be clear, Johanne bridles at the 'queer' label for this engaging dramedy, the third standalone feature following Sex (2024) and Love (2024). What she is experiencing is simply first love, wryly comical in its innocence: She believes she and her crush are bonded because of their shared names, and to get close to Johanna, she visits her at home after class for knitting lessons. Johanne's voiceover narration of her confessional has the interiority of a novel. Writing is her way to make sense of, as well as preserve, the intense emotions. And such is the candour, vulnerability and sensual lyricism of her transformative personal essay, her grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and single mother (Ane Dahl Torp), upon reading it a year later, are so awed that they suggest publishing it. Nan, a jaded feminist poet, is not a little jealous, and mum worries the girl might have been exploited, given the intimacy of her prose. Still, both wished they had lived their lives feeling so fully. The story compares the three generations of women, while asking how much of the manuscript is a besotted adolescent's fantasy and how much fact, and where do the two overlap? Dreams (Sex Love) maintains a light touch, gentle and patient in the young heroine's journey to find herself through her literary voice. Hot take: This Nordic Bridget Jones's Diary is a layered and humorous account of sexual awakening worth writing home about. Heads Of State (NC16) 116 minutes, streaming on Prime Video ★★★☆☆ Idris Elba (left) and John Cena in Heads Of State. PHOTO: PRIME VIDEO The story: British prime minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba) and American president Will Derringer (John Cena), two polar opposites, must set aside their bickering rivalry to survive a terrorist attack. Nothing less than Western democracy is at stake. The formulaic plot is that of any mismatched buddy comedy, but the buddies – Elba and Cena from The Suicide Squad (2021) – are a fun pairing in the title roles of the entertaining straight-to-streaming Heads Of State. Sam is a Cambridge alumnus devoted to public service despite his sagging polls. He is scornful of Will , a Hollywood action hero, who has recently leveraged his box-office success for the Oval Office. Sam is the serious statesman to Will's celebrity he-man , the latter defenceless when his Air Force One jet with both of them on board is hijacked by mercenaries of an arms dealer (Paddy Considine): He has only ever used prop guns. The Brit is fortunately an ex-commando equipped to extract them from the Belarus wilderness, where they become stranded. And Priyanka Chopra Jonas kicks butt as an MI6 super-agent in the value-added supporting cast that includes Jack Quaid's Central Intelligence Agency station chief. She arrives to escort the middle-aged commanders-in-chief across Eastern Europe, in a race to get them alive to the Nato summit in Italy. There is a conspiracy to destabilise the alliance, and they have to unmask the traitor via explosions and wild chases, plus a fair amount of intrigue. The action carnage under director Ilya Naishuller (Nobody, 2021) is cheerfully insane, and the message of international cooperation the greatest escapist satire conceivable in today's world. Hot take: The co-stars strike up an antic bromance all leaders should aspire to.
France 24
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Scarlett Johansson brings near-extinct Jurassic Park franchise roaring back to life
Next, "Dreams" completes the acclaimed "Oslo Trilogy", offering an intimate and nuanced look at teenage love through the eyes of Johanne, a young woman navigating her feelings for her schoolteacher in understated Nordic style. From the thriller genre comes "Islands", a stylish and atmospheric film set in Fuerteventura, where Sam Riley stars as a lost tennis coach drawn into a mysterious holiday family's secrets. Rounding out the lineup is "Materialists", a sharp rom-com by Celine Song starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, which explores the complexities of love and marriage in a modern, material-driven world. Eve and Emma unpack the themes, performances and cinematic craftsmanship behind each film, giving viewers an insightful guide to this week's must-see movies.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Berlin Golden Bear Winner ‘Dreams' Scores Further Sales in Australia, Mexico, South Korea and More (EXCLUSIVE)
Berlin sales outfit M-Appeal has sealed further deals for Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud's Berlinale Golden Bear winner 'Dreams,' as well as additional sales for 'Sex' and 'Love,' the other films in the director's trilogy. 'Dreams' follows Johanne, a young woman who documents her first love — an infatuation with her teacher — through intimate writing. When her mother and grandmother discover her work, their initial shock turns to recognition of its literary merit. As they weigh publishing it, Johanne is forced to reconcile fantasy with reality, while all three women explore their differing perspectives on love, sexuality and self-discovery. More from Variety 'Queerpanorama' Sells to North America and Other Key Territories Following Berlinale Premiere (EXCLUSIVE) Berlinale Award Winner 'Little Trouble Girls' Sells in North America, U.K. and Ireland and More (EXCLUSIVE) Berlinale Prizewinning 'We Believe You,' a Belgian Family Custody Drama, Lures Buyers for the Party Film Sales (EXCLUSIVE) Vendetta Films has acquired the trilogy for Australia and New Zealand. 