Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    ‘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

  • 75 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    ‘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

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    ‘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

  • 75 Shares179 Views

    in Movies

    ‘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

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    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

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in Music

    Sean Combs Must Remain in Jail Until Trial After Judge Denies Bail Appeal

    The judge said Mr. Combs posed a risk of witness tampering and was a danger to the community while awaiting his sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial.A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Sean Combs to remain in jail until his trial for sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, rejecting an appeal by the music mogul’s lawyers requesting that he be released on bail.Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. said at a hearing in Lower Manhattan that Mr. Combs posed a risk of witness tampering and was a danger to the safety of the community. He rejected an unusual proposal from Mr. Combs’s legal team in which he would have remained at his mansion in Florida, monitored around the clock by a private security force. The lawyers had offered a $50 million bond for his release.Arguing that Mr. Combs was prone to violence, prosecutors spoke at length about a leaked surveillance video from 2016 in which he was seen physically assaulting Casandra Ventura, his former girlfriend, who is known as Cassie. She filed a sexual assault lawsuit against him last year that was quickly settled.The judge said “that video is quite disturbing,” after which Mr. Combs, seated between his lawyers, nodded several times.Marc Agnifilo, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers, said his client should not be detained based on an assault from eight years ago that led him to go to rehab. “Mr. Combs has the unfortunate reality that the worst thing he ever did is on videotape,” the lawyer said.The government’s concern that Mr. Combs might intimidate witnesses was a theme of the hearing.“His influence makes it so difficult for witnesses to share their experiences and trust that the government can keep them safe from him,” said Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors.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

  • 75 Shares179 Views

    in Movies

    Making ‘The Wild Robot’ Even Wilder

    Roz, the beloved protagonist of Peter Brown’s popular children’s book, gets a glow-up for the big-screen adaptation.On the cover of Peter Brown’s best-selling children’s book “The Wild Robot” are massive evergreens and a matching dark green seascape. Atop a pile of enormous boulders is a tiny but unmistakable image of a robot: Roz, the book’s protagonist, with her bucket-shaped head, squared-off shoulders and two headlights for eyes.“With a book, the cover is often all you’ve got to pull the reader in,” Brown said in an interview. “I very deliberately designed Roz to look simple, so that when people saw the book cover they would immediately know that it’s a robot.”Movies, however, have a bit more freedom when it comes to automatons. “There’s motion, there’s sound effects, there’s all this other stuff that can tell viewers pretty quickly that they’re looking at a robot,” he added.So when the artists and designers at DreamWorks Animation set about adapting Brown’s book and its mechanical star for the big screen, they let their minds run free. In place of the static, unblinking silhouette of Brown’s book cover, DreamWorks created a leaping, whirling, battling protagonist who can scuttle up steep cliffs like a crab and swing from place to place via long telescoping arms.As the movie unfolds, Roz’s tools are revealed: claws that can climb sheer cliffs; fingers that shoot flames; arms that function as vacuums and leaf blowers; a homing beacon that emerges from the top of her head; DreamWorks AnimationFor a studio like DreamWorks, makers of the “Kung Fu Panda” and “How to Train Your Dragon” franchises, coming up with the dramatic action sequences and cool character design was relatively easy. The challenge for the film, which opens on Sept. 27: keeping the soul of a character that millions of readers had fallen in love with over the course of Brown’s trilogy, a character that was, yes, a robot who could stand alongside Hollywood’s and anime’s most exciting droids and bots, but was also, at heart, an adoptive mother trying her best to care for an orphaned gosling.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

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Music

    Sean Combs, Music Mogul Known as Diddy, Denied Bail on Sex Trafficking Charges

    A day after his arrest, the music mogul known as Diddy was accused of running a “criminal enterprise” that threatened and abused women. He pleaded not guilty.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul, was denied bail on Tuesday after pleading not guilty to charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution.In a federal indictment unsealed on Tuesday, Mr. Combs, 54, was described as the boss of a yearslong criminal enterprise that threatened and abused women, coercing them to participate against their will in drug-fueled orgies with male prostitutes and threatening them with violence or the loss of financial support if they refused.The 14-page indictment against Mr. Combs, a producer, record executive and performer who is also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, came a day after he was arrested in a Manhattan hotel room, following an investigation that has been active since at least early this year. Prosecutors said Mr. Combs and his employees engaged in kidnapping, forced labor, arson and bribery, and kept firearms at the ready.In asking a magistrate to deny Mr. Combs’s request to be released on bail, prosecutors argued that he was a threat to the community. One of the prosecutors, Emily A. Johnson, called him a “serial abuser and a serial obstructer,” and said his wealth would make it easy for him to escape undetected. She noted that after Mr. Combs was arrested, law enforcement found what they suspected to be narcotics in his hotel room, in the form of pink powder.Mr. Combs’s lawyers suggested a $50 million bond. But Judge Robyn F. Tarnofsky denied their request, citing Mr. Combs’s anger issues and history of substance abuse, and ordered Mr. Combs detained while he awaits trial.“My concern,” the judge said, “is that this is a crime that happens behind closed doors.”As Mr. Combs walked out of the courtroom, he looked toward his supporters in the room, including his three adult sons, and put his hand on his heart.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