Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Shanghai Blues’ Review: Slapstick Fun in a 1984 Tsui Hark Picture

    This newly restored screwball comedy is a buoyant romp. The director revisits and refines the techniques used here in his later work in other genres.By the time he directed “Shanghai Blues” in 1984, the protean Hong Kong cinema maestro Tsui Hark had demonstrated a consistently delight-inducing facility in any genre he touched — he had made a couple of impressive wuxia” (swordplay) films, each unusual; his “Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind” was, implications of its title notwithstanding, a harrowing crime picture; and he had even made a cannibal-themed feature.With “Blues,” Tsui found a slapstick comedy register that he would continue to refine and expand over his career, one that would inform even the more serious period epics he would make in the future. (And his splendid work continues; this year’s relatively unheralded “Legends of the Condor Heroes: The Gallants” is great fun.) “Blues” begins with a kiss under a bridge in the late 1930s and picks up again after World War II.Kenny Bee plays an optimistic songwriter who’s also a bit of a klutz (an early gag has him repeatedly crowning his bandmates with the bell of a tuba). Sally Yeh is the winsome and amiable character known as Stool, who’s living next door to the ambitious and tetchy songstress Shu-Shu, who’s both commanding and funny as portrayed by Sylvia Chang.“Blues,” playing now in a 40th anniversary restoration, is a constant charmer. Watching it is a buoyant experience even when the humor is a bit tasteless, including a bit involving mistaken sex partners during a blackout. Tsui’s affection for his characters rings as clear as his love for screwball comedy antecedents; while the film won’t commit to a “Design for Living” denouement, Ernst Lubitsch would recognize a few of his touches here, even if they’re delivered with cinematic exclamation points.Shanghai BluesRated PG. In Cantonese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘SVU’ Star Mariska Hargitay on Her Mother Jayne Mansfield

    Mariska Hargitay was at home, and she was sprinting up the stairs, bounding between the corners of her very full life. I had to hustle to keep pace.She checked in with her oldest son — tall, polite, home from his first year at Princeton — and supervised the setup of an engagement party she was hosting for her goddaughter. Gardeners buzzed about the terraces of her Manhattan penthouse. She apologized, superfluously, for the noise.Her latest obsession, a family heirloom grand piano that had recently entered her apartment via crane, dominated the living room, with a custom “M” bench, courtesy of her husband, the actor Peter Hermann (“Younger”). “That’s my next thing — I’m going to learn to play soon,” Hargitay vowed.Another dash and we were on the floor below, a warren of cozy offices, painted in jewel tones, with overstuffed couches and muscular art by Annie Leibovitz. Tucked on a bookshelf were some of Hargitay’s awards. She has earned Emmys for playing Olivia Benson, the beloved “Law & Order: SVU” hardass, and for producing the 2017 documentary “I Am Evidence,” about the backlog of rape kits.This is where Hargitay had conceived, edited and even shot some of her newest and perhaps most life-altering project, the documentary “My Mom Jayne.” It’s at once an unflinching portrait of her mother, the 1950s star and pinup Jayne Mansfield, who died when Mariska was 3; a homage to her father, the bodybuilder and actor Mickey Hargitay; and an investigation into her own clouded and secretive origins. Directing the film, which will air June 27 on HBO, and proclaiming her story has unlocked something profound for Hargitay, 61.“I am so clear now about the truth,” she said. “This big haze came off — a veil of fear. And now I just feel so much at peace. It’s like a miracle to me to feel this way. I never thought I could.”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 Queen of My Dreams’ Review: From Karachi to Toronto