'We fell in love with 'Dreams' and we think this unique and mystery-filled spin on the age-old tale of a student falling for their teacher is perfect for modern audiences. We're so excited to bring Dag Johan Haugerud's trilogy to screens across Australia and New Zealand,' Jill Macnab, general manager of Vendetta Films, told Variety. In Mexico, the trilogy will be released by Cinemas Nueva Era, and Edko Films has picked up the trilogy for Hong Kong ahead of the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April, where 'Dreams' will screen as the closing film. Ukraine's SVOEkino has also acquired the trilogy. South Korea's JINJIN Pictures, which previously acquired 'Sex,' the trilogy's first installment, has now picked up 'Love' and 'Dreams' to complete the set. In Singapore, the trilogy has been acquired by Anticipate Pictures, whose recent releases include 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' and 'Anatomy of a Fall.' The three films will be released in the second half of 2025. 'Whimsical yet incisive, this trilogy introduces fresh concepts of love, sex and dreams in ways that will surprise and stimulate our Singapore audience,' Vincent Quek, founder of Anticipate Pictures, said. Further new sales for 'Dreams' include Cineplex, covering Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica and Peru, and Falcon Pictures, which has acquired 'Dreams' and 'Love' for Indonesia. All distributors will release the films theatrically. 'We are delighted to have secured such strong theatrical partnerships for the film,' said Maren Kroymann, managing director of M-Appeal. 'It's incredibly rewarding to see our team's efforts and the long-term strategy we've developed over the past year for the trilogy come to fruition.' The 'Sex Love Dreams' trilogy was produced by Yngve Sæther and Hege Hauff Hvattum for Motlys. The films were supported by the Norwegian Film Institute, Nordic Film and TV Fund, and the promotion activities for the trilogy were supported by MEDIA funding from the European Union. Previously announced deals for 'Dreams' include North America (Strand Releasing), France (Pyramide), Germany and Austria (Alamode), U.K. (Modern Films), Portugal (Films4You), Taiwan (Swallow Wings), Japan (Bitters End) and Bulgaria (Beta Films). Best of Variety The Best Celebrity Memoirs to Read This Year: From Chelsea Handler to Anthony Hopkins New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Oscars 2026: First Blind Predictions Including Timothée Chalamet, Emma Stone, 'Wicked: For Good' and More
Yahoo
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
When the Hater Becomes the Creator
In January, a short film full of French stereotypes went viral. Its titular protagonist, Johanne Sacreblu, is the trans heiress to a baguette business in Paris; her paramour is the scion of a croissant company. Everyone is almost always wearing berets and striped shirts, while extras roam the streets in mime makeup. Sometimes, people dressed as characters from the French animated series Miraculous inexplicably appear. Also, the whole thing's a musical. Yet Johanne Sacreblu was not made by a French cast and crew. Rather, its mastermind is Camila Aurora, a trans Mexican director. She wanted to skewer the making of Emilia Pérez, the French-produced, Spanish-language musical set in Mexico City about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions to a woman. So Aurora followed in the footsteps of Jacques Audiard, the French auteur who directed Emilia Pérez: She assembled a team that largely didn't match her characters' cultural backgrounds, staged Johanne nowhere near where it takes place, and apparently did very little research—as Audiard admitted of his preparation for his film—into her story's setting. The result is a strikingly original critique of Emilia Pérez, the movie with the most Oscar nominations this year. The film has been receiving serious backlash online in the form of analytical essays and social-media posts, but Johanne is different. It's an extremely silly, wholly inventive affair, complete with original music and choreography. Since the short's debut on YouTube at the end of January, it has racked up more than 3 million views. As Héctor Guillén, a Mexico City–based screenwriter who began a social-media campaign decrying Emilia Pérez, put it to me, Johanne Sacreblu is 'a sort of fan art.' Make that anti-fan art. Anti-fans, as pop-culture scholars have termed them, are similar to hate-watchers: consumers who become fixated on what frustrates them. Both groups tend to target something in the zeitgeist, but unlike hate-watchers, anti-fans tend to construct something new out of their annoyance or contempt. 'Anti-fans are folks who dig into something they dislike because there's something about it that really irks them,' Melissa Click, an associate professor at Gonzaga University and the author of Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, told me. 