Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Jane Austen Wrecked My Life’ Review: It’s Not Me, It’s Jane

    A modern heroine learns about love, and a whole lot more, at a writing residency.Besides Shakespeare, no author may haunt the screen more than Jane Austen. Her novels, full of heroines who find love and usually a life lesson or two, practically spawned the romantic comedy. So no wonder filmmakers have tackled copious direct adaptations of Austen’s novels — many of which are modern classics of cinema, like Ang Lee’s “Sense and Sensibility” and the six-part TV version of “Pride and Prejudice,” with its indelible scene of Mr. Darcy emerging from a pond in a wet shirt, ensuring generations of crushes on Colin Firth.Yet Austen’s novels are timeless, and thus lend themselves to modernized spins, like “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Metropolitan,” “Clueless,” “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries” and dozens more. And there are the meta-Austen tales, stories about loving Austen’s stories: “Austenland,” for instance, and “The Jane Austen Book Club.” The well of, and thirst for, Austenalia is seemingly bottomless.“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is not quite like any of those — more of a cousin from out of town, a little different, a little more intriguing. Written and directed by Laura Piani, it’s a rom-com laced lightly with “Pride and Prejudice” overtones, and it’s also a love letter to writing and reading, and to Austen, too. But there’s plenty going on here that is, if not entirely original, at least not straight from Austen.Our heroine is the 30-something bookworm Agathe (a charming Camille Rutherford), who is French and lives in Paris, where she works at the storied English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company, having learned English from her father during her childhood. (Early scenes are shot in the real bookshop, which is a fun nugget for fans of the store.) The setup has the ring of familiarity: Her best friend Felix (Pablo Pauly, suitably impish) also works at the store, and the two are chummy and inseparable. You can feel a romance coming on, but the movie isn’t going to make it quite so easy for us or for them.Agathe also dreams of being a writer, but something psychological is holding her back, and she’s at a bit of a standstill. The movie takes its time unpeeling those layers.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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    David Lazer, Executive Who Joined the World of Muppets, Dies at 89

    At IBM, he hired a young Jim Henson to make humorous corporate films using his puppet creations. Mr. Henson later hired Mr. Lazer to help run his company.David Lazer, who as an IBM executive in the mid-1960s hired Jim Henson’s Muppets to star in a series of short films that injected laughs into sales meetings — and who a decade later joined Mr. Henson’s company as a producer — died on April 10 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 89.His death, which had not been widely reported, was confirmed by Doyle Newberry, a manager of Mr. Lazer’s estate. He did not cite a cause.“What David brought to the company was class,” Brian Henson, Mr. Henson’s son and the chairman of the Jim Henson Company, said in an interview. “Even my dad would say you couldn’t call Muppets Inc. classy. Up until then, it was a bunch of beatniks making weird stuff.”In 1965, Mr. Lazer was making commercials and sales training films for IBM’s office products division and had learned the importance of keeping in-house audiences at the company interested during meetings. Intrigued by a reel of commercials and short films made by Mr. Henson, Mr. Lazer wanted to bring his “sense of humor and crazy nuttiness” to IBM, he told Brian Jay Jones for his book “Jim Henson: The Biography” (2013).The star of Mr. Henson’s early films for IBM was Rowlf the Dog, who typed letters to his mother on a series of IBM manual and electric typewriters in which he described his new career as a salesman for the company. He promoted real products; he also plugged an electric guitar from IBM’s “Hippie Products Division” that, improbably, dispensed coffee.In another short, an early version of Cookie Monster devoured a talking coffee machine.“The idea is that if you can give people a good laugh, they’ll listen better,” Mr. Lazer told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1985.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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    Freddy Lim, Frontman of Chthonic, Is Taiwan’s New Envoy to Finland

