Aurelia Butler

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    Strauss’s ‘Salome’ Gets a New Staging at the Metropolitan Opera

    In his company debut, the director Claus Guth takes a psychological approach, surrounding the title character with six versions of her younger self.The first sound in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Salome” isn’t the wriggle of clarinet that begins Strauss’s score. It’s the tinkle of a music box, while a little girl plays with a doll at the lip of the stage. Projected on the curtain behind her is a giant image of herself, slowly twirling.She suddenly gets angry at the toy and begins beating it against the ground. Even before the orchestra squirms in, Claus Guth’s grimly effective staging has made clear its preoccupations: childhood, dancing, violence.Guth, one of Europe’s busiest directors and making his Met debut with this production, is also fascinated by multiple versions of the self. Starring the soprano Elza van den Heever — simultaneously innocent and hardened, sounding silvery yet secure — this “Salome,” which opened on Tuesday, gives its title character not one youthful double, but six.The group of Salomes, progressing in age from perhaps a kindergartner to the 16-year-old played by van den Heever, is dressed in matching dark frocks, giving hints of “The Shining” and Diane Arbus photographs.Guth, placing the action in a dour black mansion around the turn of the 20th century, has shifted from ancient to modern times Strauss’s 100-minute, one-act adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play. “Salome” depicts, in decadent music inspired by the flowery language of the Symbolists, the biblical princess who was drawn to and rejected by John the Baptist and who demanded that he be decapitated by her depraved stepfather, King Herod.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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    Stream These 13 Movies and TV Shows Before They Leave in May

    A ton of great titles are leaving fast. Catch them while you can.A vast buffet of noteworthy titles are leaving Netflix in the United States this month, including romantic comedies, pricey blockbusters and stoner favorites. (Dates reflect the first day titles are unavailable and are subject to change.)‘About Time’ (May 1)Stream it here.Richard Curtis has carved out something of a niche as the foremost practitioner of the contemporary British rom-com, a stake he claimed with his “Four Weddings and a Funeral” screenplay and continued to hone by writing and directing the likes of “Notting Hill” (also leaving Netflix this month) and “Love, Actually.” If those titles make you twitch, this one will not change your opinion of Mr. Curtis and his work. But those who adore such Anglophile delights will similarly enjoy this 2013 favorite, which fuses his signature brand of Brit character comedy with a lightly fantastical time-travel premise, in which Domhnall Gleeson uses his familial gift of temporal flexibility to romance Rachel McAdams. Both are attractive and likable, though it takes only a handful of scenes for Bill Nighy and Tom Hollander to steal the picture.‘Definitely, Maybe’ (May 1)Stream it here.Before he was a mainstay of superhero movies, Ryan Reynolds was a romantic comedy leading man, and this 2008 charmer from the writer and director Adam Brooks is the best demonstration of his skill set in the genre. He stars as a single dad whose daughter (a disarming Abigail Breslin) starts asking questions about her mom, prompting him to tell her the not-quite-whole truth about his single days and search for love. His improvisational cleanup of the bachelor life details are a good running gag (albeit one that seems swiped from the contemporaneous “How I Met Your Mother”), but the real juice here comes from the casting, matching Reynolds with three potential life partners in the form of Elizabeth Banks, Rachel Weisz and Isla Fisher — each of them beguiling in their own way.‘Friday’ / ‘Next Friday’ (May 1)Stream ‘Friday’ here and ‘Next Friday’ here.Strange as it may seem, there was once a time when the idea of Ice Cube starring in a screen comedy seemed peculiar. If anything, “Friday” seemed, upon its 1995 release, like a riff on his film debut in “Boyz N The Hood”— set in the same South Central Los Angeles milieu (and even sharing a co-star, Nia Long) but in an altogether different style. Cube stars as Craig, a newly unemployed nice guy; Chris Tucker is Smokey, his motor-mouthed best buddy, who makes it his mission to get straight-arrow Craig high for the first time. The director F. Gary Gray (“Set It Off,” “Straight Outta Compton”) gets the laid-back hangout vibe just right, and Cube and Tucker generate palpable buddy chemistry. The 2000 follow-up, “Next Friday,” doesn’t quite measure up, due mostly to the absence of Tucker. But his substitute, Mike Epps, blends in nicely, and Cube is as charismatic as ever.‘King Kong’ (May 1)Stream it here.Peter Jackson’s love for the original, 1933 “King Kong” became part of his super-director origin story after the worldwide sensation of his original “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. So it came as no surprise that he turned his attention next to this no-expense-spared 2005 remake. Unlike the story’s 1976 iteration, which updated the story to a contemporary setting, Jackson’s film keeps the original time frame intact, along with the surrounding story about a frustrated filmmaker (Jack Black), a would-be starlet (Naomi Watts) and the man who falls for her (Adrien Brody). (The titular great ape is played by Andy Serkis, a sensation as Gollum in the “Lord” movies.) “King Kong” isn’t as fleet-footed as it could be, but Jackson’s affection for the material is clear, and his first-rate cast goes all in — especially Watts and Serkis, who make their interspecies love story entirely probable.‘Queen & Slim’ (May 1)Stream it here.This 2019 romantic drama, written by Lena Waithe and directed by Melina Matsoukas, feels strikingly, urgently of its moment, telling the story of a Black couple (Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith) whose uneventful first date is interrupted by a bloodthirsty cop whom they kill in self-defense. They go on the lam, becoming folk heroes along the way, and this story about racist policing and social protest has grown only more pointed with time. Kaluuya and Turner-Smith are electric, teasing out the wrinkles and nuances of what could have been stock characters, and Matsoukas’s direction is, by turns, both dirt-on-the-floor realistic and surprisingly lyrical.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 Comes After Trauma and a TikTok Hit? Gigi Perez Is Finding Out.

