Entertainment
Filmmaker Brian Lindstrom, known for underdog documentaries, dies at 65
Brian Lindstrom, a filmmaker whose documentaries shined a light on society’s underdogs and inspired social change, has died. He was 65.
Lindstrom’s wife, author Cheryl Strayed, confirmed the news on Instagram Friday.
“Brian Lindstrom died this morning the way he lived — with gentleness and courage, grace and gratitude for his beautiful life,” she wrote. “Our children, Carver and Bobbi, and I held him as he took his last breath and we will hold him forever in our hearts. The only thing more immense than our sorrow that Progressive Supranuclear Palsy took our beloved Brian from us is the endless love we have for him.”
According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, PSP is caused by damage to nerve cells in areas of the brain that control thinking and body movements. The rare neurological disease progresses rapidly.
Strayed, who penned the bestselling memoir “Wild,” which was later adapted for the big screen and starred Reese Witherspoon, announced just weeks ago that Lindstrom had been diagnosed “with a serious, fatal illness.”
Lindstrom was born Feb. 12, 1961. The son of a bartender and a liquor salesman, he was raised in Portland, Ore. — which he and his family still called home.
He was the first member of his family to attend college, which he paid for by taking out student loans, landing work-study jobs and working summers in a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska. During a 2013 TEDx Talk, Lindstrom said that after he’d exhausted all the video production classes at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College, his professor Stuart Kaplan gave him a gift certificate to a class at the Northwest Film Center. There, Lindstrom made a short film about his grandpa that landed him a spot in the MFA program at Columbia University.
It was a train trip with his grandpa that inspired Lindstrom to tackle challenging topics with a lens that restored dignity to his subjects. His grandpa was a binge-drinker, and on day three of the trip, he woke up with a hangover and was missing his dentures. Lindstrom, only 5 at the time, noticed the way other passengers treated him and his grandpa differently.
“I think what my films are about is that search for my grandfather’s dentures, the humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between us and them and arrives at we,” he said.
Lindstrom said he returned to Portland after film school and “did several projects with the Northwest Film Center that had me putting a camera in the hands of kids on probation, homeless teens, newly recovering addicts, hard-hit people who had hard-hitting stories to share.”
“Those projects taught me so much about the transformative power of art, and they gave me permission I felt in my personal films to ask people if I might follow them, so that an audience could better understand what they were going through, and by extension, better understand themselves,” he said.
Lindstrom’s 2007 award-winning cinéma-vérité-style film, “Finding Normal,” followed long-term drug addicts as they left prison or detox and tried to rebuild their lives with the help of a recovery mentor.
“What I’m most proud about is that ‘Finding Normal’ is the only film to ever be shown to inmates in solitary confinement at Oregon State Penitentiary, and not, I might add, as a punishment,” Lindstrom said.
In 2013, he released “Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse,” a documentary that illuminated the life of a man who grappled with schizophrenia and examined his death, which happened in police custody. Discussing the film with LA Progressive in 2018, Lindstrom said that he doesn’t make films for audiences.
“I make them for the people in the film. It is my small way of honoring them,” he told the outlet. “That doesn’t mean I don’t delve into dark areas or that I ignore that person’s struggles. I’m much more concerned with trying to achieve an honest depiction of that person’s life than I am with any potential audience reaction.”
Lindstrom’s work aimed to inspire empathy and humanize those suffering in the margins of society, but it also catalyzed policy change. His acclaimed 2015 documentary, “Mothering Inside,” followed participants in the Family Preservation Project (FPP), an initiative helping incarnated moms establish and maintain bonds with their children.
Midway through filming the documentary, the Oregon Department of Corrections announced it planned to nix funding for the FPP. Lindstrom hosted early screenings of the film, which inspired grassroots advocacy that reached then-Gov. Kate Brown, who subsequently signed legislation that restored funding. The film’s release also helped make Oregon the first state in the U.S. to pass a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents.
Partnering with Strayed, Lindstrom made the documentary short, “I Am Not Untouchable. I Just Have My Period,” for the New York Times in 2019. The film highlighted the experience of teen girls in Surkhet, Nepal, and the menstrual stigma they faced. Most recently, the filmmaker released, “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill,” which examined the folk-rock singer’s life from her traumatic childhood and drug-addled adolescence through her rise in the Laurel Canyon music scene and untimely death.