    Freddy Lim, the founder and lead singer of Chthonic, is well known in Finland, a heavy metal capital of the world.Diplomatic appointments do not usually excite the world’s metalheads. But when Taiwan on Monday named the frontman for a band known as “the Black Sabbath of Asia” as its envoy to the heavy metal mecca of Finland, rockers on multiple continents rejoiced.“Because if you’re gonna be an ambassador to any Scandinavian country, you better be in a metal band,” the Brooklyn-based publication Metal Injection wrote.The choice of Freddy Lim, founder and lead singer of Chthonic, by President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan appears apt: Finland has the most metal bands per capita, with about 80 for every 100,000 citizens — a data point often cited by metal fans. And Mr. Lim already has an affinity for the country, where his band has played in major cities and performed with Finnish musicians.“Working with my partners in the Finnish music industry for a long time has made me have a special feeling for this country,” Mr. Lim said in a social media post on Monday, noting that his band had released four albums with the Finnish-founded label Spinefarm Records.His selection as Taiwan’s envoy is not based on musical fame alone. Taiwan’s foreign minister, Lin Chia-lung, said on Monday that Mr. Lim was chosen for his human rights work and international exchange experience: He served as a national legislator from 2016 to 2024 and was chairman of Amnesty International in Taiwan from 2010 to 2014. Mr. Lim, 49, formed Chthonic (pronounced THON-ik) around 1995, creating a heavy metal mythology for the band using elements of Taiwan’s local lore instead of the pagan and satanic imagery of some Western bands. The band’s 2005 album, “Seediq Bale” (Real Person), which was released in the United States in 2006 and worldwide the next year, brought the band international attention. It got Chthonic a spot in Ozzfest — on a tour founded and headlined by the British heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne — playing 24 major American cities. The band also toured Europe that year.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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    Bruce Springsteen Releases EP Including Remarks That Angered Trump

    After Bruce Springsteen criticized the Trump administration on tour, the president said he should “KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT.” Instead, Mr. Springsteen included his comments on a new release.After Bruce Springsteen opened a tour of England last week with a denunciation of President Trump, the president taunted Mr. Springsteen on social media and wrote that he “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT” until he returns to the United States.Mr. Springsteen, undeterred, released a six-track EP this week which begins with his remarks that America “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”The new EP, “Land of Hope & Dreams,” offers a mix of songs and Mr. Springsteen’s pointed political remarks from his May 14 concert in Manchester, England.In the introduction to the song “My City of Ruins,” Mr. Springsteen takes on a somber tone, telling the audience that in the United States the authorities were “persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent.” He said that the nation was cutting aid to the poor, abandoning allies, rolling back civil rights protections, defunding universities and deporting people without due process.“A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” Mr. Springsteen said. “They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.”Mr. Springsteen’s remarks were perhaps not surprising, given that he endorsed Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign and has supported a long list of Democratic candidates over the years. But they were notable since a number of other major stars have seemed to mute their criticisms of the president.After Mr. Springsteen’s comments were reported last week, Mr. Trump responded with a social media post calling him a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!).” After saying Mr. Springsteen should stay silent until he returns to the United States, the president added: “Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”Mr. Trump has continued to criticize Mr. Springsteen since then, including on Monday, when he called for a “major investigation” into Mr. Springsteen and other celebrities including Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bono. More

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    How Do You Follow One of the Craziest Cannes Movies Ever?

    Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d’Or for “Titane,” returns with the body-horror tale “Alpha.” The critical reception has not been kind.Many filmmakers dream of earning a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, but success here comes with a steep downside: It sets sky-high expectations for your follow-up and the European critics can be merciless if that next film falls short.After “The Artist” premiered at Cannes in 2011 and went on to win the best picture Oscar, the director Michel Hazanavicius returned three years later to the festival with “The Search,” which was so roundly booed that it never found a major U.S. distributor. The director Olivier Assayas followed his French hit “Clouds of Sils Maria” (2014) with “Personal Shopper” (2016), a film I actually preferred but French critics hissed at during the end credits.And after Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes for the Ryan Gosling film “Drive” (2011), his next two movies were booed here. I’ll never forget that when Refn’s “The Neon Demon” concluded with a dedication to the director’s wife, Liv, a critic stood up next to me and shouted expletives at poor Liv in a thick French accent.The latest filmmaker to face this gilded dilemma is Julia Ducournau, the French director who won the Palme d’Or four years ago for “Titane.” Rarely has that top prize gone to a movie so gory and wild: It followed a lesbian serial killer who has sex with a car, and that was just the first act! Ducournau’s Palme win felt bracingly new, not least because it was only the young director’s second movie. Where would she go from there?In the years since, rumors swirled that Ducournau felt significant pressure to deliver a worthy follow-up. On Monday, she finally unveiled that film, “Alpha,” and Cannes critics pounced. Topping a movie as audacious as “Titane” was always going to be difficult, but the brutal reception suggests that some critics here were eager to cut Ducournau down to size.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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    Morgan Wallen Retreats Into Sadness, While His Protégés Party On

