Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 75 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Nickel Boys’ Review: Childhood’s Brutal End

    This visually inventive adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel follows two boys at an abusive school in Jim Crow-era Florida.The first time that you clearly and truly see the teenage heartbreaker in “Nickel Boys,” he is walking up to a new friend. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) has just arrived at the fictional reform school referenced in the title when he sits down opposite Turner (Brandon Wilson) at a communal table. They’re in a large dining room crowded with children of varying sizes, shapes and bearings, and while some seem to be on the cusp of manhood, many look too obscenely young to be here. Their chatter and laughter obscures the horrors of this place. You only need to look closer to see that some of these children are already ghosts.Different types of kids populate RaMell Ross’s painful, boldly expressionistic adaptation of the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel, “The Nickel Boys.” The children at the school are by turns determined, defeated and stunned, almost hollowed out. Ross cradles them all in a soft, beautiful light. With great sensitivity to the power of the cinematic image — and to the history of abject representations of Black humanity — he keeps on cradling them. Even when the story turns unbearably cruel, Ross insists on beauty as an imperative; it is, among other things, a rebuke to the annihilating ugliness of Nickel and to those who oblige its horrors.Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy, as it’s called, after he’s unfairly caught up in an injustice. It’s 1962 when a sympathetic teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) taps Elwood — a sober, studious 16-year-old high-school student in Tallahassee, Fla. — to take a class at a local college. On his first day to the college, Elwood inadvertently hitches a ride with a car thief. Wrongly implicated in the crime, he is taken from the home he shares with his loving grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who, with his parents long gone, is raising him on her own. He’s subsequently sent to Nickel, where his story begins in earnest.“A prison for children” is how a 1903 report referred to the Jim Crow-era emblem, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which had been founded just three years earlier and would inspire Whitehead’s novel. There, for decade after decade, hundreds of ostensibly troubled boys, most Black, were confined, worked, terrorized and killed. (Among their offenses: “incorrigibility.”) Some disappeared. About 100 children are known to have died at the school from fire, disease, blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds. After Florida shut down the school in 2011 following several investigations, one by the Justice Department, the state ordered a separate inquiry that led to the excavation of 55 unmarked graves.The movie, written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, adheres to the novel’s narrative arc even as it condenses the story. In vivid, dreamy visual bursts, Ross glides over Elwood’s early childhood and explores his growing interest in the civil rights movement, which he carries to Nickel. There, Elwood settles into the racially segregated quarters, surveys the scene — he notes the Black students’ tattered clothing — and meets Turner. He also experiences Nickel’s culture of violence when, after defending another kid from bullies, some adult employees take him to a building called the White House. Inside this hell, he is so brutally flogged by a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater as Spencer) that he ends up in the school hospital.Ross takes an oblique approach to this scene, using narrative ellipses to avoid making a spectacle out of sadistic white violence on Black bodies. To that end, as he does from the very beginning of the movie, he shows you only what Elwood sees, a strategy that pulls you to the character and which Ross sustains for an unusually long time for a commercial movie. Through Elwood’s darting eyes and keen ears, you see and hear what he does. In the White House, you hear the rhythm of the strap and the thunderous roar of a fan that never fully obscures the children’s cries. You see a light, a Bible, another boy’s hand clutching a frantically jittering leg. You also see blood on Spencer’s shirt but not how it got there.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