Lindstrom, discussing “Judee Sill” and his style as a filmmaker, told Oregon ArtsWatch, “It’s the chance to kind of focus on the question: What does it mean to be human? The person that the film is about, what can they teach us, what can we learn from them? What can they learn from themselves?”
In 2017, Lindstrom received the Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon for his work advancing civil rights and liberties. That same year, he received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Lewis & Clark College.
In Strayed’s post announcing Lindstrom’s death, she described their more than 30-year partnership as a stroke of “tremendous luck.”
“We loved each other and our kids with deep devotion and true delight. He was a stellar husband. He was the most magnificent dad. He was a man whose every word and deed was driven by kindness, compassion, and generosity,” she wrote. “He saw the goodness in everyone. He believed that we are all sacred and redeemable.
“His work as a documentary filmmaker was dedicated to telling stories of people who, as he put it, ‘society puts an X through.’ He erased that X with his camera and his astonishing heart.”
Strayed’s memoir — which followed her as she hiked 1,100 miles along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of her mother’s death, a battle with drug addiction and divorce from her first husband — concludes with a happy ending. She finished the months-long hike and sat on a white bench near the Bridge of the Gods, a stone’s throw from the spot where, she writes, she’d marry Lindstrom four years later.
“His greatest legacy is Carver and Bobbi, who embody everything good and true about their father. Their extraordinary grace, courage, and fortitude during this harrowing time was unfaltering and grounded in the undying love Brian poured into them every day of their lives,” she wrote. “We do not know how we will live without him. We’re utterly bereft. We can only walk this dark path and search for the beauty Brian knew was there. It will be his eternal light that guides us.”
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, dir. Jerry Aronson (1993)
By Jonah Raskin
ALLEN GINSBERG performed his poetry in London, New York, Chicago, Prague and in other cities around the world, but his relationship with San Francisco stood out from all the others, not because he loved San Francisco more than any other place but rather because he wrote ‘Howl’ in San Francisco (and in Berkeley across the Bay).
Published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in San Francisco in 1956, ‘Howl’ made Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, the bookshop and the city famous and, in some circles, infamous for avant-garde poetry that shouted obscenities, evoked jazz and condemned war, mind control and materialism.
So, it’s not surprising that on the centenary of Ginsberg’s birth on June 3rd, 1926, several of the city’s cultural landmark institutions went all out to celebrate. The events kicked off on May 11th at the Chapel in the Mission District where the Kronos Quartet performed ‘Howl’ and other poems.
Sponsored by City Lights, it featured headliners such as folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Digger co-founder Peter Coyote, Tongo Eisen-Martin, an ex-poet SF laureate, Dominique di Prima, daughter of Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima, and novelist Kim Stanley Robinson. Tickets sold for $45; registration was required.
The centenary fêtes ended a month later on June 6th at the Roxy Theater, also in the Mission, with a screening of Jerry Aronson’s documentary The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg. In between the first and the last events there were readings of Ginsberg’s work at the Counterculture Museum in the Haight-Asbbury – one of the birthplaces of hippiedom – and at Bird & Beckett, a bookstore in the Glen Park neighborhood that hosts weekly jazz and monthly poetry readings.
Pictured above: Jerry Cimino of the Counterculture Museum reads Ginsberg at a centenary event
Along with Jerry Cimino, Steve Helig and Brandon Loberg, I read from Ginsberg’s vast oeuvre. My selection was ‘A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley’, which was written in 1955 at the same time that the poet wrote ‘Howl’, but that was not published until the 1960s. That event was fun. There was even cake.
On a more serious evening, I attended the screening of Jerry Aronson’s doc The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, along with my brother Daniel and Gloria Alonzo, a Latina, a friend of the family and a long time Ginsberg fan. First released in 1993, Aronson updated his doc when Ginsberg died in 1997.
A DVD was released in 2007 with added interviews with Paul McCartney, Bono, Yoko Ono, Johnny Depp and Patti Smith. Almost everybody in the world of rock and the Beats has wanted to be seen and heard with the poet who defied the state in Cuba, Czechoslovakia and the USA and who was never awarded a major literary prize in the land of his birth.
