Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Martial Artist’ Review: Tap Out

    In this overwrought action film by Shaz Khan, a mixed martial artist’s career is upended when his brother is killed.In the self-absorbed action movie “The Martial Artist,” the director Shaz Khan stars as rising Pakistani American mixed martial arts fighter Ibby “The Prince” Bakran, an unconventional pugilist whose bouts are live streamed from remote locales like Death Valley in eastern California.Impressed by Ibby, the head of a mixed martial arts league (Gregory Sporleder) promises him stardom. But alcohol, women and the killing of Ibby’s brother and trainer, Ali (Babar Peerzada), by friends of a former opponent, derail his career.After four years of boozing and working as a waiter, a frustrated Ibby tries to revitalize his moribund career by venturing home to the lush green mountains of Pakistan to be trained and spiritually healed by his grandfather (Faran Tahir).It’s disappointing that “The Martial Artist,” an adaptation of Khan’s 2016 short film “Say It Ain’t So,” is a shallow film. Characters like Ibby’s long-suffering mother (Thesa Loving), his estranged girlfriend (Sanam Saeed) and his deceased brother are nothing more than maudlin plot devices. Though Pakistan is filmed with a sense of grandeur, Ibby’s return to his cultural roots is rushed and superficial. Khan’s lack of screen presence, toothless mixed martial arts sequences and unintelligible editing further knock the film down.By the end, when Ibby faces the undefeated Decan Johnson (Philippe Prosper) at the foot of some Mayan pyramids in Belize, we’re unsure what or who he is fighting for, or why we should care.The Martial ArtistRated PG-13 for violence and bloody images. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Love Hotel’ Review: Finding Space for Beauty in the Bleakness

    A Shinji Somai contribution to a narrow soft-core subgenre crushes together the anonymity and violence, desire and trauma, that bind lives of alienation.Two harrowing sexual assaults occur in the first 15 minutes of “Love Hotel,” a 1985 erotic drama from the cult director Shinji Somai. First, Tetsuro (Minori Terada), a flailing Tokyo businessman in debt to the yakuza, is forced to stand by while his wife, Ryoko (Kiriko Shimizu), is raped by a mob loan shark. Later, in a twisted bid at reclaiming some agency, Tetsuro hires Yumi (Noriko Hayami), a sex worker, plotting to kill her and himself. He assaults her savagely, but doesn’t carry out his plan, instead leaving Yumi naked and chained to the bed at a love hotel.Nothing else in the film matches the shock of these acts of violence, captured unflinchingly in static shots and gliding pans. Their memory, however, lingers throughout and infects this human drama of romantic disillusionment and sexuality warped by trauma with serious feel-bad vibes occasionally tempered by mordant humor.Some years later, the two reconnect — on radically different footings — when Yumi, who works at a publishing house (and is now known by her real name, Nami), hops into the cab Tetsuro is driving.There’s a lot more sex, too. “Love Hotel” is one of the best-known entries in the roman porno subgenre, a kind of elevated skinflick developed by financially strained film studios in Japan in the 1970s meant to entice audiences looking for quality and coitus.It’s also something of an outlier in Somai’s filmography (he was best known for his dark coming-of-age tales, like “Typhoon Club,” 1985). Yet his exquisite visual compositions (of lonely bedrooms, concrete piers, and nocturnal courtyards) infuse even the film’s racy images with a somber sense of longing and introspection, finding beauty and humanity in the midst of the macabre.Love HotelNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Gazer’ Review: Peering Out From a Lonely Place

    Ryan J. Sloan’s brooding thriller is a murky tale about an isolated woman, with many shades of Schrader, Nolan and Cronenberg.Frankie, the roaming, cogitating mystery woman at the center of the cryptic drama “Gazer,” has eyes as big as hubcaps and a strange charisma. Much of her appeal stems from the striking looker who plays her, Ariella Mastroianni, who wrote the script with the director, Ryan J. Sloan. Although indebted to its influences to the point of self-sabotage, the movie manages to surmount enough of its flaws — including some shaky acting and distracting awkwardness — to hold your own gaze, more or less. Like Frankie, who watches others with visceral intensity, you keep looking as you wait on events, wonder and wait some more.A solitary, unsettled soul, Frankie lives in a spartan apartment in modern-day Newark that she seems to have sublet from one of Paul Schrader’s existential loners. Like those characters who brood throughout his “man in a room” trilogy (“First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” “Master Gardener”), Frankie doesn’t always communicate easily with other people. Instead, much of the story emerges from her on-and-off voice-over and from cassette-tape recordings that effectively function as critical mental aids (shades of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”), prompts she uses to try and keep her mind and world ordered. It’s a continual struggle.It’s also a struggle without an apparent happy ending because many of Frankie’s problems seem to stem from dyschronometria, an incurable condition that wreaks havoc with her sense of time. This malady has profoundly isolated her, and is getting worse; in one early scene, a doctor suggests that she check into a facility that cares for “patients with cognitive impairment,” as he puts it. Frankie demurs. She’s trying to save money for her young daughter who lives with someone else, a goal that leads to a series of complications that push the movie into self-conscious noirish territory with varied results. There, as the shadows darken, she meets another question mark, Claire (Renee Gagner), who offers to help her.Things grow progressively complicated, sometimes intriguingly so, especially when the story is fuzzier. In its first stretch, Sloan and Mastroianni build a palpable air of dank menace by creating tension with narrative ellipses and leaning into Frankie’s unusual condition and her isolation. Frankie doesn’t just live alone, she also seems OK with being estranged from most of her family and whatever friends she may have had. An early, foreboding sequence of her warily walking into a house to shrieking electronic music adds more mystery and intrigue, particularly when her creeping entrance is abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a gun.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