    The country superstar’s “I’m the Problem” is a despondent self-portrait. But a generation of singers blending Southern rap and Nashville songwriting are thriving.It seems like the more melancholy Morgan Wallen becomes, the more successful he gets. In just a few short but smash-filled years, he has become the most prominent and committed miserablist in pop — the contemporary star most preoccupied with failure, and the most adept at turning it into something like beauty.Unlike Drake, who is perhaps his closest analogue, Wallen almost never dwells on his successes. He forever lives in the space just beyond loving himself, and allowing himself to be loved. As a result, even his best and most engaging songs have a somber pallor hovering just over them.On “I’m the Problem,” his moody and melodramatic fourth album, Wallen is almost unrelentingly despondent. Women are ruining him, and whiskey is rescuing him (by ruining him even further). Some representative moods: “I just wanna love somebody that don’t want me falling apart”; “Every square inch of this house is as messy as you left me”; “Too young to feel this old.”It’s tragic, concerning and pointedly effective stuff: “I’m the Problem” is already on track to become one of the most commercially successful releases of the year. At 37 songs and almost two hours long, it’s a structural beast, a chart-clogging data dump. But rather than use that grand scale to explore different sonic approaches, Wallen largely digs in to several microtones of weariness.“Kick Myself” laments the one thing an addict can’t ever escape: himself. “Just in Case” tells a story of never letting anyone get too close. “Jack and Jill,” a morbid song about a broken couple, recalls “Whiskey Lullaby,” the unbearably tragic Brad Paisley-Alison Krauss duet from 2004.After Morgan Wallen, Lil Nas X and Shaboozey, Nashville is going hip-hop yet again. “Oil Money” by Graham Barham is the latest example of a long lineage, our critic explains from the driver’s seat.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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    Chris Brown Released on $6 Million Bail by London Court

    The R&B singer was charged last week with grievous bodily harm over a 2023 incident in England. His release from custody means he can proceed with a world tour.Chris Brown, the R&B singer, has been freed from custody by a London judge as he awaits a court case over accusations of an assault in a nightclub.Mr. Brown, 36, was arrested last week at a hotel in Manchester, England, and charged with grievous bodily harm.The singer is accused of attacking a music producer with a tequila bottle at Tape London, a nightclub in the Mayfair district, on Feb. 19, 2023.Lawyers representing Mr. Brown applied for him to be bailed at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court in South London on Wednesday, and London’s Metropolitan Police said the application had been granted.The judge’s decision means that Mr. Brown will be able to perform on an international tour that is scheduled to begin in Amsterdam on June 8. He is then set to visit European countries including Germany, Britain, Ireland, France and Portugal before traveling to the United States.The BBC reported that the judge, Tony Baumgartner, imposed a series of conditions on Mr. Brown, including that he must surrender his passport when not on tour and stay away from Tape London.Mr. Brown’s representatives agreed to pay into the court a security fee of five million pounds ($6.7 million), which can be forfeited if any of the conditions are breached.He has not yet been asked to enter a plea in the case, and British law bans the reporting of any details that could prejudice a jury at a future trial.Omololu Akinlolu, 38, an American rapper who performs under the name HoodyBaby, was charged with grievous bodily harm two days after Mr. Brown, in relation to the same incident.Mr. Brown and Mr. Akinlolu are scheduled to appear at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court on June 20. More

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    Kid Cudi Will Soon Take Center Stage at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial

    Casandra Ventura had testified that the mogul threatened to have the entertainer’s car blown up after learning about their relationship.Prosecutors confirmed this week that Kid Cudi, the rapper whose romance with Casandra Ventura is said to have sent Sean Combs into a jealous, threat-filled rage, will be testifying in the music mogul’s sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, could take the witness stand as soon as Wednesday, but the precise timing of his testimony is uncertain.Ms. Ventura, who is known as the singer Cassie, testified last week that after Mr. Combs discovered her relationship with Mr. Mescudi in 2011, Mr. Combs made a series of threats to her, including that Mr. Mescudi’s car would be “blown up” in his driveway.In 2023, after Ms. Ventura filed the lawsuit that kicked of Mr. Combs’s legal troubles, Mr. Mescudi confirmed that his car had exploded. But he has yet to speak publicly about the details of his role in the case.As part of the racketeering conspiracy charge against Mr. Combs, the government has accused him of running a criminal enterprise that helped him commit a series of crimes dating back to 2004. Among the list of allegations is that Mr. Combs’s associates set fire to a rival’s car with a Molotov cocktail.A lawyer for Mr. Combs, Teny Geragos, said in the defense’s opening statement that Mr. Combs was “simply not involved” in the allegations of arson put forward by 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