Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 138 Shares76 Views

    in Movies

    Cannes: Coralie Fargeat Doesn’t Shy Away From Gore in Her Films

    The director Coralie Fargeat’s films don’t shy away from violence and gore, including her latest which is vying for the top prize at Cannes.The movies of Coralie Fargeat are not for the fainthearted: Blood and gore play an absolutely central role.There was so much of it in her body-horror movie “Revenge” (2017) — her first full-length feature — that, on set in Morocco, extra quantities of fake blood had to be constantly prepared using ingredients shipped over from France.Fargeat’s new title “The Substance” — starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid — promises to be no less violent and is one of 22 contenders for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which begins on Tuesday.Fargeat, who was born in Paris, took up filmmaking from a very young age, making little movies of her toys, and developed a passion for genre movies thanks to her grandfather, who let the 12- or 13-year-old Coralie watch films her parents considered too violent: the “Rambo” series, “RoboCop” and “The Fly.”Later, while finishing her university studies at Sciences Po in Paris, she noticed a film shoot in the university courtyard one day and asked the assistant director for an internship. She interned on the set of his next movie, and spent the next two years doing other internships to learn the ropes.Releasing a number of critically acclaimed shorts, she presented “Revenge” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and got plenty of attention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares54 Views

    in Movies

    At Cannes, Un Certain Regard Offers a Different Perspective

    While not receiving the same attention as the main competition, the sidebar is where you often glimpse the future of cinema.The British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker was on vacation in Rome on May 26, 2023, when her phone rang. A week earlier, her feature debut “How to Have Sex” had premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, festival organizers were calling because her movie, about a group of 16-year-old girls who spend a debauched booze and sex-soaked summer vacation on the Greek island of Crete, had won a prize that would be announced at that evening’s closing ceremony back on the Côte d’Azur.“I had to drive to the nearest airport really quickly and get on the next plane and I ran in three minutes after the film had been announced,” Manning Walker, 30, recalled in a recent phone interview.She wasn’t exaggerating. She did, in fact, bolt into the cinema wearing a lime green T-shirt and black tennis shorts. “What the hell is going on?” she asked the audience in disbelief. The answer was that “How to Have Sex” had won the top award in Un Certain Regard, the sidebar section at the festival that is known for recognizing films by new and emerging directors.While the starry main competition at Cannes — which begins on Tuesday, and this year features new work by David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and other established filmmakers — attracts most of the media’s attention, Un Certain Regard, which translates to “a certain look,” is where one can most reliably glimpse where world cinema is headed. In the words of Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, “U.C.R. discovers and celebrates the new generation and expands the frontiers of cinema.”Last year, Molly Manning Walker rushed back from Rome to Cannes to accept the prize for her feature debut, “How to Have Sex.”Ammar Abd Rabbo/Abaca/Sipa, via Associated PressIn an email interview, Frémaux, who heads the viewing committee that selects the films that screen at the festival, said that Un Certain Regard’s purpose was “to bring out new trends, new paths, new countries of cinema. It’s a selection that favors young filmmakers, especially female directors, and prepares the emergence of future generations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares54 Views

    in Movies

    Cannes Film Festival: More From India Than Just Bollywood

    This year’s edition of the annual film festival features a prominent presence of Indian stories and storytellers that celebrates the country’s independent cinema.For the first time in 30 years at the Cannes Film Festival, an Indian film will compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition, alongside new movies from Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold.The dry spell might come as a surprise for a country with film industries in multiple regions producing hundreds of films per year, including international sensations like last year’s Oscar-nominated “RRR.”But the inclusion of “All We Imagine as Light,” directed by Payal Kapadia, reflects a growing recognition of the independent cinema made in the shadow of the country’s mainstream hits.Thierry Frémaux, the artistic director of Cannes, noted the new generations of filmmakers in India when he announced the lineup in April. These movies offer what the critic Namrata Joshi calls “a young, probing, and provoking gaze at Indian reality.” Indian publications have celebrated the country’s prominent presence at the festival, whose inaugural edition in 1946 included a film from India, Chetan Anand’s “Neecha Nagar,” in its grand prize category.“All We Imagine as Light” joins a generally notable selection of Indian stories and storytellers across this year’s edition, which begins on Tuesday. Santosh Sivan will be the first Indian filmmaker to receive the Pierre Angénieux prize for career achievement in cinematography, and in the Un Certain Regard competition, Sandhya Suri’s “Santosh” follows a widow who takes on her husband’s policeman post.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares93 Views

