Aurelia Butler

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    Jim Abrahams, 80, Dies; One of Trio Behind ‘Airplane!’ and ‘Naked Gun’

    Along with David and Jerry Zucker, he revolutionized film comedy with a style of straight-faced, fast-paced parody.Jim Abrahams, who with the brothers David and Jerry Zucker surely comprised one of the funniest trios of comedy writers in film history, layering on the yucks in classics like “Airplane!” and “Naked Gun,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 80.His son Joseph said the death was from complications of leukemia.Mr. Abrahams and the Zucker brothers — often known around Hollywood as the “men from ZAZ” — revolutionized film comedy with their brand of straight-faced, fast-paced parodies of self-serious dramas like 1970s disaster films and police procedurals.Along the way they littered pop culture with a trail of one liners seemingly custom-cut to drop into daily conversation: “Have you ever seen a grown man naked?” “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.” And “Nice beaver!”Their films spawned an entire genre of spoof comedy, many of them pale, scruffy comparisons to the tight scripts and cleverly paced plots that gave the ZAZ films their punch.The trio shared writing credits on five films, starting with “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977), a compilation of parody sketches that grew out of a comedy show they developed after college in Madison, Wis., and took to Los Angeles in 1972.The idea for their second film, “Airplane!” (1980), came after watching a 1957 thriller called “Zero Hour!” about an ill-fated passenger plane on which the crew are stricken with food poisoning, forcing one of the passengers, a psychologically scarred ex-pilot, to take control.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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    ‘Queer’ Review: The Seductive, Damaged Charm of Daniel Craig

    The star kills off his Bond to inhabit a dissolute American expat in Luca Guadagnino’s handsome adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella.When William Lee stalks through Mexico City in “Queer,” he often seems on high alert, though sometimes he’s just high. The louche protagonist in Luca Guadagnino’s soft-serve adaptation of the William S. Burroughs autobiographical novella, Lee is a smoker, drinker, heroin addict and epic storyteller. He’s a refugee from America who at times seems like a visitor from another dimension. Played with sensitivity and predatory heat by Daniel Craig, Lee has a feverish mind, eyes like searchlights and a mouth that’s quick to sneer. There are moments when he seems possessed, though it’s not often clear what’s taken hold of his soul.As in the book, the movie follows Lee during an adventure that takes him from Mexico circa 1950 further south — to Panama, Ecuador and parts distinctly unknown — only to bring him back to where he began or thereabouts. The novella runs a scant 160 or so pages, and while it’s crammed with incisive details, characters and observations, the story is fairly compressed and, for the most part, focuses on Lee’s preoccupation with another American, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a tall, good-looking veteran. Lee first sees him gawking at a street cockfight, a distinctly Guadagnino take on what romantic stories call the meet cute.It’s rapture at first sight, at least for Lee, who’s soon chasing Allerton across the city. The younger man coyly, coolly, keeps Lee at a distance until they fall into bed. Guadagnino stages and shoots their encounter with discreet intimacy and pretty lighting, imbuing it with longing. This sensitivity may seem surprising given the outrageous visions, including a talking anus, that fill Burroughs’s most famous novel, the phantasmagoric “Naked Lunch” (1959). Yet desire suffuses his “Queer,” which he began writing in 1952, some six months after he fatally shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a horrifying, calamitously drunken game of William Tell.Burroughs remains best known as one of the coolest cats in the Beats; it was Jack Kerouac who suggested the title for “Queer.” Burroughs came from money, had a difficult past, sartorial flair, a hypnotically droning voice and a sinister aura. “He’s up there with the pope,” Patti Smith said. “Without Burroughs,” Lou Reed said, “modern lit would be a drama without a page, a sonnet without a song and a bone without gristle.” Burroughs, who died in 1997, and Kurt Cobain collaborated on a project, and Nirvana is featured on the soundtrack, suggesting Burroughs’s reach. He was a classic American figure: the nonconformist as cult.The most unconventional thing about the Lee in Guadagnino’s version of “Queer” is that he’s played by Craig, who, of course, is famous as the most recent James Bond. It’s understandable that Craig would seek out roles that put distance between him and Bond, a glossy cartoon of masculinity. It’s both startling and funny when, early in “Queer,” Lee enthusiastically claps a hand on the naked butt of an unnamed guy (Omar Apollo), a moment that Guadagnino presents in close-up so that the backside all but fills the screen, becoming a monumental landscape of desire. Craig isn’t just committing to this role; he is also throttling his Bond.Written by Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” “Queer” follows the novella fairly faithfully, though with customary and unexpected liberties. Lee pursues Allerton, and they become involved amid a blur of drinking, partying and talking. (Jason Schwartzman pops up as Joe, a lampoon of Allen Ginsberg that borders on the offensive.) In time, Lee and Eugene take off for South America to find what Lee calls yagé (the hallucinogen ayahuasca), a mystery drug with potential powers. The trip is by turns brutal and tender, and ends in a jungle where they meet an ayahuasca expert, Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), and her husband (the filmmaker Lisandro Alonso), who fling open the doors of perception.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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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Is Denied Bail a Third Time

