Did you see ‘The Brutalist’ this weekend?

Adrien Brody as an architect in “The Brutalist.”

(A24)

What do you say when a child asks whether Santa is real? For years, my wife and I took our kids to see the same jolly ol’ Santa for a photo and a reading of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” Then, one year they saw “Santa” getting out of his Honda Civic in the mall parking lot. After he walked away, they looked through the car window and spied a bunch of takeout bags from McDonald’s. There wasn’t a sugar plum in sight.

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope’s Monday newsletter, wishing you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, a pocket full of money and a cellar full of beer.

‘The Brutalist’ (with intermission) has arrived

“The Brutalist,” Brady Corbet’s provocative portrait of an immigrant architect wrestling with the American Dream, opened this past weekend. But it’s only playing at the AMC Century 15 and I would not blame you if you decided to avoid the hellscape that is the Westfield Century City mall’s parking garage and wait until it comes to a more forgiving locale.

I saw the movie a second time on Thursday at that theater and spent 15 minutes looking for a parking space. And because “The Brutalist” is three and a half hours long, I ended up paying $16 for the privilege. You could always move your car, exiting and reentering during the film’s 15-minute intermission as a writer friend sitting next to me did. And he almost made it back in time!

Times film critic Amy Nicholson recommends the film, though she, like me, has some issues with the second half and, in particular, one scene that she says plays like a “queasy bad-taste joke about how artists get screwed.” My old friend Mark Olsen talked with Guy Pearce, who is marvelous playing the movie’s big shot tycoon benefactor who commissions László Tóth (Adrien Brody) to build a monumental community center.

“It was pretty clear to me in the script who this guy was as far as his personality and his energy,” Pearce told Mark. “I’m sure that Brady will have done a whole lot of homework on the Rockefellers and Barnes and all different kinds of people. And he probably mentioned some of those people to me, but I certainly didn’t feel like I even needed to go and investigate those people to understand. I just read it and I could have started the next day, to be honest.”

Guy Pearce has a key role in “The Brutalist.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

How Angelina Jolie conquered fear and learned to sing for ‘Maria’

A much easier movie to see right now, provided you subscribe to Netflix, is “Maria.” It’s right there on the platform. You don’t have to circle the parking garage, saying a silent prayer that those people carrying bags will stop right before your car, enter their vehicle and take, say, less than 10 minutes to exit their parking space.

Times contributor Dave Itzkoff spoke with Angelina Jolie and the team behind “Maria,” a dramatization of the final days of legendary opera singer Maria Callas. As you might imagine, playing Callas was a daunting task, one that gave Jolie pause before accepting director Pablo Larraín’s offer.

“I didn’t have the confidence in myself, necessarily, to do it,” she told Dave.

Later, reflecting on Callas’ despondency over her vocal decline, Jolie noted, “My motherhood is the only thing that I couldn’t live without, Truly, you could take everything else. I’d be fine.”

Jolie adds she did gain some insight into Callas by telling her story in the company of other “slightly broken” and “sensitive” people. “I’ve been one my whole life,” she notes. “Sensitive people feel a lot, and they worry a lot. They also create a lot, and they connect in beautiful ways.”

Angelina Jolie stars in “Maria,” a dramatization of the last days of opera singer Maria Callas.

(Victoria Will / For The Times)