    in Movies

    What Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor

    Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing.Nobody’s ever really known what to do with Mary Flannery O’Connor. They didn’t know when she was alive, and they haven’t known since she died in 1964, at 39, after years of battling through lupus to write her nervy, weird stories about Southerners, sin, religion and the God to whom she prayed so fervently. Her mother, Regina, with whom O’Connor lived for the last third of her life in Milledgeville, Ga., once asked her daughter’s publisher, Robert Giroux, if he couldn’t “get Flannery to write about nice people.” He couldn’t. Not that he would try.O’Connor in 1959 on the steps of her home in Milledgeville, Ga. She’s a patron saint to writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation.Floyd Edwin Jillson/ Atlanta Journal- Constitution Via Associated PressThe screen adaptations of O’Connor’s work have not quite captured her essence either, though some attempts have been more successful than others. A telling instance comes in “The Life You Save,” a 1957 TV adaptation of her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” starring Gene Kelly in his first small-screen role. He plays Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant who talks a woman into taking him on as her handyman, then marries her mute, deaf daughter, Lucynell. Tom and Lucynell drive off toward their honeymoon and then, at a diner, as Lucynell naps on the counter, Tom makes his getaway. In the story, Tom picks up a hitchhiker, who insults him before leaping out of the car, and Tom just keeps driving away. In the TV version, however — presumably to avoid offending viewers’ delicate sensibilities — Tom has a change of heart, returning to the diner to retrieve Lucynell after all.That kind of moment would never have made it into an O’Connor story. She saw the episode, and “the best I can say for it is that conceivably it could have been worse,” she said. “Just conceivably.” (It paid for a new refrigerator for her and Regina.) She was not interested in writing tales of cheap redemption, or those that dramatize a change of heart that brings about a pasted-on happy ending, even if they’d have sold a lot better. Her stories are full of darker things, the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” as she put it. A traveling Bible salesman steals a dour intellectual woman’s false leg. A young man berates his mother for her backward views on race until she has a stroke. A family on the way to a vacation is murdered by a roving serial killer. A pious woman beats the hell out of her reprobate husband after he gets a giant tattoo of Jesus on his back.“Wise Blood,” John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name, comes much closer to her uncomfortable tales of uncomfortable grace. The book was adapted by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, sons of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, close friends of O’Connor (she lived with them for a while, and they edited “Mystery and Manners,” her 1969 collection of lectures and essays). “Wise Blood” is the story of a somewhat unhinged veteran named Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), the grandson of a traveling preacher, who returns to his Tennessee home and tries to spread an antireligious gospel, only to discover he can’t quite get away from God. The Fitzgeralds chose Huston to direct in part because he, like Motes, was an avowed atheist, and they thought that’s what O’Connor would have wanted: a director who wasn’t afraid to skewer the pieties of her native South. But on the last day of shooting, Huston turned to Benedict Fitzgerald and said, “I’ve been had.” He realized he hadn’t managed to tell an atheist’s story at all. He’d told O’Connor’s story, and that meant it was soaked in hideous divine grace.Brad Dourif as a somewhat unhinged veteran trying to spread an antireligious gospel in “Wise Blood.”Anthea FilmWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 100 Shares93 Views

    in Music

    The Power and Beauty of African Guitar Greats

    Hear songs by Mdou Moctar, Bombino, Orchestra Baobab and more.Mdou Moctar onstage at Coachella in April.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for CoachellaDear listeners,For today’s Amplifier, your proprietor Lindsay Zoladz graciously lent me the keys for a little tour of Africa to celebrate some of the continent’s guitar greats. It was prompted by my recent profile of Mdou Moctar, the axeman from Niger who has built up a following with a tight band and stunning solos that can sound somewhere between vintage psychedelia and the so-called desert blues — a modern update of the African rhythmic and harmonic traditions that underlie so much popular music in the West, including the blues (and rock, and jazz, and R&B …).But honestly, any excuse is a good one to delve into this music and explore some of the characters behind it. There’s Ali Farka Touré, the Malian poet of the guitar, who learned from exposure to American bluesmen like John Lee Hooker but bristled at the idea that he was anything but an African purist. There’s Orchestra Baobab, whose songs are evidence of how musical styles pingpong around the world and can continue to evolve after returning home. And Oliver Mtukudzi, a force for justice and human rights who put music in service of his message.When I interviewed Moctar, much of our conversation was about politics. His latest album, “Funeral for Justice,” is a take-no-prisoners assault on the legacy of colonialism in Africa, which includes the struggles of the Tuareg, a historically nomadic ethnic group in the Sahara region that are divided by national borders. Political statements are scarce in American pop music these days, but they are a vital part of many of the tracks here, in ways that can be direct or oblique.This playlist is an assortment of some of my favorites, but is by no means meant as an exhaustive list, musically or geographically. If you’re new to this, I hope it can help you get started on a lifetime of exploration.Thanks for listening,BenListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 100 Shares82 Views

    in Movies

    What’s Your Favorite Soundtrack? We Want to Know.