    A federal judge ruled against the music mogul’s efforts to be released from jail while he awaits trial on sex trafficking and racketeering charges.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul who has been charged with sex trafficking and racketeering, was denied bail again on Wednesday after a federal judge rejected his lawyers’ third attempt to challenge his detention.Judge Arun Subramanian wrote in the order that prosecutors had presented evidence of Mr. Combs’s propensity for violence and that he had violated jail regulations by trying to obscure his communications with the outside world.The judge wrote that “there is evidence supporting a serious risk of witness tampering.”The decision orders Mr. Combs to remain at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a hulking federal facility on the Brooklyn waterfront, until his trial, which is scheduled for May. Mr. Combs, 55, has been detained since his arrest in September after a nearly 10-month federal investigation.After Mr. Combs’s arrest, his lawyers offered a robust bail package that they argued was more than sufficient to assuage the court’s concerns about the risks of his release. They offered a $50 million bond, secured by Mr. Combs’s Florida mansion and said that Mr. Combs would pay for round-the-clock security, with visitors restricted to family. Apart from contact with his lawyers, he would have no access to phones or the internet.Prosecutors asserted that there was no way the government could trust that private security guards, paid for by Mr. Combs, could be depended on to prevent efforts toward obstructing justice, which, they argued, he had been engaging in before and after his indictment.Judge Subramanian agreed, writing in the order that “the Court doubts the sufficiency of any conditions that place trust in Combs and individuals in his employ — like a private security detail — to follow those conditions.”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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    Andy Paley, Whose Imprint Was All Over Pop Music, Dies at 73

    Musician, singer, songwriter, producer and more, he collaborated with Madonna and a raft of other artists and helped resuscitate the career of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.Andy Paley, a music producer, composer and rock ’n’ roll chameleon who worked with artists as varied as Madonna, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jonathan Richman, and who helped resuscitate the career of the Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson after his much-chronicled emotional flameout, died on Nov. 20 in Colchester, Vt. He was 73.The death, at a hospice facility, was caused by cancer, his wife, Heather Crist Paley, said.A curator of the spirit of classic 1960s pop, Mr. Paley played many roles over an ever-evolving career. He got his start in the late 1960s as the frontman for a Boston-area power pop outfit called the Sidewinders, which briefly included the future FM radio staple Billy Squier on guitar and opened for groups like Aerosmith.Later that decade, he banded with his younger brother, Jonathan, to form a highly regarded, if short-lived, pop duo, the Paley Brothers. With their winsome looks and mops of blond hair, they appeared in the pages of teen bibles like 16 Magazine and Tiger Beat and toured with the pop confection Shaun Cassidy.A skilled multi-instrumentalist, Mr. Paley often went on the road with his close friend Mr. Richman and filled in on keyboards on Patti Smith’s 1976 tour of Europe.During the 1980s, he began to produce for Seymour Stein, the visionary label chief of Sire Records. Influenced by studio wizards like Phil Spector, Mr. Paley produced songs for numerous performers, including Debbie Harry, K.D. Lang, NRBQ, Little Richard and Brenda Lee.From left, Darlene Love, Phil Spector, Joey Ramone, Mr. Paley and Jonathan Paley in 1978. Even as an intimate of musical luminaries, Mr. Paley maintained the wide-eyed wonder of a fan throughout his career.Bob MerlisWe 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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    Watch Ariana Grande Swing From a Chandelier in ‘Wicked’

    The director Jon M. Chu narrates the musical scene, also featuring Cynthia Erivo, where Grande performs the song “Popular.”In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The song “Popular” from “Wicked” has secured a firm place in pop culture in the 21 years since the show opened on Broadway. So how to make the song fresh for the film adaptation?This was one of the major challenges for the film’s director, Jon M. Chu. His formula was a little practical effects, a little razzmatazz and a whole lot of Ariana Grande.The scene has Glinda (Grande) working to improve the image and perception of her roommate, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). In the process, Glinda’s suitcases almost come to life as pop-up closets that she raids for her task.“In each of these devices,” Chu said in his narration, “even though they seem simple, there’s grown men in small spaces pulling it open and shutting it. And the engineering in each took months and months to design right.”The other element involves the timing of Grande’s singing, and the way she works the pink peignoir she’s wearing (designed by Paul Tazewell). She swings on a chandelier in it and slides across the wood floor in it as well, singing live on set throughout.“Ari is just a master of comedy,” Chu said. “You can see it in all her moves, and how she interacts when she acts with Cynthia Erivo. When you actually listen to it, too, her beats and her pauses are just masterful.”Read the “Wicked” review.Read a tearful interview with its stars.Read an interview with the director.Read about the costume design.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    How ‘September 5’ Recreates a Historic News Broadcast

