Aurelia Butler

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    The Enduring Simplicity of Galaxie 500

    The pioneering 1980s dream-pop band has now unveiled its entire studio catalog, mistakes and all.Dean Wareham has a Google Alert set for his first full-time band, Galaxie 500, named after a friend’s vintage Ford. With Wareham as its guitarist and lead singer, the band lasted a little over three years — from 1987 to early 1991 — and made just three albums for an indie label that went bankrupt.Galaxie 500’s biggest headlining gigs were appearances for only club-sized audiences. Its music never reached the American album charts. And Wareham and the other two band members, the bassist and singer Naomi Yang and the drummer Damon Krukowski — who are married — haven’t spoken or been in the same room since 1991, when Wareham quit the band on the verge of a tour of Japan. (They deal with Galaxie 500 business via email.)But decades later, Google Alerts for Galaxie 500 keep arriving.“Sometimes it’s a car for sale, but a lot of times it’s a review,” Wareham said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles. “And yeah, every week there’s a review of something that thinks it sounds like Galaxie 500. There’s a lot of that. But they don’t, really.”This Friday, the final remnants of Galaxie 500’s brief but luminous studio recording career will be released as “Uncollected Noise New York, ’88-’90.” The new album adds eight previously unreleased songs to a group of non-album tracks that were included in 1996 as part of a Galaxie 500 boxed set, then reissued separately in 2004 as the album “Uncollected.”“When we made these records, if you had told me that 30 years later, 35 years later, people would still be excited about them, I would be most surprised,” Wareham said.The added tracks reveal how rigorously Galaxie 500 judged its music, even from the beginning. “I think we were good editors. I still think these were the right tracks to reject,” Krukowski said by video from his and Yang’s home in Cambridge, Mass. “I don’t think it’s hidden gems. It’s more like telling the story in a different way. It’s a narrative thing, which I think is why we were all OK with 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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    In the Sean Combs Case, Echoes of the Tack Taken Against Other Powerful Men

    Federal authorities are prosecuting Mr. Combs under sex trafficking and racketeering laws, which were used to successfully prosecute R. Kelly and Keith Raniere in earlier abuse cases.Though graphic and startling in its details, the indictment of Sean Combs reflects a familiar playbook for federal prosecutions against high-profile men accused of a long-running history of abuse against women.The Combs indictment, which was unsealed on Tuesday, resembles the prosecution strategy employed in two other major sexual abuse cases brought by federal investigators in recent years against Keith Raniere, the Nxivm sex cult leader, and R. Kelly, the R&B singer.Both of those men were convicted on some of the same sex trafficking and racketeering charges now facing Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty.Racketeering charges are attractive to prosecutors pursuing powerful defendants because they are designed to present an “enterprise,” a complex web of individuals who helped the defendants carry out alleged crimes that can date back many years. In Mr. Combs’s case, for example, prosecutors have assembled their racketeering conspiracy charge by accusing him of crimes dating as far back as 2008, including arson, kidnapping, bribery and narcotics distribution.In some instances, the federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges allow prosecutors to cite crimes for which a state’s statute of limitations has expired.And the federal laws carry stiff punishments: The most severe sex trafficking law that Mr. Combs has been charged under carries a 15-year mandatory minimum prison sentence. The racketeering conspiracy charge, which accuses defendants of carrying out crimes as part of an “enterprise,” carries up to life in prison.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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    ‘Wolfs’ Review: Brad Pitt and George Clooney as Themselves