'There's something that they can't just ignore. It calls them in a certain way, in the same way that people who are fans of things get called into something.' And what they produce, Click added, can range from the relatively harmless (a meme or two, posted on a snarky subreddit) to the actively hateful (harassment of the subjects of their ire online or in person). [Read: A film impossible to have mild feelings about] Dislike has long fueled art. Kendrick Lamar's Grammy-winning 'Not Like Us,' a track made amid a feud with the rapper Drake, wouldn't exist without disdain. Nor would the live-action film version of Sonic the Hedgehog, whose design was overhauled after fans protested the character's original look. But the internet encourages the transformation of antipathy into creative fodder, and enables its dissemination. On platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, creators build personal brands off parodying celebrities and constructing elaborate takedowns of what's in the mainstream. They draw dedicated audiences interested in granular interrogations of pop culture. (The video essayist Jenny Nicholson's four-hour dissection of Disney World's Galactic Starcruiser—better known as 'the Star Wars hotel'—went viral last summer.) And the trajectory of Johanne Sacreblu suggests that online success can translate offline; the short film has enjoyed a limited theatrical run in Mexico City. Establishing yourself as a purveyor of anti-fan art seems to be good business, Suzanne Scott, the author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, told me. Anti-fan art is, she said, 'absolutely more visible as a phenomenon than it once was, and a lot of that has to do with the shareability of digital content … What I think is new and distinct about some of this is you see fans and fan influencers professionalizing themselves around this kind of content.' Michael Pavano, an actor who began posting his impersonations of celebrities during the coronavirus pandemic, has certainly benefited from the spread of anti-fandom. In January, he struck internet gold with a parody of Blake Lively's work in the romantic drama It Ends With Us. He wasn't familiar with the Colleen Hoover novel upon which the film is based; he'd watched the movie one night and wanted to offer some 'playful critique' afterward, he told me over Zoom. The next day, he'd donned a long auburn wig, turned on his camera, and uncannily captured Lively's expression throughout the movie by curling his lips and exaggerating her pout. The clip has accumulated more than 46 million views on TikTok, becoming his most popular upload yet. Pavano followed up by eagerly posting several more takes on Lively, who, as he played her, always seemed unable to change her morose appearance. Before long, however, he began seeing comments that were criticizing Lively herself. These arrived as Lively became embroiled in a legal battle against the film's director, an ongoing, headline-making case that divided viewers of It Ends With Us. Pavano felt that he needed to be more careful about how much Lively-related material he published. He was concerned that his work seemed to pander to the actor's critics, which was not his intention. 'For me, it's not about hate at all,' he said. He paused the impressions, telling his followers at the end of January that he 'might wait a couple weeks before I post her again.' But his new audience never stopped requesting more Lively, and Pavano told me that he felt that the actor's other roles, such as her work in the TV show Gossip Girl, were still worth riffing on—just for 'silly fun.' 'If Blake did reach out and say, you know, I'm not okay with this; this is really hurtful to me, of course I would listen,' he added. 'I would never capitalize on someone else's obvious hurt.' Last Sunday, Pavano indulged his audience by going live on TikTok for 12 hours, staying in character as variations of Lively's roles—including her part in It Ends With Us—the whole time. The relationship between fans and the subjects of their admiration has always been tricky. What begins as support—of a public figure, a pop-culture phenomenon, a franchise—can grow into obsession. The same goes for anti-fans; their dislike can turn noxious, and creators within this genre who attract their own devotees risk perpetuating the cycle. Just as fandoms can become perilously passionate, so too can anti-fandoms. 'People who have hated things have always existed,' Click explained, 'but being able to find other people so easily who also hate the thing you hate is something that's new.' The key to generating anti-fan art that doesn't elicit actual hostility, then, is care—authentic appreciation for the material being judged. Pavano may be mocking Lively's performance, but he's also studying it closely. Whenever he chooses a celebrity or an actor's work to imitate, he told me, he'll practice their quirks in the mirror for so long, he starts to feel like they're a part of him. 'It is sort of like a possession,' he said with a laugh. 'I visualize myself as this person … and I keep doing it until I feel the person.' Someone like the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson, too, is obviously deeply engaged with the various subjects of her critique. She often dresses up in the relevant franchise's merchandise—a headband sporting Na'vi ears while talking about Avatar, for instance—and contributes robust context about a subject's history; she makes it plain that she understands her topic's appeal. The team behind Johanne Sacreblu also scrutinized Emilia Pérez with rigor; the short opens with a number set in the streets of France, the same way Audiard's film does with Mexico. Such analysis doesn't mean that these creators love what they scorn; they establish their bona fides to show how informed they are to viewers who might suspect otherwise. 