  • 150 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ Review: Side Quest

    This anime adaptation, drawn from Tolkien’s appendices, focuses on a shield maiden, but mostly it serves as an excuse to revisit Middle-earth.There’s something so tantalizing about discovering the story within a story — the old tale, the side quest or the bit of lore that is relegated to a brief mention or note. Or, possibly, to a reference in the appendix. That’s the case in “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” a hot-and-cold anime adaptation of a tale mentioned in the appendices of “The Lord of the Rings.”Taking place pre-Peter Jackson trilogy and post-Amazon series, and directed by Kenji Kamiyama (“Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex”), the movie is based on a story from the history of Rohan, a kingdom of men known to be great horse-tamers and riders. Almost 200 years before the War of the Ring, Rohan is facing a mighty rift within its own boundaries, as a Dunlending lord named Wulf seeks a bloody path to the throne held by Helm Hammerhand, voiced by Brian Cox (and, yes, Helm as in Helm’s Deep, the battle site in “The Two Towers,” the second Jackson film). As fighting breaks out, putting both the Helm house and the people of Rohan at risk, Helm’s only daughter, a wild and untamed princess fated for little more than an advantageous marriage, becomes the warrior who defines the battle’s conclusion.Helm’s daughter is unnamed in the appendices, but here she gets both a name — Héra — and a central role in the story, as the eyes through which we see the action unfold. Héra (voiced by Gaia Wise), her family’s fastest equestrian, descends from a tradition of Rohan shield maidens, as does her casually badass lady in waiting, Olwyn. The narrator is Éowyn (voiced by Miranda Otto, who played the character in Jackson’s trilogy), another shield maiden who tells the story 200 years after the film’s events. So while “War of the Rohirrim” feels like a noble attempt to expand the number of valiant women characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s canon, Héra doesn’t feel fully realized. Though she’s independent and bonded to nature, the character lacks personality and feels ancillary to the story. Even the film’s bid to add dimension, by, say, including a flashback of Héra’s childhood friendship with Wulf, plays as a forced attempt to weave this character into the larger drama of the movie.Part of the issue here is the built-in constraints to the narrative: The War of the Rohirrim takes up less than three pages in the appendices to Tolkien’s already meticulously detailed and beloved “Lord of the Rings,” so there is, understandably, a bit of reticence to the storytelling in the film. “The War of the Rohirrim” tries to strike the proper balance between remaining loyal to the Middle-earth created by Tolkien and imagined by Jackson while also introducing novel ideas to an adaptation of a lesser-known part of that universe.So although parts of the story feel predictable or familiar — particularly character tropes like the stubborn ruler, the loyal knight exiled from the kingdom and the one-dimensional villain hellbent on revenge — the film does succeed at recreating the fantasy world we know and love, just in a new anime format. It helps that this film shares much of the same creative team that worked on the Jackson films, and the unforgettable music, by Stephen Gallagher (music editor of the “Hobbit” trilogy), immediately sets this world within Jackson’s universe.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 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Endless Summer Syndrome’ Review: Who’s Lying?

    In this sun-dappled French psychological thriller, a lawyer receives a call accusing her husband of having an affair with one of their children.Every year there seems to be a new book or movie on the subject of incest in France — most recently Catherine Breillat’s “Last Summer.” Extending from this tradition, in which a sunny French bourgeois family is secretly rotting from the inside, is “Endless Summer Syndrome,” a promising debut feature by the Iranian director Kaveh Daneshmand that frames the crime as a twisty detective story.As Delphine (Sophie Colon), a lawyer, enjoys her final days of vacation in her family’s country villa, she receives an anonymous call from one of her husband’s co-workers telling her that Antoine (Matheo Capelli), a novelist, drunkenly confessed to having an affair with one of his children.Suddenly, Delphine’s blissful vacation turns into a paranoid inferno as she obsesses over her family’s dynamic and each member’s behaviors. Could the child in question be their coquettish 17-year-old daughter, Adia (Frédérika Milano)? Or Aslan (Gem Deger), their brooding college-bound eldest? Both Adia and Aslan were adopted, and Delphine and her husband’s bohemian parenting style (a topless Adia sunbathes in front of them, and Aslan at one point shares a joint with mom) now adds to Delphine’s suspicion that she’s surrounded by strangers.The luxe pastoral setting and slow-burning suspense recall the psychological thrillers of Patricia Highsmith and Claude Chabrol, while the magnetic Colon anchors the plot’s more sensational turns. The focus on Delphine’s mental state is a reminder that this is a story about betrayal, and the human cost of abandoning reason in the name of desire.The script falters when it attempts to pinpoint the dysfunctions of a modern family in the age of fluid sexual identities and multiculturalism. But none of these potentially intriguing avenues play out with much thought, diminishing the emotional effect of a tragedy that winds up seeming like an exercise in style.Endless Summer SyndromeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Music