    Fawzia Mirza’s amiable feature debut traces the lives of a mother and her daughter in two coming-of-age tales.The complicated bond between Mariam (Nim­ra Bucha), a traditionally minded Pakistani mother in Canada, and her daughter Azra (Amrit Kaur), an acting student, is at the heart of Fawzia Mirza’s “The Queen of My Dreams.” A vibrant dramedy, the film takes place over three time periods and settings as it tracks Mariam’s shift from youthful pleasure seeking to the conservative values she swears by — and foists upon her queer daughter — later in life.The film opens in Toronto in 1999 as Azra and Mariam are butting heads. It then flashes back to two eras: 1969, where a pert, adolescent Mariam (Kaur again, with a bouffant) is falling in love in Karachi; and 1989 in Nova Scotia, where Mariam hosts Tupperware parties while a preteen Azra (Ayana Manji) struggles as a Muslim among her Christian classmates.In granting equal screen time to the two women, the film shows how their lives expand and contract. Scenes of Mariam’s life in Pakistan buzz with 1960s Bollywood energy, a stark contrast to her staid middle age in Canada. The juxtaposition of the lifestyles builds a nostalgic mood and gestures at a generation of women transformed by societal pressures and familial anxieties.Yet rather than intersperse the three periods, “The Queen of My Dreams” treats the earlier eras as extended flashbacks — an awkward structural choice. The fragmentation often seems to blunt the film’s emotion where it should be deepening it. But Kaur acts as an amiable anchor, gamely embodying a mother and a daughter across time periods.The Queen of My DreamsNot rated. In English and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Familiar Touch’ Review: Living With Dementia

    In this empathetic debut feature, Kathleen Chalfant plays Ruth, a woman who moves into an assisted living facility and adapts to her new life.From the opening scene of Sarah Friedland’s empathetic debut feature “Familiar Touch,” Ruth (Kathleen Chalfant) radiates a magnetic yet dubious sense of poise that undergirds the film’s careful balance of tragedy and hope.Ruth, a woman with dementia who lives in a charming cottage-style home, prepares sandwiches and gets dolled up for an unknown visitor. A sheepish younger man joins her for lunch, and by her coy banter and playful pursed lips, we slowly realize that Ruth believes she is on a date.The man, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin), turns out to be her son, making her display of sexuality feel uncomfortable — if, at the same time, a good reminder that older people have libidos, too. From the awkwardness of this attempted flirtation comes a poignant realization. Steve has arrived to move Ruth to an assisted living facility, provoking a sad, funny, confusing process of adaptation that doesn’t sensationalize Ruth’s tribulations.Movies about dementia tend to do that: Think of the cruel reality-warping horrors of “The Father” or the magical weepie “The Notebook.” “Familiar Touch,” which sees Chalfant acting alongside the real inhabitants of an assisted living community, is a series of naturalistic vignettes that showcase Ruth’s struggle to maintain her identity in the face of a new life that she believes poses a threat to her sense of dignity.The film is primarily a character study, subtly revealing details about Ruth’s past through her interactions with her new surroundings and neighbors (her lively responses to weekly medical exercises or taking command of the residential kitchen). Friedland does gesture at the larger context as well: the guilt of patients’ children; the beautiful yet fraught bonds forged between residents’ and their caretakers (Carolyn Michelle, who plays Ruth’s handler, is a quiet standout).In the end, “Familiar Touch” reveals itself to be less about the agonies of change than in the concessions we make to feel closer to our loved ones and ourselves.Familiar TouchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Everything’s Going to be Great’ Review: Show People

    A theater family sorts out its offstage drama in a coming-of-age movie starring Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney.In the Smart family — a roving clan of four who make their living mounting regional theater productions, and whom we first encounter in Ohio in 1989 — Gilbert and Sullivan are typical car-song material. All four Smarts know the lyrics. The protagonist, Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), the younger of the two adolescent sons, converses with the ghosts of Noël Coward, Ruth Gordon and Tallulah Bankhead. Les has a habit of walking onstage during performances and taking a place as a bit player in ensemble scenes, even though he isn’t supposed to be there.That description might give you some sense of “Everything’s Going to Be Great,” a coming-of-age film at once endearing in its specificity and overly previous in its strategies. Directed by Jon S. Baird (“Tetris”) and written by Steven Rogers (“I, Tonya”), whose father worked in regional theater, the film follows the Smarts as they grapple with internal tensions over art, money, identity and religion.The father, Buddy (Bryan Cranston), whose Broadway dreams never came true, is confident that a successful summer season at a New Jersey theater will propel them to a sturdy gig in Milwaukee. Les, a proud oddball who talks back to a school bully by quoting from “Hair,” is fully committed to Buddy’s vision. Macy (Allison Janney), the matriarch, has more of a pragmatic streak. Derrick (Jack Champion), Les’s older brother, who’s spent years going along with the thespian stuff, just wants to play football and lose his virginity.By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.Everything’s Going to be GreatRated R for teenage fumblings, adult infidelity. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Bride Hard’ Review: Taking on Baddies at Her Best Friend’s Wedding

