Aurelia Butler
More stories
- in Movies
Death, Taxes and Ben Affleck: ‘The Accountant’ Gets a Sequel
In the movie class of 2016, “The Accountant” was a wild-card.It told an original story for adults, breaking from the family-friendly intellectual property derivatives that crowded the top of the box office charts. And though it resembled a durable breed of man-on-a-mission action thrillers, it had an absurdist, gleefully dorky twist — Ben Affleck playing a neurodivergent bookkeeper and consigliere to the criminal underworld.Audiences responded. “The Accountant” outperformed expectations in theaters, earning $155.5 million globally (according to Box Office Mojo), and was the No. 1 most rented movie of 2017 (according to Comscore), ahead of “Moana,” “Wonder Woman” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”Nine years and a change of studios later, a sequel, “The Accountant 2,” arrives on Friday, with Affleck and much of the original cast (Jon Bernthal, J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson) returning, along with the director Gavin O’Connor and the screenwriter Bill Dubuque. In two conversations — one at South by Southwest in March, before the film’s premiere there, and another virtually earlier this month — Affleck, O’Connor and Dubuque discussed regaining the rights to the story, the definition of success and a potential idea for a third film.These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Affleck, right, with Jon Bernthal in “The Accountant 2.”Amazon StudiosBill, you wrote the script for the first “Accountant” independently — before an actor or a director was involved. Where did the main character, Christian Wolff, come from?BILL DUBUQUE I know people who are on the spectrum, and I thought something like this might be interesting; I’ve always been interested in how the brain works. I thought we could take this character who has a certain set of skills, a certain set of vulnerabilities, and not make him a victim but put him in a situation that was entertaining and where you felt something for him.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
- in Music
Maggie & Terre Roche’s 1975 LP Is a Revelation. Why Is It Forgotten?
“Seductive Reasoning,” a flop that preceded the Roches’ debut, has a fluctuating sonic palette, contributions from Paul Simon and the sisters’ most brilliant songwriting.“It’s funny how one always wants to play their favorite records for friends, and they never listen properly, never understand them,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1943. Many of us have albums like that, orphaned ones we shyly push on others to little or no avail. We blink back tears while playing the tracks; they wish to flee the room.Primary among these, for me, is Maggie & Terre Roche’s little-known 1975 album “Seductive Reasoning.” It appeared 50 years ago this month, which seems like an occasion to speak up about it. It’s a misfit of a record, and it fizzled commercially: People lined up not to buy copies.“Seductive Reasoning” was such a non-hit that it drove Maggie and Terre, sisters from Park Ridge, N.J., out of the music business — at least until 1979, when they emerged with their younger sister, Suzzy, as the Roches and released their eponymously titled first LP to ecstatic reviews. That album, “The Roches,” deserves its reputation. If you don’t know “Hammond Song,” well, your homework, and a portable slice of bliss, awaits you.From left: Maggie, Suzzy and Terre Roche in 1980.Rob Verhorst/Redferns, via Getty ImagesNothing the three Roche sisters did together, for me, tops the sparer and earthier and wilier (it’s a little stupid on purpose) pleasures of “Seductive Reasoning.” It’s been in the shadows for too long.“Seductive Reasoning” is a young person’s record, a product of overlapping propinquities, made by a college dropout (Maggie) and a high school dropout (Terre) who possessed swooping blood harmonies, a novelistic deftness with language and a whole raft of intense perceptions and inchoate longings to draw upon.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
- in Music
Roy Thomas Baker, Who Helped Produce ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Dies at 78
Among the most successful music producers in the 1970s and ’80s, he helped churn out hits for acts like Queen, the Cars, Journey and Foreigner.Roy Thomas Baker, who was among the most successful music producers of the 1970s and 1980s and who helped produce Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most unconventional pop hits, died at his home in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., on April 12. He was 78.His death was announced by Bob Merlis, a spokesman, who said in a statement that the cause was unclear.Besides Queen, Mr. Baker collaborated with other well-known bands like the Cars, Journey, Mötley Crüe and Foreigner while working as a producer and sound engineer at several recording studios over the course of his career.He is perhaps best known for helping to produce the nearly six-minute-long “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. In an interview with The New York Times in 2005, Mr. Baker said that the song was “ageless” because “it didn’t confine to any given genre of music.”“I thought it was going to be a hit,” said Mr. Baker, who produced the song with Queen. “We didn’t know it was going to be quite that big. I didn’t realize it was still going to be talked about 30 years later.”Roy Thomas Baker was born on Nov. 10, 1946, in Hampstead, England. He began his career at Decca Studios in London in 1963, working as a second engineer to Angus Boyd (Gus) Dudgeon, an English record producer who would later become known for his collaborations with Elton John; and Tony Visconti, an American producer who went on to work with artists like David Bowie and Marc Bolan.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
