Pattinson and Hoult Screen-Test for James Bond

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Coming up on Spotlight: Batman and Lex Luthor walk into a James Bond audition, an animation legend insists his Dior film was drawn by hand, and Olivia Rodrigo's Christmas song gets a blessing from the man who wrote Christmas Wrapping.

Bond first. Amazon MGM's search for the next 007 has reached screen tests, and on Friday night Deadline and Variety reported two surprise names among the actors who tested: Robert Pattinson and Nicholas Hoult. Amazon declined to comment. According to Deadline's sources, they joined Callum Turner, Josh O'Connor and Jack Lowden, three names that have been circling for months.

The superhero math is pretty funny. Pattinson is DC's current Batman, and Hoult plays Lex Luthor in its Superman films. Pattinson also has an edge: he has already worked with Denis Villeneuve, who is directing Bond 26, in Dune: Part Three, out December 18. Deadline says a decision could come before Thanksgiving. Hoult, meanwhile, has a heist comedy in theaters next Friday called How to Rob a Bank, a convenient title for a man trying out to be a spy.

Pattinson and O'Connor share another credit this week. Both voice Christian Dior's Night in Color, a six-minute holiday film from Sylvain Chomet, the French animator behind The Triplets of Belleville. Pattinson narrates, O'Connor plays a talking chair, and Rihanna is Dior's lucky star, in a story about Marlene Dietrich's director suddenly switching to color and Dior's seamstresses racing to make her a gown overnight.

Since it came out Wednesday, people online have been passing around frames, including a hand with six fingers, as proof it was made with generative AI. Chomet told Variety that's wrong. His producer says it took seven months and about twenty people, including six animators. They acknowledge an automated tool helped with some in-between frames, the fill-in drawings that smooth out motion, but say every character, background and key pose was drawn. As for the finger, Chomet says a hand spreading like a fan can show six or seven in motion, and he has seen classic cartoons where a nose changes shape over five frames. He also notes the irony: he kept making hand-drawn films back when Disney was declaring 2D animation dead.

It has been a jumpy week for this argument. In France, Philippe Jaenada won the Prix Goncourt on Tuesday, then told France Inter he had slipped one ChatGPT-written sentence into his novel to play with the reader. Now viewers are hunting for the machine in a film its makers say was drawn by people.

Some sad news from Chile. Sebastián Lelio, the writer and director of A Fantastic Woman, died Friday at his home in Santiago, following what his partner called health complications. He was 52. A Fantastic Woman starred Daniela Vega as a trans woman shut out of mourning the man she loved, and it won the 2018 Oscar for foreign language film, still Chile's only win in that category. Most of his films centered on women pushing back against people who underestimate them: Paulina García in Gloria, Julianne Moore in his American remake Gloria Bell, Florence Pugh in The Wonder. He was making an adaptation of Alejandro Zambra's novel Chilean Poet when he died. If you have never seen his work, Gloria is a lovely place to start.

Today is N7 Day, the annual Mass Effect celebration, arriving a few weeks after EA closed BioWare and halted Mass Effect development. The fans are not letting it go. On Friday a group called We Are Mass Effect drove a Save Mass Effect billboard truck around EA's headquarters in Redwood City; another heads to BioWare's former offices today, and one more is planned outside The Game Awards. A fan petition has passed 300,000 signatures, and in Canada, member of Parliament Don Davies is sponsoring an official House of Commons petition asking the government to fund BioWare's employees to buy their studio back. Whether Ottawa acts is another matter. Today the group is asking players to boot up Mass Effect Legendary Edition on Steam.

Olivia Rodrigo released her first holiday single, Take Me Home (4 Christmas), late Thursday, and some listeners immediately compared it to the Waitresses' 1981 new wave classic Christmas Wrapping. The man who wrote that song, Chris Butler, now 77, settled it on Facebook: "The vibe is there, but no plagiarism." He got a preview two months ago, when Rodrigo emailed him, gushing about the Waitresses. Butler, who did not know who she was, assumed it was fake. He wrote back anyway, "if you really are you," with a list of things he liked, including that she held on to her masters. Then they met after her show in Columbus. His verdict: a smash, maybe even a UK Christmas number one.

One discovery for the weekend. Kogonada, the video essayist who made Columbus and After Yang, had a rough time with his studio film A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. His answer was Zi, shot in Hong Kong with no script and next to no budget, now in select theaters from Grasshopper Film. Michelle Mao plays a young violinist who sees visions of her future self while waiting a day for medical test results, and Haley Lu Richardson plays an American former dancer, in a startling blonde wig, who keeps her company for one night, all over a soundtrack drawing on Ryuichi Sakamoto. IndieWire's David Ehrlich calls it a searching, unformed wisp of an experiment that didn't hook him but did haunt him. Kogonada calls it "a retreat, as well as a pursuit."

That's Spotlight for Saturday. If your weekend calls for something hushed, Zi is out there; if it calls for a Christmas banger, Olivia Rodrigo and Chris Butler agree you're covered. See you tomorrow.