    The artist, 25, struck platinum with “Sailor Song.” Her debut album is a tribute to her lost sister, and an attempt to make sense of a few rudderless years.Gigi Perez walked into a Brooklyn restaurant last week with a toothpick wedged in her mouth, stood up after dinner and slid in another one. She had glanced at a clear box of them sitting on the table periodically, like she was seeking comfort or reinforcement. But for two hours, she mostly kept her gaze fixed to the side, avoiding eye contact while she spoke — as she often finds herself doing — about death.“Getting older, watching the people in your family get older — I feel like I’m on a conveyor belt that’s going to this inevitable end,” she said.At 25, Perez speaks with a weariness of someone at least twice her age. She was at one of her favorite Japanese spots in Williamsburg, not too far from where she used to live; she was days away from releasing her debut album and 10 hours from a brutally early wake-up call for “The Today Show.”Like many young musicians, Perez is figuring out what comes next after virality. Her lilting, guitar-powered anthems have blazed through TikTok, amassing millions of streams and a fervent fan base. “Sailor Song,” a ballad about lusting after a girl who looks like Anne Hathaway (yes, it was based on a real woman), went platinum and has been planted on Spotify’s most-streamed songs in the United States for months; it became a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom last fall. But Perez’s career hasn’t been built on celebration. She is carving a catalog out of grief.“When you’re a kid, music is verbalizing things you don’t know how to say — you don’t have the vocabulary to understand. You’re discovering how you feel in real time,” Perez said. OK McCausland for The New York TimesOne of her first songs to garner attention on SoundCloud, “Sometimes (Backwood),” took off six months after her older sister, Celene, died suddenly in 2020. Perez’s LP, “At the Beach, in Every Life,” released less than a week ago, is largely a tribute to her. It is also an attempt to shape and sharpen the last, often rudderless years of her own life.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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    Forget Grotesque Sights. David Cronenberg Does Grotesque Desires.