    YoungBoy Never Broke Again Sentenced to 23 Months in Prison For Gun Possession

    The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell Gaulden, admitted to possessing guns as a felon in Louisiana. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years.YoungBoy Never Broke Again, one of the most-streamed hip-hop artists in the United States, has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison by a federal judge in Utah for possessing weapons as a felon.The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell D. Gaulden, was sentenced on Tuesday to 23 months in prison on gun charges related to a case in Louisiana. Mr. Gaulden, 25, was also sentenced to five years of probation and fined $200,000 for a gun charge in a separate Utah case.Federal law bars gun ownership by felons. In 2017, Mr. Gaulden was convicted of aggravated assault with a firearm, a felony, in a Louisiana court. Details of that case could not be independently confirmed early Wednesday.In a plea agreement filed in the United States District Court in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Mr. Gaulden said that he had been in possession of three guns since his earlier felony conviction.In the first instance, Mr. Gaulden admitted to possessing two guns while filming a music video in Baton Rouge, La., in September 2020. In the second, a semiautomatic pistol was found in the master bedroom of his Utah home during a search, according to the plea agreement.He faced a maximum prison sentence of 10 years in the Louisiana case and 15 years in the Utah case.“This has been a long road that involved extensive litigation and ultimately extensive negotiation,” Mr. Gaulden’s lawyers said in a statement on Wednesday night. “Kentrell’s defense team is very happy for Kentrell and we look forward to his many future successes.”Mr. Gaulden, who is best known as NBA YoungBoy, has legions of dedicated fans. Many of his songs receive hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube.But he has a history of legal problems.In 2022, Mr. Gaulden was found not guilty in a similar gun possession case in California. Police in the Los Angeles area had found a pistol and ammunition in the car he was driving. His lawyers argued that he did not know that the weapon was in the car at the time, and that his fingerprints were not found on the gun. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Movies

    Sundance Film Festival Unveils a Lineup Heavy on Politics

    The annual event also makes room for a remake of the musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and the return of Justin Lin.There is a point during every Sundance Film Festival, usually as movie fans are trudging through the cold, slushy snow in Park City, Utah, when they wonder, why do they hold this in January? And yet, so often current events — most often of the political nature — are reflected not only in the films being screened on the mountain but also in the happenings around town.In January 2009, huge crowds gathered to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration. In January 2017, 4,000 festivalgoers, including Charlize Theron, Kristen Stewart and Chelsea Handler, marched down Main Street the day after President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration. The following year, amid a considerable snowstorm, Jane Fonda, Gloria Allred and Tessa Thompson gathered protesters with fiery speeches to coincide with the one-year anniversary of his presidency.The 2025 edition of Sundance will debut on Jan. 23, three days after Trump is inaugurated a second time, and the Sundance lineup suggests politics are on the mind of this year’s filmmakers.In the five-part documentary series “Bucks County, USA,” Barry Levinson and Robert May take a close look at two 14-year-old girls, best friends despite their opposing political beliefs, living at the epicenter of the nation’s political divide.The documentarian Sam Feder was shooting in Washington as recently as last week for “Heightened Scrutiny,” about the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio and his battle before the Supreme Court for transgender rights.“The Librarians,” from Kim A. Snyder, tracks the efforts of workers in Texas, Florida and other states to protect democracy amid a wave of book bans, while “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” from Mstyslav Chernov (“20 Days in Mariupol”) follows a Ukrainian platoon on a mission to liberate a strategic village.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 Shares119 Views

    in Music

    How a Soprano With Dyslexia Rose to the Heights of Opera

    Elza van den Heever, a star of “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, no longer sees dyslexia as a hindrance — just a different way of learning.When the soprano Elza van den Heever was hired to sing the role of the Empress in Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Metropolitan Opera, she was elated. It was a dream role — the kind that could cement her reputation as a leading singer.But van den Heever was also nervous. She has struggled with dyslexia since her childhood, in South Africa. And “Frau” is one of opera’s most daunting works, not least because of its dense libretto.“I just sort of assumed in life that I would never be able to sing this kind of complicated music,” she said. “I knew this would be my Mount Everest.”For three years, van den Heever followed a rigorous routine, learning the “Frau” music five to 12 measures at a time and studying the text “as if I were a toddler learning a new language,” she said.Then the pandemic hit, and the Met’s revival of “Frau” was called off.“I was devastated,” she said, “100-percent gutted.”Finally, van den Heever is getting her moment. “Frau” was rescheduled, and is now onstage at the Met through Dec. 19. Van den Heever has won praise for her shimmering voice and seamless virtuosity, and this run of “Frau” has been hailed by critics as a must-see opera.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 Shares169 Views

    in Music

    Shadow of a Childless Woman: The Mythic Roots of Strauss’s ‘Frau’