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    ‘Eric LaRue’ Review: When Pain Won’t Stay Quiet

    Judy Greer stars in a searing drama about the mother of a school shooter and all the things we try not to say.Most of us would say we’re “at a loss for words” when senseless tragedy strikes. We try to use words anyhow — to comfort, to explain, to process, to apologize. It’s a human impulse. But it’s insufficient, and can harm as much as it helps.That insufficiency of language is the stealth subject of “Eric LaRue,” the feature directorial debut of Michael Shannon. Stealth, because its premise is a bit of a misdirect. Like last year’s “Ghostlight,” it’s a gut-punching indie drama borne out of the Chicago theater scene. The playwright Brett Neveu adapted it from his play by the same name, produced in 2002 at A Red Orchid Theater, of which Shannon is a founding member. Writers who come from theater tend to evince a keen understanding of how, in talking to one another, we reveal and conceal what’s inside of us — and that’s at the core of Neveu’s script.But that premise, it’s a tough one to sit down and watch: Janice LaRue (a remarkable Judy Greer, in a lead role at last) is the mother of a school shooter. Her teenage son, Eric, is in prison, and she is trying to put her life back together, or at least figure out if that’s something she wants to do.Her husband Ron (Alexander Skarsgard, sporting an admirably off-putting arrangement of facial hair) is not helping: he’s eager to move on from the incident, and is making headway, thanks to his overly friendly colleague Lisa (Alison Pill). She’s convinced him to join to her church, an evangelical congregation pastored by the imperious Bill Verne (Tracy Letts), who instructs Ron to act like the head of his household and tell Janice how things will go in their home.Janice is not interested, either in being told what to do or in Ron’s new church family, and not really interested in Ron at this point, either. She’s still attending their less trendy Presbyterian church, pastored by the well-meaning but blundering Steve Calhan (Paul Sparks), who tries to counsel her in his office but doesn’t have many helpful things to say.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

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    What’s His Age Again? Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus (Now 53) Looks Back.

    In early March, Mark Hoppus, the singer and bassist for the long-running pop-punk trio Blink-182, and his wife, Skye, were special guests at a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art auction in London. The sale featured a piece from their collection, a rare Banksy titled “Crude Oil (Vettriano),” up alongside works by Yoshitomo Nara, Gerhard Richter and Vincent van Gogh.“It was such rarefied air that we’ve never been a part of before,” Hoppus recalled at his home a week later, outfitted in chunky black glasses, a Dinosaur Jr. long-sleeve T-shirt, navy blue Dickies and Gucci Mickey Mouse sneakers. The painting sold for nearly $5.5 million, part of which will go to charity.It would have been hard to predict such a highfalutin turn for Hoppus back in 1999, when Blink-182 released its magnum opus, “Enema of the State,” which catapulted the band to MTV “Total Request Live” stardom and sold five million copies domestically. The video for the album’s first single, the jocular “What’s My Age Again?,” famously features the band members running unclothed through the streets of Los Angeles. (“Naked dudes are so ridiculous,” Hoppus said. “It just looks comical to me.”) Blink-182 followed up that LP with its first No. 1 album, “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket,” two years later.Despite Blink-182’s reputation for high jinks, naughty puns and charmingly adolescent hits like “All the Small Things,” Hoppus is remarkably thoughtful in person. Jim Adkins, whose group, Jimmy Eat World, supported Blink-182 and Green Day on a 2002 tour, said in an interview that Hoppus exhibited “human empathy.”“I know ‘Mark from Blink-182 is emotionally mature’ might seem like an oxymoron if you don’t know him,” Adkins admitted, “but I would say that.”Blink-182, from left: Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge in 1999.Lester Cohen/Getty ImagesWe 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