    We’re asking readers to share the movie-related albums that they return to again and again.In my tween years, the soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever” was on repeat for months in my bedroom. This was via, ahem, an eight-track tape player. So, three or four cuts, clunky pause, three or four more, and so on. Listening this way was work, that’s how much I loved this music.Too young to see the R-rated movie itself, I only had a hazy — and, as it turned out, completely incorrect — idea of what it was about. Imagine my surprise years later when I discovered it was a drama, not the lighthearted ode to dancing that I pictured. (To put it another way: What if you were expecting “Barbie” and got “Oppenheimer”?) It’s not a bad film, but instead of the moves of John Travolta, it’s the sounds of the Bee Gees and Yvonne Elliman that are permanently etched in my memory.Some of the soundtracks I played incessantly back then, such as “Star Wars” (really more of a score, but still completely thrilling) and “Grease” (c’mon), were more or less universally popular; others (“Fame,” which I haven’t revisited since; no idea if it holds up) seemed like private obsessions. Years later, that’s how the “Garden State” soundtrack felt even though it became a cultural phenomenon.As you can probably tell, I’ve always loved soundtracks. There are the individual songs, of course, but somehow it’s the album-ness of the thing — immersing me in a vibe, and reminding me of where I was and who I was when I first heard it.My favorites (like “Purple Rain,” “Pulp Fiction” and “The Matador”) aren’t too surprising for a Gen X-er like myself. But with “Barbie” and other new movie-related albums in the last year, including the latest, “I Saw the TV Glow,” getting so much love from younger moviegoers, I got to thinking about different eras of film and music and wondering what other soundtracks I should be checking out.So I’m asking you, readers, what soundtracks do you obsess over? Why do you return to them? I would love to hear your thoughts. Fill out the form below, and your response may be featured in an upcoming story. We will not publish or share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. More

  • 75 Shares54 Views

    in Music

    Review: Robert Ashley’s ‘Foreign Experiences’ Returns

    Robert Ashley’s 1994 opera “Foreign Experiences,” a portrait of a paranoid mind in free fall, is part of a wave of revivals following his death.The makings of opera are quite simple. Strip away the clichés of an opulent art form populated by Viking helmets and powdered wigs (and more than 400 years of history), and you end up with DNA shared by Claudio Monteverdi, Richard Wagner and Meredith Monk across centuries: an artificial, elevated form of speech that reaches for the sublime.Few composers have tested the fundamental qualities of opera as much as Robert Ashley, who died a decade ago at 83. He stretched language and banality to operatic extremes, exalting discarded bits of life as if they were cosmic, in stylized declamation that is every bit as musical as Mozart.Hardly mainstream, Ashley’s works were often performed as he wrote them, then talked about more than staged. Since his death, though, there has been a wave of fresh recordings and revivals, the latest of which is “Foreign Experiences” (1994), now running at Roulette in Brooklyn. A portrait of a mind in free fall, red-pilled before we were talking about red-pilling, it is essential viewing for those interested in the possibilities of opera.Picture an opera made entirely of a mad scene, and you have “Foreign Experiences,” an installment in “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” Ashley’s tetralogy whose construction recalls another four-work saga, Wagner’s “Ring.” In “Experiences,” the protagonist, Don Jr., spirals in isolation after a move to California, and from his apartment he imagines paranoid adventures in esoterica, in search of truths about power and wealth. He comes to conclusions like, “‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford one,’ I always thought we ought to have that carved into that stupid mountain with the four guys’ heads.”Don Jr.’s thoughts come quickly; “Foreign Experiences,” alone in “Now Eleanor’s Idea,” is set to 90 beats per minute instead of Ashley’s usual 72. And those beats matter to each line of the opera’s 50-page libretto. This is a work of extreme mathematical precision that, in performance, shows no signs of being precise at all, with manic speech unfurling over ambient synth chords that reflect both the mood and sound world of “The X-Files.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 138 Shares98 Views

    in Music

    Bill Holman, Whose Arrangements Shaped West Coast Jazz, Dies at 96

    His economical, linear writing helped define the sound of Stan Kenton’s band. He also led his own 16-piece ensemble for many decades.Bill Holman, an arranger and composer whose work with Stan Kenton, Gerry Mulligan and other jazz greats established him as a transformative figure in the cool jazz sound associated with 1950s California, died on Monday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 96.Kathryn King, his stepdaughter, announced the death.Mr. Holman’s longtime collaboration with Mr. Kenton, first as a saxophonist in his band and later as an arranger, provided the foundation of his reputation, but he also went on to arrange for Maynard Ferguson, Count Basie, Peggy Lee, Tony Bennett, Michael Bublé and many others, and to lead his own 16-piece ensemble.He won three Grammy Awards — for his arrangements of “Take the A Train” (1988) for Doc Severinsen’s band and “Straight, No Chaser” (1998) for his own, and for his original composition “A View From the Side” (1996) — and contributed compositions and arrangements to seven other Grammy-winning records, including Natalie Cole’s “Unforgettable” (1991). He received a total of 16 Grammy nominations.Mr. Holman was known for his economical, linear arrangements, which used elegant counterpoint and dissonance to enliven both old standards and his own works. Reared on the big bands of the 1930s and ’40s, he helped Mr. Kenton and others from that era make the transition to a more energetic sound in the postwar years.He was already an innovative arranger when he was in his 20s, creating new avenues that jazz would pursue over the following decades. And yet, while he was often imitated, his unique style remained easily recognizable, even on pieces that he ghostwrote for other arrangers.Mr. Holman in 1999. He won three Grammy Awards, two for arrangements and one for his original composition “A View From The Side.”Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More