    What’s behind the strange emphasis on childlessness in “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” the Strauss-Hofmannsthal opera now at the Met? Look to the ancients.Although the music of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (“The Woman Without a Shadow”) is often transcendentally beautiful, it is among the least performed of the Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal operas at the Metropolitan Opera. Its relatively rare appearance on the Met stage is, I believe, in large part because of its weird, somewhat incomprehensible, and to some contemporary tastes offensive, libretto. The opera compounds the felony by being (at over four hours) the longest of all the Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas. Only “Der Rosenkavalier” comes close, but as “Rosenkavalier” is the best loved of all the pair’s operas, the length of “Frau” cannot be the only culprit.It’s the libretto. Any summary immediately brings to mind Anna Russell’s satire on the convoluted plot of Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” which she excused by remarking, “But that’s the beauty of Grand Opera: you can do anything so long as you sing it.”The “Frau” libretto concerns the Empress, the daughter of the invisible spirit god Keikobad and a mortal woman, who has married the Emperor (a mortal man) but cannot bear children. The sign of her defining lack is that she has no shadow; because she is part spirit, she doesn’t have enough substance to generate a shadow or a child.Many Strauss aficionados have long been uncomfortable with the opera’s strange emphasis on childlessness. But the return of “Die Frau” to the Met’s stage (through Dec. 19) comes at a fraught moment when audiences are dealing with abortion and transgender issues, not to mention concerns over a declining birthrate. They might be apt to criticize it for what they see as a natalist stance. Men and women, however, have been caught up in the convoluted dance of mortality and fertility since the dawn of history, and “Frau” draws upon that tradition, allowing us to see our present preoccupations in both the ancient wisdom and the ancient folly that still bedevil us.Mortality and fertility become real issues when the Empress learns that unless she gets a shadow within three days, her father, the god, will turn her husband, the Emperor, to stone. So she goes to the world of mortals to try to buy a shadow from the malcontented wife of a very nice but very poor man who wants children. He is named Barak, and he’s a dyer, which can be heard, for those listening in English translation, as “a dier,” one who dies, which is the defining characteristic of the dyer and his wife.Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss in 1912. Their opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten” premiered in 1919, in the wreckage of World War I.Fine Art/Heritage Images, via 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

  • 75 Shares169 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Maria’ Review: A Diva in Decline

    Angelina Jolie plays the opera star Maria Callas in a movie that can’t figure her out.There is a moment, a little way into “Maria,” when you realize it shares a cinematic universe with another of the director Pablo Larraín’s recent films. This movie’s main character is the celebrated opera singer Maria Callas (Angelina Jolie). In a flashback rendered in monochrome, we see the night she met the absurdly wealthy business magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer) — and he’s the future husband, we know, of Jackie Kennedy, who was the subject of Larraín’s 2016 film “Jackie.” Onassis, still married to his previous wife, claims he’s fallen in love with Callas through his opera glasses and invites her and her husband aboard his yacht; she seems lightly amused and a little irritated. “There’s a point where self-confidence becomes a kind of insanity,” she tells him.Obviously that “cinematic universe” is just reality: Famous people know other famous people and go to the same parties and fall in love with one another. Callas and Onassis spent nine years together before he left her for the widowed Jackie Kennedy. But in this case, the link reminds the viewer that Larraín has made a better movie in his so-called diva trilogy — two better ones, actually. In “Jackie,” Natalie Portman played the bereaved first lady as she carefully crafted a legend out of her assassinated husband’s legacy. “Spencer,” which came out in 2021, was not good — but it was interesting, starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in the throes of a Christmastime existential crisis.Yet “Maria” is a bit of a slog, even for an opera lover (like me). Callas here is at the end of her life, and she is not well. She lives in Paris with her long-suffering butler (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housemaid (Alba Rohrwacher), lies to them about how many pills she’s taking, and hallucinates enough of her day that she qualifies as an unreliable narrator. Her longing for Onassis, or perhaps her visions of him, is one narrative thread in “Maria.” Here are some others: her need for adulation; her fading voice; her addiction to various prescription drugs; her obsessive proclivity for ordering her butler to move the piano around her home; her slip-sliding memory; her refusal to listen to anyone’s advice other than her own; her almost pathological insistence on dying for her art.This is, in other words, about the sun setting over a once-shining prima donna, a woman who wowed the world with her voice and then faded from view. The movie skips over most of her scandals, flashing back to performances on the world’s great stages and, even earlier, in her youth (Aggelina Papadopoulou plays the young Callas). Those performances are sumptuously staged, as are several dreamlike sequences involving choruses and orchestras on the streets of Paris, in one case performing “Madama Butterfly” in the pouring rain. There’s no lack of effort here. Jolie trained for seven months to sing some of the music, and while she is lip-syncing to some of Callas’s famous performances, she is completely immersed in all of 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