Aurelia Butler

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    Audience Report: Celebrating 50 Years of ‘Jaws’ on Martha’s Vineyard

    It was Day 3 of “Amity Homecoming Weekend” on Martha’s Vineyard, and like thousands of other “Jaws” superfans celebrating the movie’s 50th anniversary on the island where it was filmed, David Scanlon was living his dream.Scanlon, 30, of Savannah, Ga., has loved “Jaws” since his first viewing, at age 3, from which he somehow emerged more enchanted than petrified. At 10, he begged his mother to take him to Martha’s Vineyard, seven miles off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, for the 30th-anniversary festivities. “Not this time,” she had told him. “We’ll go for the 50th.”People lined up to jump off “Jaws Bridge,” on Martha’s Vineyard, to escape the heat.And so it was that Scanlon and his mother — along with his sister, brother-in-law and 15-month-old nephew, Georgie — sat by the sparkling harbor on Sunday afternoon, steps from a replica of the Orca, the fishing boat where the movie’s terrifying climax unfolds, savoring an experience two decades in the making.“It’s a perfect film,” Scanlon said, “and from a very young age, you understand that — long before you have any technical understanding of why.”The anniversary festivities included V.I.P. meet-and-greets, book signings, film screenings, and lectures about sharks.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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    What Happened in the Closing Arguments of the Sean Combs Trial

    The jurors will begin deliberating on Monday. The music mogul has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.The federal government and Sean Combs’s defense team presented their closing arguments this week after extensive testimony in which the music mogul’s ex-girlfriends said they were pressured to have sex with male escorts in drug-dazed marathon sessions.Mr. Combs is charged with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution, and has pleaded not guilty, saying the sexual encounters were consensual. Jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Monday, which will mark the eighth week of the trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan.Here are some key observations from the closing arguments:The ChargesSex TraffickingThe federal prosecutor who delivered the government’s closing argument on Thursday, Christy Slavik, emphasized to jurors that convicting Mr. Combs of sex trafficking required only one example of him coercing his girlfriends into sex with prostitutes.For examples of such coercion, Ms. Slavik pointed to Mr. Combs’s 2016 assault on Casandra Ventura at a Los Angeles hotel that was captured on surveillance video, and a fight between “Jane” and Mr. Combs in 2024 before he directed her to have sex with another man.Jane, who was identified by a pseudonym, testified that she repeatedly said “I don’t want to” before Mr. Combs asked, “Is this coercion?”The next day, the defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo argued that Ms. Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, was a willing participant in the frequent sex sessions that Mr. Combs called “freak-offs.”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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    Priyanka Chopra Jonas Is OK Sitting With Idris Elba and John Cena

    A scene in their new movie “Heads of State” involved a car chase and close quarters. “It was the smallest space for the two biggest guys I’ve ever worked with,” she said.Priyanka Chopra Jonas gets a kick out of action — the stylistic long shots, the slow-motion explosions, the stunts.And if there are a couple of hilarious sparring partners in the mix, all the better.In her new film “Heads of State,” which begins streaming on Prime Video on July 2, Chopra Jonas plays Noel Bisset, an MI6 operative on a mission to rescue the prime minister of Britain (Idris Elba) and the president of the United States (John Cena) from a global menace.After starring in shows like “Citadel” and “Quantico,” “I trust myself when it comes to action, and I get to do some really fun things,” she said. “I love learning from the stunt department. Their experience and expertise is very exciting to me.”But the most insane scene to shoot in “Heads of State” involved Elba, Cena and a tight squeeze into a vehicle known as the Beast.“It’s just the three of us and a couple of bad guys, and it’s raining bullets and bombs at us, and we’re driving through the streets,” she said. “It was the smallest space for the two biggest guys I’ve ever worked with. We used to chat about everything because you couldn’t leave the vehicle in between shots often.”In a call from her home in Manhattan, Chopra Jonas sent Malti Marie, her 3-year-old daughter with her husband, the singer and actor Nick Jonas, out on a play date before revealing why self-care days, Magna-Tiles and signature scents top her list of essentials.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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    Oasis Ends a 15-Year Pause With a Familiar Goal: Conquering America

    Last August, when Oasis announced a reunion for its first tour since 2009, the fractious British band led by the brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher released a statement filled with exactly the sort of full-throated grandeur and bravado that marked its rise in the 1990s: “The guns have fallen silent. The stars have aligned. The great wait is over. Come see. It will not be televised.”When the band trumpeted the North American leg of the tour a few weeks later, the tone was a bit more passive-aggressive: “America. Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove that you loved us all along.”The distance between those two proclamations says a lot about the trans-Atlantic legacy of this combative band, which performs the first show of its sold-out reunion tour in Cardiff, Wales, on Friday. Oasis will play 17 stadium concerts in the U.K. and Ireland before arriving in North America in late August for a nine-show run; two additional London gigs will follow, then dates in Asia, Australia and South America.When tickets went on sale for the U.K. shows last August, a reported 14 million people tried to buy them, crashing ticketing websites and angering fans. In October, seats for the gigs in North America went fast too, selling out in an hour. Michael Rapino, the chief executive of Live Nation, later called it “the biggest on-sale in history.”Reunions generate interest, and the improbability of this one, with the Gallaghers sniping at each other for a decade-plus, almost certainly turbocharged it. The music has also aged well: So much of the band’s seven-album catalog, which stretched from 1994 to 2008, already sounded like classic rock when it first emerged.“Wonderwall,” in particular, has become an inescapable anthem. On Spotify, it’s the third-most played song from the 1990s, with over 2.3 billion streams. Covers of the track in every imaginable style — rap-rock, country-soul, punk-pop, chillwave, metalcore, big band, lounge-pop, electro-funk, cool jazz, bossa nova, dubstep, mariachi — have tallied hundreds of millions more plays. The wistful singles “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Champagne Supernova” are nearly as popular and have proven similarly durable to wide-ranging reinterpretation.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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    How 5 States Are Trying to Lure Hollywood Productions