- in Music
An Ode to the Blues’ Many Guises, Inspired by ‘Sinners’
Listen to an imagined set list for a supernatural juke joint featuring Albert King, Outkast, Cécile McLorin Salvant and more.D’AngeloZackary Canepari for The New York TimesDear listeners,I’m James, a software engineer with The New York Times’s interactive news desk and an occasional contributor to Culture. I cajoled my way into this space this week after being captivated by the musical ideas pulsing through “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending vampire flick that’s also a tone poem about Black love and pain, and the power and cost of Black creativity.In an arresting scene, a transcendent blues musician plays so fiercely, he summons ancestors and progeny to a Mississippi juke joint in 1932. Suddenly and seamlessly, Jim Crow-era sharecroppers, B-boys from the ’90s, Chinese folk dancers, African griots and funk musicians from the ’70s are all together, reveling to the same kinetic sound. It’s a visual expression of Black music’s shared DNA.My girlfriend and I spent all weekend analyzing that scene, pondering the blues’ connections to what came before and since. Here are 11 songs I could imagine on the set list at a supernatural juke joint unbounded by technology, geography or time.If he don’t dig this, he got a hole in his soul,JamesListen along while you read.1. Albert King: “Cold Feet”This infectious stomper from 1967 would set a warm vibe early in the interdimensional party, satisfying fans of the Mississippi-born blues luminary and the ’90s hip-hop heads who’d recognize it as the foundation of Chubb Rock’s “Just the Two of Us.”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
- in Music
Tina Knowles Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis in New Memoir, ‘Matriarch’
A little over a decade ago, during quiet moments traveling between New York and Houston, Tina Knowles started freestyling, recording memories and childhood stories in voice notes on her cellphone.Then 59, Knowles was still busy styling and mothering her world-conquering daughters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles (she counts Kelly Rowland and a niece, Angie Beyincé, as her own, too) and had just divorced her husband of 31 years. There had been several deaths in her family.“I just started thinking about mortality, and ‘I’m not gonna be here forever,’” she said. “I felt old, I felt sad.” She wanted to leave a legacy for her kids and grandchildren.As Knowles, now 71, sat earlier this month in the great room of her home atop a Hollywood Hill, a sunny space filled with gallery-sized artwork at every turn, she described that personal nadir while infrequently waving a hand adorned with a few knuckle-sized gold rings and manicured in a bright red that matched her lipstick. Having changed into a tan Alo sweatsuit after a photo shoot — the right sleeve eventually slipped, leaving her shoulder bare — she radiated an offhand sultriness, a nonchalant glamour that couldn’t have been more removed from the dark era that launched the project.Her resulting memoir, “Matriarch,” available Tuesday, brings Knowles’s life to center stage. It has the drama of her upbringing in the segregated South and the personal improvement journey of a working mom compelled to stand up for her kids but not herself, as well as cautionary optimism: Knowles reveals for the first time that she was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer in 2024. (After surgery and treatment, she is cancer free — and daring to dress in “sheer mesh” after undergoing a reduction. “That was my silver lining.”)When she was first approached to write a memoir, Tina Knowles said she thought, “They’re going to want to hear about my kids; they’re not going to want to hear about me.”Kobe Wagstaff for The New York TimesWe 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
- in Music
How Japanese Engineering Transformed Pop Music
On the morning of Monday, Aug. 18, 1969, during the last set of the Woodstock festival, Jimi Hendrix wielded a white Stratocaster to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His guitar solo was one psychedelic peak in a long heritage of experimentation. Almost as soon as guitars were first amplified in the 1930s, musicians began messing with their equipment to create brash tones — from poking holes in speaker cones to increase distortion to plugging into a Leslie speaker, which had horns rotating in a hefty refrigerator-size wooden enclosure, the resulting Doppler effect making the guitar sound rich and otherworldly. More
- in Movies
How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language
The greatest filmmaker of postwar Japan found a new way to show life onscreen.MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to “the pathos of things,” or something like “the beauty of transience,” has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn’t usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it’s the filmmaker who’s gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story’s concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving “empty spaces” in his movies as a means of revealing “the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.” More