    They play underworld fixers in this trifle of a movie, though really they’re here to look enviably fabulous.“Wolfs” — a new something or other starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt — would like you to think it’s a thriller with a helping of comedy, though maybe a comedy with guns and guts. Whatever the case, it isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.Clooney and Pitt play underworld fixers, the kind of misterioso professionals whom people with power and money hire to clean up their messes. Much like the character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel — named Winston Wolfe but known as the Wolf — the fixers here swoop in and, with some elbow grease and a duffel bag large enough to hold a body, discreetly make the problem go away, or that’s the idea. Tarantino’s influence is conspicuous throughout “Wolfs,” most notably in its reams of self-aware dialogue, theatricality, casual violence and focus on characters talking to and at each other, including in a diner booth.The fixers in “Wolfs” meet cute, as it were, early on when Pitt’s unnamed character interrupts Clooney’s mid-job inside a sprawling penthouse in a New York hotel. Since neither character has a name, it’s easier to refer to the actors playing them, which is very much to the movie’s meta-referential point. Clooney is tidying up a gruesome mess involving a local politician, Pam (a reliably appealing Amy Ryan). Faced with a potentially career-torpedoing situation — there’s blood and shattered glass on the floor, along with what may be the body of a dead male prostitute — Pam has speed-dialed a mysterious number hoping for help. Clooney comes to the rescue, and it’s on.Pitt’s arrival baffles Clooney and adds to what becomes a messier, more dangerous problem. After some teasingly testy back and forth, the two settle into a wary partnership. Pam cleans up and splits as Clooney cleverly deals with her mess in between side-eyeing Pitt. (If you ever wanted to know how to unobtrusively move a body, this movie offers a helpful to-do list.) And then Pitt spies a backpack holding several bricks of drugs, and the cleanup becomes instantly far more complicated. It gets trickier still when the body turns out to be alive, and he flees into the night. Called the Kid (Austin Abrams), he looks a bit like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” another nocturnal adventure that racks up mileage in downtown New York.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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    ‘Transformers One’ Review: Back to the Beginning

    An animated prequel maps out a tidy mythology while indulging in the toy-smashing thrills of the ’80s cartoons.When settling into “Transformers One,” the latest spinoff of the alien robot franchise, you may have a pang of nostalgia for what suddenly feels like the quaint mayhem of Michael Bay’s original film from 2007.Back then, “Transformers” was about as much of a ludicrous commercial tent pole as you could come up with: Bayhem unleashed on a Hasbro toy. The franchise that film spawned has managed to extend its life force well into a movie era defined by intellectual property equations. Say what you will about Bay’s metal masher, but it was, in its early goings, a blockbuster that had its own ethos. Now, 17 years later, we’re down to an animated prequel for kids.This is all what a cynic may think at the start of “Transformers One.” But by the end, the film offers a different kind of nostalgia, one that harks back to and indulges the toy-smashing thrills that an ’80s kid would get from a dose of the original animated cartoons.This movie, directed by Josh Cooley, scraps everything we associate with its cinematic forebears and goes back to the beginning, creating, on a structural level, an effective origin story of the Transformers universe.Before Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) were enemies, they were best friends and young nobodies, two miners toiling away as part of an underclass that provided the energy for the planet of Cybertron.But after unwittingly finding a clue to the long-lost Matrix of Leadership, the vital key to the their world’s energy, they, along with Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and a young Bumblebee (Keegan-Michael Key), embark on an adventure and uncover a conspiracy that shifts both the fabric of the planet and of their friendship.It’s a completist piece of lore-building that is sturdily developed but frequently includes stiffly explicative dialogue; Hemsworth and Johansson don’t help much, though Henry gives us a believable transformation into villainy and Key is dexterous comic relief. The missteps can be forgiven and even feel somewhat appropriate when it becomes clear just what kind of itch the film means to scratch: to plot out an immersive mythology in order to have some pulpy fun.That philosophy may explain the film’s confounding computer-generated style — one that can have a rich Cybertron universe but also can revert to what feels like a B-rate children’s TV spinoff. The result is a blockbuster animation film that somehow reads both very expensive and inexplicably cheap.Will fans care all that much, though? Most palpable in its frames are the heart and genuine love for this universe, and when the bots start colliding, with action sequences toward the end that are thrillingly punchy, it’s easy to surrender to the lore. In this way, Cooley’s film makes a good spinoff suddenly seem simple: Sometimes all you need is the imagination for heroes and villains, betrayal and glory — and heaps of plastic to smash together.Transformers OneRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Substance’ Review: An Indecent Disclosure