    States have spent at least $25 billion to attract movie and TV filming. Texas and New York are increasing their subsidies, while Georgia and Louisiana are broadening their programs.“Sinners,” about twin brothers who confront a supernatural evil through music, could have been shot in the Mississippi Delta where the story is set. Yet it was filmed in Louisiana, which has long lured Hollywood with tax incentives that the director Ryan Coogler said made the state an attractive choice.The competition for business is fierce, with states awarding at least $25 billion in filming incentives over the past two decades. Because of California’s struggle to retain movie and TV productions, state lawmakers have approved more than doubling its annual tax credit program to $750 million.Economists have called the subsidies a race to the bottom, but politicians have shown few signs of slowing down. Here is a roundup of how five other states are trying to attract productions from California.TEXASLawmakers approve $1.5 billion in spending over the next decade.For the second consecutive legislative session, Texas lawmakers voted to substantially expand the state’s incentive program.The biennial funding was below $100 million for two decades until lawmakers increased it to $200 million in 2023. This year, they overwhelmingly passed a bill that would increase the tax credits to $300 million every two years for the next decade, an additional investment of $1.5 billion.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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    Democrats Cheer Hollywood Tax Breaks They Once Called ‘Corporate Welfare’

    California politicians once derided a $50 million proposal by Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the support of unions, they’re now strongly backing a $750 million subsidy.Time was running out to pass new California bills in 2005 when a power broker in the State Capitol got a request from the action movie star in the governor’s office. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted lawmakers to give Hollywood studios $50 million in tax breaks to help prevent the movie industry from leaving.But Democrats preferred to restore funding that had been cut from schools and support for disabled people. Republicans in the governor’s own party objected to the notion of assisting one industry over others. The effort fell flat, as did similar proposals over the next few years.Among many Democrats, said Fabian Núñez, who was the speaker of the California Assembly at the time, the thinking about Mr. Schwarzenegger’s plan went: “Why does he want to give corporate welfare to rich people? That doesn’t make any sense.”Times have certainly changed.California lawmakers, most of them Democrats, approved a budget on Friday that includes $750 million to subsidize movie and television production, doubling the size of the state’s incentive program while making cuts elsewhere to help close its $12 billion deficit. A bill to make the tax credits available to more types of productions is expected to be approved in the coming days.Some economists object to film subsidies, saying they are a poor financial investment for states, while proponents say they are necessary to slow an exodus of productions. Over the past 10 years, production in Los Angeles has decreased by more than one-third, according to FilmLA data. One Hollywood studio is flying Americans to Ireland to film a game show, and “The Substance,” a best picture nominee, was filmed in France even though it is set in Los Angeles.“Expanding this program will help keep production here at home, generate thousands of good paying jobs and strengthen the vital link between our communities and the state’s iconic film and TV industry,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in October when he announced his plan to increase the tax breaks.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 Trial: Takeaways From Defense’s Closing Arguments

    Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer made a final appeal to the jury, arguing in often sarcastic tones that the government’s evidence contradicted its case against the hip-hop mogul.Sean Combs’s lawyer made a final appeal to the jury at his racketeering and sex trafficking trial in New York on Friday, arguing in often sarcastic tones that the government’s evidence contradicted its case against the hip-hop mogul.The lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, portrayed his client as a deeply flawed man who led a swinger’s lifestyle, had a drug problem and sometimes physically assaulted his girlfriends. But he argued government’s accusation that Mr. Combs was a sex trafficker or the ringleader of a racketeering organization was “badly exaggerated.”“He did what he did,” Mr. Agnifilo said. “But he’s going to fight to the death to defend himself from what he didn’t do.”Here are some takeaways from the defense’s closing argument.The defense focused on consent, credibility and overreach.Friday’s summation was the most substantive argument made to date by the defense, which called no witnesses during the trial and declined to put Mr. Combs on the stand.Mr. Agnifilo devoted long stretches of his four-hour closing argument to highlighting testimony, texts and video evidence, that he said demonstrated that Casandra Ventura and “Jane,” who testified under a pseudonym, consensually participated in the marathon sex parties that are central to the government’s claim that the women were sex trafficked.“You want to call it swingers, you want to call it threesomes,” he said, “whatever you want to call it, that is what it is — that’s what the evidence shows.”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