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg shows why he was so popular with the folks pursued by the paparazzi, though that was not Aronson’s explicit intention. The documentary moves from Ginsberg’s birth in 1926 to his death seventy years later. Surprisingly, it does not explore the writing of ‘Howl’, the publication of ‘Howl’ or the trial of ‘Howl’ in 1957 when Ferlinghetti was found not guilty of obscenity.
Hey, as most savvy San Franciscans knew, it was the society at large that was obscene, not the poet and his poem. Perhaps Aronson felt that there had already been enough attention to the San Francisco chapters of the Allen Ginsberg story to add it to his account.
The film ends with Ginsberg’s demise, but its emotional and visual crescendo occurs in Chicago in 1968 where the police attacked peaceful protesters, and where Ginsberg chanted and aimed to avoid what he called ‘a bloodbath’. In hindsight, he was clearly prescient. The demonstrations led to the election of Richard Nixon and five more years of the war in Vietnam. Ginsberg was as radical as Percy Bysshe Shelley who called poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Pictured above: Allen Ginsberg’s gravestone
Aronson includes black-and-white archival footage, plus interviews with singer Joan Baez, Yippie Abbie Hoffman, Merry Prankster Ken Kesey and others, as well as highlights from Ginsberg’s TV appearances with mild mannered Dick Cavett and firebrand William F. Buckley, who seems to have been charmed by the cheeky poet who called the host a ‘conservative’ and described himself as ‘a faggot’.
Aronson’s documentary shows the gay poet as fearless and as an extraordinarily able performer. Ferlinghetti once observed that after his early success with Howl and Other Poems and Kaddish, Ginsberg didn’t develop as a poet, but that he remained a versatile performer of his own work his whole life.
The Life and Times shows that’s so. The film includes emotionally moving clips of Ginsberg’s loving step-mother Edith, his poet/father Louis, and a cast of thousands – the usual suspects – who gathered with him in the streets of Prague, Chicago and elsewhere.
If you want an introduction to Allen Ginsberg, his work and the era that shaped him and that he in turn shaped, you can’t go wrong with Aronson’s well-put together, entertaining documentary. And if you want a journey down memory lane to refresh your own album of Ginsberg’s images this is also the place to go. There will probably not be this many loving celebrations of the life and work of the poet who wrote, in ‘America’, ‘go fuck yourself with your atom bomb’. Not for another 100 years.
Entertainment
How the ‘Masters of the Universe’ post-credits scenes introduce you-know-who and make the case for a sequel
This story includes spoilers for “Masters of the Universe.”
He-Man has made his way back to the big screen thanks to the power of Grayskull — and Hollywood’s love of nostalgia.
Now in theaters, “Masters of the Universe” stars Nicholas Galitzine as Eternia’s long-lost Prince Adam. Working a menial HR job after getting stranded on Earth as a child, Adam “(he/him)” dreams of reuniting with his Sword of Power in order to make his way back home.
Spoiler: He does (with a little help from his friends).
Helmed by “Bumblebee” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” director Travis Knight, the movie is “a dopey, friendly comedy about modern masculinity in crisis with a He-Man who openly wonders what kind of a man to be,” according to a review by Times film critic Amy Nicholson.
Much like the first live-action film around the popular 1980s toyline, the new “Masters of the Universe” features a couple of post-credits scenes that tease what could come in the franchise’s future. But for now, fans will have to wait to learn whether a sequel is forthcoming.
Yes, Orko is in the He-Man movie
Fans of the He-Man franchise can rejoice because everyone’s favorite floating wizard (and court jester) does make an appearance after the main “Masters of the Universe” story ends. In a nod to the animated Filmation series in which the character originated, Orko appears in a brief stinger after the conclusion of the film in order to share what lessons audiences could learn from the story they just watched.
Has He-Man seen the last of Skeletor (Jared Leto)?
(Amazon MGM Studios / Prime)
The mid-credits scene introduces a familiar hero
The most significant of the bonus scenes comes in the middle of the credits. The scene opens with Prince Adam’s mother, Queen Marlena (Charlotte Riley), sharing a moment with Duncan (Idris Elba).
After the queen mentions she had given up hope for reuniting with “both of them,” Man-At-Arms replies “perhaps one day she’ll come back to us too.”
The scene then cuts to the “she” in question, wearing a red cape and holding a familiar sword.
“Force Captain… Adora?” calls out a voice.
“No, not anymore,” she replies.