    “The Shrouds,” the director’s latest, underlines the central difference between his films and all the “body horror” that has come in their wake.In David Cronenberg’s newest film, “The Shrouds,” a widower named Karsh Relikh, played by Vincent Cassell, takes a woman on a blind date to his dead wife’s grave. They stop in front of her tombstone — a double plot, with empty space for Karsh to occupy in the future — and pay their respects in a very Cronenbergian way. On a screen on the headstone is a real-time image of his wife’s body, decaying in its grave, captured by the high-tech metallic “shroud” she was buried in; it is also transmitted to a smartphone app that allows Karsh to zoom and rotate the image at will. This technology allows people to remain connected to their loved ones by watching their bodies disintegrate, like a mash-up of the Buddhist corpse meditation and a mindfulness app. “I can see what’s happening to her,” Karsh says, enraptured, as his date squirms in discomfort. “I’m in the grave with her. I’m involved with her body the way I was in life, only even more.”You know what you are about to be shown: a body in some state of decay. But as the screen traces the desiccated shape of Karsh’s wife, Becca, with tender slowness, the effect is still irrationally startling. Death has rendered Becca’s elegant features down to an anonymized skull. Even so, there is someone on the screen whom Karsh recognizes and responds to at the deepest emotional level. You feel disgust, of course, but also a secondhand intimacy. What’s shocking is not the rotting body but the affection with which it is viewed, a tenderness that allows you to continue looking. You are not encountering death in the abstract, impersonal and horrific: You are seeing it anew, through the devoted gaze of the lover who has been left behind.These days there is nothing so shocking about seeing gruesome things on film. Horror movies are now mainstream, and it’s common for at least a few of the biggest releases at any given megaplex to offer some kind of grisly fright. Violence is also more common than ever on the screens of our laptops and phones, where social media catalogs accidents, bombings and dead children with eerie nonchalance. Despite all this, Cronenberg’s films remain difficult to digest. They are full of disconcerting bodily transgressions, rooted in aberrant desire. They get under the skin, repulsing even viewers accustomed to the usual Hollywood blood and gore. His last film, “Crimes of the Future,” from 2022, prompted one dissatisfied reviewer to write that it “should be renamed crimes against humanity.”Perhaps this is because of the way Cronenberg’s movies tend to relish the things that are most terrifying to the audience. Other horror films share the viewer’s repugnance, even reinforce it; only Cronenberg asks you to imagine what it would be like to be erotically transfixed by a car crash (as in “Crash”) or by tenderly performing ornamental surgeries on your partner (as in “Crimes of the Future”). His films invite you into a morality that does not yet exist, hinting at the possibility that the values and norms of your world could be supplanted someday. In a recent interview, he pointed out that we already possess the technical know-how to make something like his fictional death shrouds: “It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: What if somebody did want it?” Rather than dwelling in the horror of transgression, his interest is in what lies beyond — in transgression’s intimate life.Lately it feels as if movies are more Cronenbergian than ever, obsessed with triggering our fear of the body’s capacity for gruesome transformation. “The Substance,” a hit from the French director Coralie Fargeat, served up the story of an aging actress who creates a younger, sexier double of herself to stay on top of her body-obsessed industry — but suffers a rapid and freakish decrepitude when the double decides to go rogue. “Mickey 17,” a science-fiction romp from the Oscar winner Bong Joon Ho, follows a high-risk worker who is used as an experimental guinea pig, then cloned and tossed ruthlessly down a recycling chute. In each, we see bodies agonizing under the burden of a monstrous social system.‘It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: What if somebody did want it?’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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    A Novelist Finds Unsettling Echoes in a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises

    The spark of inspiration for “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s new historical novel about a filmmaker toiling for the Nazi regime, came during the first Trump administration. Kehlmann noticed Americans taking special care about what they said and to whom they said it. The self-censorship faintly echoed stories he’d heard from his father, who was a Jewish teenager in Vienna when the Third Reich came to power.The word “Austria,” for example, was banned by the regime. Suddenly, everyone lived in Ostmark.Kehlmann, a boyish 50-year-old born in Munich, has long been fascinated by the ways that citizens accommodated Hitler’s dictatorship. He centers his novel on the largely forgotten G.W. Pabst, an Austrian film director who gained fame in the era of silent movies and flamed out in Hollywood in the 1930s.Through an unfortunate happenstance — he’d returned to Austria to check on his ailing mother just as war broke out — Pabst was stuck when the Nazis slammed shut the borders. Eventually, he worked for the German film industry, which was overseen by the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.In Kehlmann’s telling, this was both a nightmare and a golden opportunity.“That’s the crazy irony here,” he said. “Pabst had more artistic freedom of expression under Goebbels than he did in Hollywood. And that’s what I really wanted to write about. A world where everybody is forced to make compromises all the time. And eventually, those small compromises end in a situation that is completely unacceptable, completely barbaric.”Kehlmann is surprisingly buoyant and sunny given the darkly comic pickles he regularly creates for his characters. During a three-hour conversation at a small kitchen table in his Harlem apartment, he held forth on his work, his life and on politics, which became unnervingly relevant to his latest novel when Donald Trump was re-elected.Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film “Pandora’s Box.”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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    Andy Bey, Jazz Singer Renowned for His Vocal Range, Dies at 85