    The drama chronicles the 1972 Munich Olympics attack from ABC Sports’ point of view, a perspective that resonates today. But the film arrives at a fraught time.“They’re all gone.”When the sports broadcaster Jim McKay announced the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympic team members taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, it was a sentence freighted with emotion and instantly became a part of broadcast history.In the new film “September 5,” there is no actor playing McKay, who instead “plays” himself through archival footage woven throughout the drama, which focuses almost entirely on the ABC Sports control room as it retells the saga that unfolded that day.As the dramatized ABC Sports team pivots from the Olympics to breaking news, the real footage unspools on actual monitors from the era: “September 5” features a painstakingly recreated control room with 1970s technology restored to working order.The broadcasters weren’t the focus when the director, Tim Fehlbaum, and his team started their research in 2020, poring over police files and archival collections. But the ethical issues remain, more than half a century later. Fehlbaum said getting the details right was important.“The technology obviously has changed,” he said. “Maybe the bigger questions are still the same.”The 1972 Olympics have been covered multiple times on the big screen before, in movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005) and the documentary “One Day in September” (2000). The episode had long intrigued Fehlbaum, a Swiss director who went to film school in Munich and worked on many student films shot at the former Olympic Village.But it was only after talking to people who were in Munich at the time that they found their protagonist in Geoffrey Mason. In 1972 he was a young producer for ABC Sports thrust into a position of responsibility shortly after hearing gunshots in the distance. Mason had to weigh guidance from his superiors — the “Wide World of Sports” creator Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard) and the longtime producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) — and quickly come up with answers to difficult ethical questions like how to respond to potential graphic violence on a live broadcast watched by millions.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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    Lovable Movie Robots Are Coming to Charm Your Children

    The adult world is ever more full of robots. Children’s entertainment feels as if it’s working hard to make them seem adorable.One near certainty about raising a young child these days is that you and your offspring will be exposed to a lot of stories about robots. Another is that the robots working their charms most effectively on you will belong to a new kind of archetype: the sympathetic robot. Sitting in darkened theaters with my 5-year-old son, I have watched any number of these characters. They are openhearted and often dazzled by the wonders of everyday life — innocently astounded by, say, the freedom of playing in the surf, the bliss of dancing with a loved one or the thrill of just holding hands. They might be more winningly human than some of the humans you know.The robots in our fictions used to be more sinister. Our notion of artificial life has included the bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner,” the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the one that wages war on its makers in the “Terminator” movies. Long before that, we had Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel and the golem in some versions of 17th-century Jewish folklore. These were often stories of hubris, of humanity’s inability to think through all that we were setting loose: Synthetic life was constantly breaking away from its creators’ grasp and committing heinous, forbidden acts. Even when the characters were more abstruse, operating beyond the ken of the people they manipulated — like the artificial intelligence Wintermute in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” — they were, in some sense, gods that we mortals unleashed on the world and then struggled to control.This hasn’t entirely changed. We still enjoy stories about malevolent machines, like the homicidal A.I. doll in “M3gan.” With other fictional robots, it’s not clear if they’re dangerous or merely hapless: Look to “Sunny,” recently on Apple TV+, in which a human protagonist spends most of the series trying to determine if she can trust the upbeat, bumbling homebot left to her by her roboticist husband. That kind of fear and suspicion, though, has mainly been reserved for adults. Children are offered a far more optimistic view — one that has lately seemed to go well beyond the endearing robots of the past, like R2-D2 and BB-8 in the “Star Wars” films, or the Iron Giant, or Sox in “Lightyear.”Take Roz, the main character of the animated film “The Wild Robot,” which came out in September. Like the Peter Brown book series on which it is based, the movie focuses on a robot protagonist that gains emotional complexity after she washes ashore on an island unpopulated by humans, learns to communicate with the animals she meets there and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling. Roz changes and adapts; she goes from seeing her care for the gosling as a rote task to welcoming it as a real connection. She embraces the wildness of the animals around her and ceases to be the unfeeling machine that her programming intended. Instead, she becomes an unnatural champion for the natural world — one whose touching incomprehension of how to care for a newborn makes her charming.Or consider “Robot Dreams,” an animated feature by Pablo Berger that came out earlier this year. Based on a graphic novel by Sara Varon, it is set in a version of 1980s New York inhabited by humanlike animals who can, among other things, order build-your-own-robot kits advertised on late-night television. This film, with its theme of loneliness and its surprisingly mature depiction of how relationships change, might be better for slightly older children: It follows a dog and its robot companion as they grow close and then are driven apart, exploring the ways that love can evolve over time. But near the end, it is the robot, not the anthropomorphic dog who built it, that has to make a heartbreakingly human decision.This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films. 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