'They lead with this kind of deep fan knowledge and affect,' Scott said, 'so that when they are critical, it's coming off both as informed and … so you don't get the sense that they're doing it in bad faith.' [Read: The purest fandom is telling celebrities they're stupid] The best anti-fan art produces a clarifying effect, in other words, rather than inspiring pure derision. They're works of respectful rebellion that cut through the growing hum of online chatter and that, Click said, 'might encourage us to become more critical consumers,' the kind who generate thoughtful analyses of pop culture. In the case of Emilia Pérez, the objections to it have grown cacophonous. There have been essays by Mexican viewers denouncing its crude rendering of Mexico's drug-related violence; damning statements from LGBTQ advocacy organizations such as GLAAD, which called the film 'a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman'; and social-media posts condemning the offensive missives made by the movie's star. But Johanne Sacreblu delivers something fresh along with its creator's evident disapproval of Emilia Pérez. Guillén told me he admired that Aurora, 'instead of just trying to diminish other people's work,' made something original; in doing so, she highlighted what she found ludicrous about Audiard's approach while also offering a dose of humor, not anger. As he put it, 'I think it's way better to create something, right?' After all, without art, there wouldn't be fans—or anti-fans. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
When the Hater Becomes the Creator
In January, a short film full of French stereotypes went viral. Its titular protagonist, Johanne Sacreblu, is the trans heiress to a baguette business in Paris; her paramour is the scion of a croissant company. Everyone is almost always wearing berets and striped shirts, while extras roam the streets in mime makeup. Sometimes, people dressed as characters from the French animated series Miraculous inexplicably appear. Also, the whole thing's a musical. Yet Johanne Sacreblu was not made by a French cast and crew. Rather, its mastermind is Camila Aurora, a trans Mexican director. She wanted to skewer the making of Emilia Pérez, the French-produced, Spanish-language musical set in Mexico City about a Mexican cartel boss who transitions to a woman. So Aurora followed in the footsteps of Jacques Audiard, the French auteur who directed Emilia Pérez: She assembled a team that largely didn't match her characters' cultural backgrounds, staged Johanne nowhere near where it takes place, and apparently did very little research—as Audiard admitted of his preparation for his film —into her story's setting. The result is a strikingly original critique of Emilia Pérez, the movie with the most Oscar nominations this year. The film has been receiving serious backlash online in the form of analytical essays and social-media posts, but Johanne is different. It's an extremely silly, wholly inventive affair, complete with original music and choreography. Since the short's debut on YouTube at the end of January, it has racked up more than 3 million views. As Héctor Guillén, a Mexico City–based screenwriter who began a social-media campaign decrying Emilia Pérez, put it to me, Johanne Sacreblu is 'a sort of fan art.' Make that anti-fan art. Anti-fans, as pop-culture scholars have termed them, are similar to hate-watchers: consumers who become fixated on what frustrates them. Both groups tend to target something in the zeitgeist, but unlike hate-watchers, anti-fans tend to construct something new out of their annoyance or contempt. 'Anti-fans are folks who dig into something they dislike because there's something about it that really irks them,' Melissa Click, an associate professor at Gonzaga University and the author of Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age, told me. 'There's something that they can't just ignore. It calls them in a certain way, in the same way that people who are fans of things get called into something.' And what they produce, Click added, can range from the relatively harmless (a meme or two, posted on a snarky subreddit) to the actively hateful (harassment of the subjects of their ire online or in person). Dislike has long fueled art. Kendrick Lamar's Grammy-winning 'Not Like Us,' a track made amid a feud with the rapper Drake, wouldn't exist without disdain. Nor would the live-action film version of Sonic the Hedgehog, whose design was overhauled after fans protested the character's original look. But the internet encourages the transformation of antipathy into creative fodder, and enables its dissemination. On platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, creators build personal brands off parodying celebrities and constructing elaborate takedowns of what's in the mainstream. They draw dedicated audiences interested in granular interrogations of pop culture. (The video essayist Jenny Nicholson's four-hour dissection of Disney World's Galactic Starcruiser—better known as 'the Star Wars hotel'—went viral last summer.) And the trajectory of Johanne Sacreblu suggests that online success can translate offline; the short film has enjoyed a limited theatrical run in Mexico City. Establishing yourself as a purveyor of anti-fan art seems to be good business, Suzanne Scott, the author of Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry, told me. Anti-fan art is, she said, 'absolutely more visible as a phenomenon than it once was, and a lot of that has to do with the shareability of digital content … What I think is new and distinct about some