New Horizons Alexander Payne is back and PRSRT STD U.S. POSTAGE PAID OMAHA NE PERMIT NO. 389
A publication of the Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging
November 2023 | Vol. 48 | No. 11
better than ever, in latest film
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By Leo Adam Biga ritical acclaim for Alexander Payne’s new holiday-themed film The Holdovers followed world premiere screenings at the Telluride, Toronto and London film festivals and an initial October 27 in select New York City and Los Angeles theaters. The film, along with Omaha native Payne, star Paul Giamatti and screenwriter David Hemingson are touted as sure-fire Oscar-nominees. Releasing widely November 10, the picture makes its formal Omaha premiere November 11 at the Film Streams Dundee Theater. A reception precedes the 7 p.m. screening. A post-show Q&A features Payne and Washington Post chief film critic Ann Hornaday. The film finds Payne revisiting subjects of love, regret and family that permeate his work. Just as he explored aging in About Schmidt and Nebraska, he explores it anew in The Holdovers, which also marks his reunion with Giamatti, who starred in his Sideways. Giamatti came to Omaha in 2019 for a program in which the director interviewed the actor live on stage before a full house at the Holland Performing Arts Center in Omaha. The eight-week Holdovers production shot in New England from January through March 2022. Editor
COURTESY PHOTO Kevin Tent joined Payne in Omaha to start cutting the film before they finished up in Los Angeles. Essentially a three-character piece, it’s the kind of small scale, personal project Payne prefers and didn’t have with his last film, the bloated Downsizing. “Making this film has been complete pleasure,” Payne said. “It feels like a return to form for me I think. A real joy was working with Paul Giamatti again. I had been dying to work with him again since Sideways, and finally created the right vehicle for him.” A NEW DYNAMIC Entrusting the script to Hemingson, a veteran television writer, pro-
ducer and show-runner best known for Whiskey Cavalier and Kitchen Confidential, was a departure for Payne, a two-time Oscar-winner for Best Adapted Screenplay with Jim Taylor. Indeed, Payne wrote alone or in tandem with Taylor all of the previous features he directed except for Nebraska, which Robert Nelson penned. In Hemingson, Payne’s found a close friend and an important new collaborator. The two are researching a Western to be set and shot in Nebraska. “It’s kind of a dream come true thing when you’re a fan who gets to work with the master,” Hemingson said of Payne. “When you watch all his movies there’s a continuity in
terms of emotionally resonant comedy penetrating inside the human condition. It’s just brilliant.” The intimate collaboration with Payne, said Hemingson, represented “a new experience for me.” “I’ve never worked with anyone this closely before and I don’t think I’ve ever had as good a time.” As a TV writer, he said, “I’ve learned to work really quickly. I could absorb his notes and adjust and move forward.” Giamatti plays protagonist Paul Hunham, an arch educator at the fictional elite prep boys boarding school, Barton Academy, outside Boston in 1970. A former student there with a complicated past, he’s a Barton lifer. Hemingson was keenly aware Payne always intended Giamatti in the role of Hunham. “He had this long-held idea with this specific teacher who’s kind of an awkwardly challenged misanthrope. Very much from the get go it was like, I’m writing this for Paul Giamatti. I had this is my head. So when I was writing the dialogue I would go back and look at everything of Giamatti in John Adams, in Sideways, in American Splendor, in Win-Win, which is fantastic. “I watched what he leans to. Then I kind of wrote from that role from emotional stuff I had with my own --Payne continued on page 9.
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Game on: Older adults battle boredom with board games
There has been quite a resurgence in the popularity of board games, and for many people, playing board games connects them with their past. Read more about board games, on Page 16.