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    Joe DePugh, Pitcher Who Inspired Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days,’ Dead at 75

    A gifted athlete, he gave a clumsy teenage Bruce Springsteen his first nickname, Saddie. Years later, the Boss returned the favor, memorializing him in a song.Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul said.In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.“Bruce lost this big game for us one year,” Mr. DePugh told The Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stuck him out in right field all the time, where you think he’s out of harm’s way. But this important game, we had a bunch of guys missing, and we had to play him.”In the last inning, Saddie dropped an easy fly ball.“Actually, it hit him on the head,” Mr. DePugh said, “and we lost the game.”They remained friends in high school, bonding over their turbulent home lives and their distant, alcoholic fathers. After graduation, Saddie took off to play rock ’n’ roll in bars and nightclubs. Joe, who excelled at multiple sports, tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers but wound up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.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

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    The Movie That Can Help You Understand Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Senate Speech

    “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” starring Jimmy Stewart as a naïve senator, explores the idealism — and reality — behind the tactic.Late in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra’s 1939 ode to democracy, free speech and the filibuster, a CBS newsman is trilling into his microphone near the Senate chamber. Inside that august room, he tells his listeners, is a man engaging in “the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form.”“The rrrrright,” he calls it, rolling that r, “to talk your head off!”He is referring to Jefferson Smith (played by a 30-ish Jimmy Stewart, all big eyes and gee-willikers wonder), the fish-out-of-water junior senator from some unnamed Western state and political party, who’s held the Senate floor all night and is still at it. He’s filibustering an appropriations bill to protest graft and injustice, specifically injustice against himself and more generally against the people of his state, his country and heck, why not, the whole world.I thought of Smith and his idealism while watching Senator Cory Booker on Tuesday, 24 hours into his own record-setting speech to protest the actions of the Trump administration. (Technically it wasn’t a filibuster because it did not come during a debate over a specific bill or nominee.) Stewart’s performance is calibrated to heightened Hollywood standards, to be sure, but by the end of the movie’s daylong filibuster, Smith looks as if he’s got the flu: sweaty, haggard, staggering around, voice reduced to a painful rasp. By contrast Booker, who’s about 25 years older than that character, remained coherent and composed and also audible, even when he concluded at the 25-hour mark.Cory Booker emerging from the Senate after his record-setting speech.Eric Lee/The New York TimesIn truth, I always think of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (for rent on Apple TV+) when this kind of speech comes up. I saw it dozens of times as a teenager, as it was a favorite in the home-school community to which my family belonged. It’s both very funny and profoundly idealistic, with its underlying belief that anybody who tries a feat this athletic and grueling — as the CBS newsman reminds the crowd, sitting down ends the filibuster — must be in the right. “Either I’m dead right or I’m crazy!” Smith hollers at one point.“You wouldn’t care to put that to a vote, would you, senator?” one of his irritated colleagues replies. We know the movie’s answer.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

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    Val Kilmer Brought a Wonderfully Weird Sensibility to Every Role

    Even his choice of parts could be eccentric. In the end, he’s best thought of as a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body.Val Kilmer doesn’t even need to appear onscreen as Iceman in “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) for the audience to feel his presence.Early on, Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” Mitchell is texting with his old rival, Iceman, but even though he’s just represented by words on a screen, you know exactly who that is, the joy of Kilmer’s boisterously cocky performance in the original 1986 film echoing through your memory.It makes the moment Kilmer actually shows up, late in the film, all the more powerful. Maverick has come to him for counsel. Kilmer still projects a regal energy, only now his character has earned his haughtiness, which presents as wisdom. Time has softened him a little, but Kilmer does not play Iceman as humbled. Instead, he’s more confident than ever, a sage of sorts even if the years have taken away his voice, as they did with Kilmer himself, who suffered from throat cancer.It seemed like everyone involved knew that the scene in “Maverick” would serve as a swan song for Kilmer, who died Tuesday at the age of 65 from pneumonia. But as brief as the sequence is, it is a reminder of just what kind of actor Kilmer was, one who thrived on unexpected choices and was constantly eager to surprise, no matter what the context.In his youth, Kilmer looked like the ideal movie star, with smoldering good looks that were punctuated by naturally pouting, kissable lips. That classically beautiful appearance could have led him down a different path, and, sure, Hollywood occasionally tried to make a traditional leading man out of him. Most notably he was constrained as the vigilante in the cowl in Joel Schumacher’s “Batman Forever” (1995). But he thrived more as a character actor, bringing a bit of weirdo spice to the screen.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