of this is you see fans and fan influencers professionalizing themselves around this kind of content.' Michael Pavano, an actor who began posting his impersonations of celebrities during the coronavirus pandemic, has certainly benefited from the spread of anti-fandom. In January, he struck internet gold with a parody of Blake Lively's work in the romantic drama It Ends With Us. He wasn't familiar with the Colleen Hoover novel upon which the film is based; he'd watched the movie one night and wanted to offer some 'playful critique' afterward, he told me over Zoom. The next day, he'd donned a long auburn wig, turned on his camera, and uncannily captured Lively's expression throughout the movie by curling his lips and exaggerating her pout. The clip has accumulated more than 46 million views on TikTok, becoming his most popular upload yet. Pavano followed up by eagerly posting several more takes on Lively, who, as he played her, always seemed unable to change her morose appearance. Before long, however, he began seeing comments that were criticizing Lively herself. These arrived as Lively became embroiled in a legal battle against the film's director, an ongoing, headline-making case that divided viewers of It Ends With Us. Pavano felt that he needed to be more careful about how much Lively-related material he published. He was concerned that his work seemed to pander to the actor's critics, which was not his intention. 'For me, it's not about hate at all,' he said. He paused the impressions, telling his followers at the end of January that he 'might wait a couple weeks before I post her again.' But his new audience never stopped requesting more Lively, and Pavano told me that he felt that the actor's other roles, such as her work in the TV show Gossip Girl, were still worth riffing on—just for 'silly fun.' 'If Blake did reach out and say, you know, I'm not okay with this; this is really hurtful to me, of course I would listen,' he added. 'I would never capitalize on someone else's obvious hurt.' Last Sunday, Pavano indulged his audience by going live on TikTok for 12 hours, staying in character as variations of Lively's roles—including her part in It Ends With Us —the whole time. The relationship between fans and the subjects of their admiration has always been tricky. What begins as support—of a public figure, a pop-culture phenomenon, a franchise—can grow into obsession. The same goes for anti-fans; their dislike can turn noxious, and creators within this genre who attract their own devotees risk perpetuating the cycle. Just as fandoms can become perilously passionate, so too can anti-fandoms. 'People who have hated things have always existed,' Click explained, 'but being able to find other people so easily who also hate the thing you hate is something that's new.' The key to generating anti-fan art that doesn't elicit actual hostility, then, is care—authentic appreciation for the material being judged. Pavano may be mocking Lively's performance, but he's also studying it closely. Whenever he chooses a celebrity or an actor's work to imitate, he told me, he'll practice their quirks in the mirror for so long, he starts to feel like they're a part of him. 'It is sort of like a possession,' he said with a laugh. 'I visualize myself as this person … and I keep doing it until I feel the person.' Someone like the YouTuber Jenny Nicholson, too, is obviously deeply engaged with the various subjects of her critique. She often dresses up in the relevant franchise's merchandise—a headband sporting Na'vi ears while talking about Avatar, for instance—and contributes robust context about a subject's history; she makes it plain that she understands her topic's appeal. The team behind Johanne Sacreblu also scrutinized Emilia Pérez with rigor; the short opens with a number set in the streets of France, the same way Audiard's film does with Mexico. Such analysis doesn't mean that these creators love what they scorn; they establish their bona fides to show how informed they are to viewers who might suspect otherwise. 'They lead with this kind of deep fan knowledge and affect,' Scott said, 'so that when they are critical, it's coming off both as informed and … so you don't get the sense that they're doing it in bad faith.' The best anti-fan art produces a clarifying effect, in other words, rather than inspiring pure derision. They're works of respectful rebellion that cut through the growing hum of online chatter and that, Click said, 'might encourage us to become more critical consumers,' the kind who generate thoughtful analyses of pop culture. In the case of Emilia Pérez, the objections to it have grown cacophonous. There have been essays by Mexican viewers denouncing its crude rendering of Mexico's drug-related violence; damning statements from LGBTQ advocacy organizations such as GLAAD, which called the film 'a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman'; and social-media posts condemning the offensive missives made by the movie's star. But Johanne Sacreblu delivers something fresh along with its creator's evident disapproval of Emilia Pérez. Guillén told me he admired that Aurora, 'instead of just trying to diminish other people's work,' made something original; in doing so, she highlighted what she found ludicrous about Audiard's approach while also offering a dose of humor, not anger. As he put it, 'I think it's way better to create something, right?' After all, without art, there wouldn't be fans—or anti-fans.