Those familiar with the lore of the “Masters of the Universe” franchise will recognize that the mysterious woman is Adam’s long-lost twin sister, Adora. The most common backstory is that Adora was kidnapped by Hordak as an infant and raised on the planet Etheria as a member of his Evil Horde. She eventually learns the truth about her heritage and defects to fight for good.
The Sword of Protection gives her the power to transform into the hero She-Ra.
Is that the last post-credits scene?
Nope. The final stinger shown after the credits are done rolling involves Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) and Skeletor (Jared Leto). It appears He-Man has not seen the last of his nemesis — as long as a sequel is greenlit.
Movie Reviews
Supergirl Movie Critics Reviews Are On the Way — Here Are The Good – And Bad – Reactions DC Studios’ First Female-Led Film Is Expected To Bring
Supergirl reviews are almost ready to be released, as viewers wait for the results. Directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Ana Nogueira, Supergirl will be DC Studios’ second theatrical release after kicking the franchise off last summer with Superman. After that movie earned largely positive reviews from critics, the question is whether the DCU’s next big-screen release can match that hype.
As revealed by @EmbargoLiftsFor on X, the review embargo for DC Studios’ Supergirl will lift on Wednesday, June 24. This comes only two days before Milly Alcock’s solo movie for Kara Zor-El is released in theaters worldwide on Friday, June 26.
The review embargo being lifted only two days before the movie’s release could be seen as a concern, as this usually happens when studios lack confidence in a movie’s success. Reportedly budgeting over $200 million, Supergirl has work to do to become a financial success for Warner Bros., even with plenty to look forward to in the titular character’s first big-screen appearance in well over 40 years.
Ahead is what fans can potentially expect from those reviews, based on what has been reported in rumors and from test screenings for Supergirl.
Early Teases for Supergirl Critic Reviews & Reactions
Milly Alcock Shines as Supergirl
According to @Cryptic4kQual, after test screenings, Milly Alcock was “praised for her acting in the role” as the film’s leading star. This should help motivate fans to head to theaters to see Alcock as Kara Zor-El.
This film will give Alcock her second appearance in the DCU, following a short cameo at the end of 2025’s Superman, in which she arrived at the Fortress of Solitude to retrieve Krypto. Now, she will get her own adventure away from the Man of Steel, giving Alcock the chance to fully flesh out the role.
Jason Momoa Is Fun as Lobo
Following a long run in the former DCEU as Aquaman, Jason Momoa will join James Gunn’s DCU as Lobo, which he has described as his dream comic book role. While reports have gone back and forth about how big his role in the movie is, he appears to be a highlight.
As reported by @AxelTalksFilm, “Lobo has a substantial role in the film, and is crucial to the ending.” Other reports suggest he’s in 10-20% of the movie, but the time he spends on screen is sure to be memorable.
Shaky Visuals
One of the most notable critical talking points for any movie, especially modern superhero movies, is the visuals and VFX. For Supergirl, early rumors hint that this may not be the most positive talking point for the DCU’s second theatrical release.
Reported by BobaTalks on YouTube, the movie does not seem to use many of the exciting psychedelic visuals fans know from the Woman of Tomorrow source comic, even with unfinished VFX. While this could be adjusted before the film is released, it is certainly a point of concern from a visual perspective.
A Mixed Villain
After Lex Luthor served as the main villain in Superman, Supergirl will move on to another classic comic book villain, Krem of the Yellow Hills, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. While he is the same antagonist used in the original comic the movie is based on, the results of his inclusion are mixed.
@Cryptic4KQual called Krem “underwhelming” as a villain, while @AxelTalksFilm noted that he was “described as extremely ‘menacing’ and a tremendous villian.” Additionally, BobaTalks reported that Krem was “underdeveloped” and looked similar to the rest of his goons, sparking concern that he was fairly generic.
Balanced Tone
One major lingering question about the DCU is its tone, especially with new movies like Clayface introducing horror elements. With Supergirl set to come before that movie and after Superman, its tone will be another major talking point upon its release.
Reported by @AxeTalksFilm, the “cinematography is an upgrade” to what fans saw in Superman, including one specific scene in a hallway that can be compared “to the action sequences of those in Daredevil and Guardians 3.” Additionally, it is much “darker and [more] serious in tone” than Superman, suggesting a more grounded story behind Milly Alcock’s heroine.
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