    Rebel Wilson gamely plays the role of secret agent and bridesmaid in this action-thriller mixed with a rom-com.If ever there were two genres that traffic in too-muchness, it’s the destination-wedding rom-com and the secret agent action-thriller. So call it fate that over-the-top meets outlandishly excessive in “Bride Hard,” a spoofy genre mash-up whose raison d’être can be boiled down to this line, uttered late in the proceedings: “She’s using the chocolate fountain as cover.”The “she” is Sam, a.k.a. Agent Dragonfly, who leaps into muscular, gravity-defying action to take on a group of interloping baddies at her best friend’s wedding, all while wearing a frilly bridesmaid’s dress. She’s played to perfection by the ever-game Rebel Wilson, leading a cast that leans earnestly and ably into the escalating absurdity.Working from a screenplay by Shaina Steinberg, the director Simon West, who until now has focused mainly on such outings in mayhem and stunt work as “The Mechanic” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” lands this hybrid beast in the realm of the sort-of caper and the not-quite romp.Sam is a devoted spy whose preposterous cover story is one of the screenplay’s funnier jokes, and who’s barely had time to participate in the countless bachelorette rituals for the bride-to-be Betsy (a high-spirited Anna Camp). Feeling neglected, Betsy has demoted her bestie from maid of honor to bridesmaid — much to the delight of the groom’s sister, a control freak expertly brought to passive-aggressive life by Anna Chlumsky.The extravagant nuptials, on a private island off the coast of Savannah, Ga., grind to a halt with the arrival by speedboat of a gruff mercenary named Kurt (Stephen Dorff), who is in pursuit of a cache of gold. Cue an assortment of purposely ridiculous chases and explosions, and the chance to see Sam wield hair supplies as weapons and go mano a mano with Kurt’s henchmen and the weaselly best man (Justin Hartley). The rest of the wedding party is a collection of one-note types played with conviction, among them the sunny groom (Sam Huntington) and a sex-obsessed bridesmaid (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).A smorgasbord of unconvincing danger and semi-schmaltzy lessons in friendship, “Bride Hard” is rarely as funny as it could be. Opportunities for satirical digs go mostly unplumbed, although you might note that a key prop is a Civil War cannon. You might also note a glaring continuity gaffe in the final sequence, an apt reminder not to give any of this a second thought.Bride HardRated R for sexual references and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ’28 Years Later’: A Zombie Apocalypse Infected by Brexit, the Manosphere and Trump