    Demi Moore stars in an absurdly gory tale of an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity.In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel “The Eye,” a sad-sack Russian tutor living in Berlin dies by suicide, and then spends the rest of the book skulking around the living — watching, obsessing over their lives. He eventually realizes something bleak: Most of us see ourselves only through the eyes of others, through the stories we think they make up about us from the glimpses they get of our lives. “I do not exist,” the narrator writes near the end of the book. “There exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.”Something of “The Eye” lurks in “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s mirror-haunted gory fable about fame, self-hatred and the terror that accompanies an identity constructed on the backs of other people’s stares. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), the aging star at the center of the narrative, is very much alive, but she might as well be dead when the story starts. A career spent in front of cameras — first as a celebrated actress, and then as a celebrity fitness instructor on a show called “Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth”— abruptly ends when an executive (Dennis Quaid) decides she’s too old to be worthy of being seen. He gets to decide if anyone wants to look at her, and if he turns the cameras away, does she even exist?That executive is loud and disgusting and named Harvey, which should tell you a little about the subtlety of this movie, which is to say it has none, and doesn’t particularly want any. He, like most of the movie, is deliberately way, way over the top. “After 50, it stops,” he tells her, through mouthfuls of mayonnaise-coated shrimp, by way of explaining why she’s no longer attractive. Then he sputters when she asks what “it” is.There are mirrors everywhere in Elisabeth’s world: literal mirrors and polished doorknobs, but also pictures of her in the hallways at the studio and a giant portrait at her house, so that her younger body and face are always looking back at her. Everywhere she looks, there she is, or was — lithe, toned, smiling broadly. Elisabeth is still gorgeous by any sane person’s reckoning (and Moore is in her early 60s), but surrounded constantly by a version of herself with a little more collagen, she is being slowly driven mad.Relatable, really. We all see too much of ourselves. Ancient women had pools of water into which they could peer, but our ancestors didn’t have scads of selfies lurking in their pockets. They weren’t tagged in unflattering photos snapped by friends. They didn’t have to look at their own faces on Zoom all day.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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    ‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Sisters at Odds Together

    Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters who are caring for their dying father in this tender, funny family drama.Every so often in the heart-heavy drama “His Three Daughters,” the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs frames the actress Natasha Lyonne in radiant close-up. Her character, Rachel, is one of the daughters of the title, and while she thrums with palpable energy, she also has a quality of stillness about her. When Rachel stares into the distance, as she tends to do, lost in thought or maybe just lost — her huge eyes shining, her face edged by flaming red hair — she brings to mind a hummingbird hovering in midair, its wings beating impossibly fast against the strongest headwind.Rachel is the youngest of the sisters who’ve convened to care for their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), at the end of his life. With her older siblings Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), Rachel drifts through the New York apartment where their father is fading away, his heartbeat now supplanted by the beeping machinery that he’s hooked up to, which creates an eerie rhythm throughout. It’s a hard, painful setup but also absurdly funny, intimate and human. Jacobs is sensitive to life’s contradictions; he knows how abruptly love seems to boil over into hate, and how quickly adult siblings can turn into whining, raging children.Set over an inexact number of days and nights, the movie tracks the sisters during the course of their vigil. Katie is the scold (and surrogate angry patriarch), who also lives in the city, while Christina (an anxious maternal type from California) plays the part of the diplomat. Outwardly, at least, Rachel — who lives with their father in the apartment — slips readily into the role of the black sheep (and unruly child), especially given her pursuits and pastimes. When she’s not fleeing from her sisters, Rachel is hunkered down in her room, watching sports on TV, playing the odds and taking hits off a blunt. Rachel seems to be in a fog, but she’s perfectly lucid.Most of the movie takes place in the apartment, a modest, pointedly ordinary space with plenty of windows and a couple of bedrooms on the upper floor of a building in a large complex. It’s humble by mainstream, art-directed movie standards; it looks like a real apartment where real people live. There’s nothing fancy about it, just photos, tchotchkes and furniture people might actually use, middle-class people, working-class people, people lucky enough to have an affordable New York (Manhattan!) apartment. It’s a moving emblem of a nearly lost city and, by turns, a haunted house, a cozy home and a theater for the family’s drama, one that the sisters enact at times while reciting grievances they clearly committed to heart long ago.Emotions are already raw when the movie opens on Katie. Seated against a white wall, arms tightly folded across her chest, she is in the midst of an epic tirade directed at an offscreen, silent Rachel. As the camera holds on Katie, she talks and talks, her words running together into a near-indistinguishable slurry. It’s as if she didn’t believe in punctuation or the niceties of conversation; it soon becomes clear she has next to no patience for Rachel. Katie asks her a question without waiting for the answer, emphasizes the obvious, makes demands. It’s not for nothing that the first time you see each sister she is alone in the frame.As the vigil continues, things shift and settle, and other characters come and go, including a hospice worker, Angel (Rudy Galvan); a security guard, Victor (Jose Febus); and Rachel’s friend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo). Each brings some air into the fraught scene; more subtly, they reveal something about how the sisters relate to the larger world. Katie, for one, jokingly refers to the hospice aide as an Angel of Death, which isn’t funny the first or the second time she does so. That Rachel talks more readily to Victor than to her sisters says much about the family — about the siblings’ relations, worldviews and aching need for connection — as does the moment when, in her bedroom, she wearily rests her head on Benjy’s shoulder.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 Different Man’ Review: Face, Off

    Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson star in a marvelously inventive dark comedy about a man who can’t change his insides.Cinema obsesses over doppelgängers and doubles. Perhaps that’s only natural since movie cameras let us record ourselves, and then play our images back in front of our own eyes. According to ancient folklore, seeing your doppelgänger was a harbinger of doom. So we get “Vertigo” and “Mulholland Drive” and “Possession” and “Us,” all haunted by some primal psychological dread.“A Different Man,” written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, taps that apprehension with wryly absurd humor. Deft and clever, “A Different Man” is itself a doppelgänger of sorts for “The Substance,” the horror film starring Demi Moore, which opens on the same day. They both stick their fingers in a festering wound: our deep-down belief that if we could only shed our flaws, we’d unveil the cooler, more svelte, and above all happier selves that dwell within. They are films for our moment: It’s never been easier to alter our own appearances, and never been harder to escape our own faces.But where “The Substance” is glossy and frantic, “A Different Man” lopes and zags and rubs some gratifying schmutz on the lens. There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.The story begins with Edward (Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition in which tumors grow beneath the skin. It has mainly affected his face, distorting his features. He has little confidence, and it doesn’t help that his latest gig is in a cheap and patronizing corporate training video aiding viewers in “accepting” and “including” co-workers with facial disfigurement.Edward lives quietly in a small, old New York apartment populated by the usual New York characters: loudmouths and weirdos and people who pound on the ceiling when you walk too heavily. One day, though, the gorgeous and friendly Ingrid (Renata Reinsve) moves in next door. She is an aspiring playwright, and she and Edward strike up a friendship.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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    JD Souther, Who Wrote Hits for the Eagles, Dies at 78

    JD Souther, who crafted many of the biggest hits to come out of the Southern California country-rock scene of the 1970s, including for the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, and who later played a wizened music industry veteran — in other words, a version of himself — on the hit television show “Nashville,” died on Tuesday at his home in Sandia Park, N.M., in the hills east of Albuquerque. He was 78.His death was announced on his website. A cause was not provided.Beginning in the late 1960s, Mr. Souther was part of a coterie of musicians around Los Angeles who found themselves circling the same sort of peaceful, easy, country-inflected rock sound. They played at the same venues — among them the Troubadour, the famous West Hollywood nightclub — and lived and partied in the same canyons in the Hollywood Hills.Mr. Souther played with or wrote for most of them. Though he was brought up on jazz and classical music, he easily mastered the country-rock vernacular on songs like “Faithless Love” and “White Rhythm and Blues,” for Ms. Ronstadt; “The Heart of the Matter,” which he wrote with Don Henley; and “Her Town Too,” a collaboration with Mr. Taylor that they sang as a duet.He also played a central role in the formation of the Eagles, encouraging Ms. Ronstadt, his girlfriend at the time, to hire his friend Glenn Frey as part of her backup band. After Mr. Henley joined, he and Mr. Frey decided to form their own group, along with two other members of Ms. Ronstadt’s ensemble, Bernie Leadon and Randy Meisner.Mr. Souther, third from left, onstage with the Eagles in San Diego in 1979. With him are, from left, Joe Vitale, Timothy B. Schmit, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, Joe Walsh and Don Felder.George Rose/Getty ImagesMr. Souther was almost the fifth Eagle: He joined the quartet for an afternoon tryout at the Troubadour, but he decided that the band was already perfect, and that he’d rather write for them.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