    An admirer of Nat King Cole, he began as a child performer and as part of a family trio before emerging as a master of the American Songbook.Andy Bey, a jazz singer, pianist and composer whose silky, rich bass-baritone and four-octave vocal range placed him among the greatest interpreters of the American Songbook since Nat King Cole, his role model, died on Saturday in Englewood, N.J. He was 85.His nephew, Darius de Haas, confirmed the death, at a retirement home.Mr. Bey’s life in jazz spanned over 60 years, from his early days as a child prodigy singing in Newark and at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan, to a late-career run of albums and lengthy tours that kept him active well into his eighth decade.The sheer reach of his voice, and his expert control over it, could astound audiences. Not only could he climb from a deep baritone to a crisp tenor, but he could also do it while jumping ahead of the beat, or slowing to a crawl behind it, giving even well-worn songs his personal stamp.At a typical show, he might start out singing and playing piano, alongside a bass and drums, then switch between them, sometimes singing without piano, sometimes playing the piano alone.Mr. Bey performed as part of the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem in August 2015. He was rediscovered late in his career. Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesEven long into his 70s, Mr. Bey had a commanding, compelling voice, projecting from his baby face beneath his signature porkpie hat, a look that made him seem younger than his years.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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    Beyoncé Cowboy Carter Tour Review; The Star Remixes American History, and Her Own

    The last time Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons,” the stomping, biting number from her 2016 album, “Lemonade,” was at that year’s C.M.A. Awards, in a blistering rendition alongside the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks).Not everyone in country music embraced Beyoncé’s experimentation. “I did not feel welcomed,” she wrote in album notes leading up to the release last year of “Cowboy Carter,” her eighth solo album, an exploration of the many tendrils of American roots music and their connections to Black music of all stripes and generations.So it was meaningful, and pointed, that at the opening night of the Cowboy Carter Tour at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on Monday, Beyoncé played “Daddy Lessons” for the first time since that rejection. It came right after she sang her renovated version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” — approved by the country royal herself — while soaring over the rapturous crowd in a flying horseshoe.At almost three hours long, her seventh solo headlining concert tour was a characteristic Beyoncé epic.The New York TimesBeyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show featured the debut of many of the album’s songs, but also brought back tracks from across her catalog.The New York TimesFull-circle moments don’t just happen — they are the products of intention and diligence and allergy to loose threads. Throughout this roisterous and clever show, there were suggestions that loop-closing has been very much on Beyoncé’s mind, along with culmination.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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    Jack Black’s ‘Minecraft Movie’ Song, ‘Steve’s Lava Chicken,’ Hits the Charts

    “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” a 34-second song from “A Minecraft Movie,” made the Billboard Hot 100. He charted before with a song from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”Don’t call him a one-hit wonder. Jack Black made a surprise return to the Billboard Hot 100 chart this week with another unlikely song from a video game movie: “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” a 34-second song from “A Minecraft Movie.”The song entered the chart at 78, fueled by its popularity on TikTok, where it has been used in more than 280,000 videos. On Spotify, the song has racked up nearly 22 million streams.“Steve’s Lava Chicken” is Black’s second Hot 100 hit from a video game-themed movie. In April 2023 his song “Peaches,” from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” peaked at 56 on the chart, according to Billboard.What makes “Steve’s Lava Chicken” so unusual is its length: It is just 34 seconds, which Billboard said set a record as the shortest song in the chart’s 67-year history. It is nearly three minutes shorter than the average length of last year’s No. 1 hits, according to Hits Songs Deconstructed, a company that provides analysis of hit songs.Black, a movie star known for playing quirky characters, is also a musician. He appeared in “School of Rock,” a film about a failed rock star who pretends to be a substitute teacher, and lampooned heavy metal with the comedy-rock duo Tenacious D, alongside Kyle Gass.“A Minecraft Movie,” co-starring Black and Jason Momoa, was released more than three weeks ago and has earned nearly $380 million domestically at the box office. Warner Bros. Pictures wants to cash in on the craze — and people who want to shout “I am Steve” and “Chicken jockey.”The studio announced that it would host a “block party” on Friday at participating theaters where fans can embrace the film by singing or meme-ing along to their favorite songs and scenes. More