    “28 Years Later” leaps forward through time — into a world that has changed in worrisome parallel to ours.It begins with a deadly lab leak. Inside an English research facility in Cambridge, a bank of TV monitors is blasting clips of documentary violence — riots, hangings — into the eyes of a chimpanzee, a test subject in what we’d now recognize as “gain of function” virus research. Today, the rest plays out like Instagram highlights: Animal rights activists burst into this “Clockwork Orange” tableau and free an infected chimp. The chimp promptly mauls its human liberator. Then comes the familiar transformation — spasm, contortion, brisk snap into embodied demon — that starts murderous insanity spreading through the lab’s remaining humans, and then to those outside.This was the start of Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later,” the movie that helped reboot the zombie apocalypse, turning a moribund horror subgenre into one of the dominant forces in entertainment. Boyle’s innovations — tonal seriousness, punk-rock filmmaking, speedy zombies bearing infectious disease — are still visible in everything from “World War Z” to “The Last of Us.” But it’s that opening scene, in which triggering media turns a primate virus into a fatal blood-borne psychosis, that sets up a prescient metaphor for what has happened in the decades between the movie’s release in 2002 and the arrival, this month, of “28 Years Later,” a new sequel from Boyle and the original screenwriter, Alex Garland. Across those years, a digital intoxication not unlike the film’s “Rage virus” really has made society feel angrier, crazier and more unstable.The original film had a grungy kinetic intensity; Boyle used digital video and the fast, cheap Canon XL1 to energize his shots, finding a jittery, claustrophobic, hyperreal visual language. Using what Garland has called a “Tootsie” cut — after the moment in that movie when Dustin Hoffman is suddenly revealed dressed as a woman — the story jumps straight from the initial outbreak of the virus to the moment, 28 days later, when a young bike messenger, Jim, awakes from a coma in an abandoned hospital and wanders out into an indelible vision of London after a people-vanishing cataclysm. (The walls and kiosks, covered with missing-person fliers, are one of several images that were transformed by real-life events after the film began shooting on Sept. 11, 2001.) He is rescued from his first contact with the infected by two masked survivors, one of whom explains that the apocalypse first appeared as a news item — “and then it wasn’t on the TV anymore,” she says, “it was coming through your windows.” Jim’s small crew must resist both the infected and a company of British soldiers who offer protection at the cost of sexual slavery. Finally escaped to a remote Lake District idyll, they see a military jet flyover as proof that civilization still endures — that the late-’90s neoliberal order may soon be restored.Clearly, things didn’t quite play out that way. A 2007 sequel, “28 Weeks Later” (neither original creator was involved) was rooted in post-9/11 security and warfare, imagining survivors huddled in a militarized safe zone controlled by American-led NATO troops, testing what a fearful society will tolerate to defend itself from an external threat. Then time passed and the paradigm shifted; ordinary people’s anger and fear was redirected from distant menaces to various enemies within. Real-life media and political institutions seemed to succumb to their own Rage, a process amplified by everything from new apps and platforms to a nonfictional pandemic. Now, “28 Years Later” shows us how the weaponized virus alters even the uninfected, reshaping society in terrifying ways.‘Some of the stuff in this film is about people misremembering the world we had.’The new film imagines a kind of extreme Brexit, extended a generation into the future. It, too, opens in the new-millennium world of pixels and screens, with a close-up of a TV playing the old British toddler show “The Teletubbies,” whose original series ended in 2001. But from there it moves to the residents of the tidal Holy Island, where, 28 years later, residents maintain a rugged nationalism apart from both the existing England and the smartphone-using world they’ve never seen. “We’ve gone backwards,” is how Boyle explained it to me. “Because inevitably you would retrench back to analog.”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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    In ‘Lash,’ Rebecca Saunders’s First Opera, Sex Flirts With Death

    Rebecca Saunders has collaborated with the artist Ed Atkins to create “Lash,” a work that hovers around themes of illness and intimacy.Toward the end of “Lash,” a new opera by Rebecca Saunders, a vocal quartet of invites the listener to “come to bed and die.”Saunders, 57, is a masterly composer whose recent music is becoming more passionate, expressive and lyrical than ever. An artist whose works are regularly performed throughout Europe, she has won many prizes, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at last year’s Venice Music Biennale. Her subtle music has an unmistakable momentum.The text of the opera is by Ed Atkins, an artist and writer who often uses hyper-realistic C.G.I. video to unsettling effect. A critically acclaimed, career-spanning exhibition of his work is currently on show at Tate Britain in London, and his “Old Food,” which featured sandwiches filled with uncannily modified bodies, was shown at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Like his video work, Atkins’s prose is obsessed with the strangeness of sex and death.On Friday, “Lash” will premiere at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. It is Saunders’s first opera and Atkins’s first libretto. Though Saunders wrote a piece based on words by Atkins, “Us Dead Talk Love,” in 2021, “Lash” is the first time the artists have shaped a piece together from the beginning.That relationship allowed Saunders to finally take on an opera. “I didn’t want to give a piece to somebody and just let go,” Saunders said. “I wanted to find the author and the directors and the house who would enable us to work on a collaborative project.”“Lash” features four female performers — the singers Noa Frenkel, Sarah Maria Sun and Anna Prohaska, and the actor Katja Kolm — who represent separate strands of a single consciousness.Marcus LieberenzWe 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