Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Didi’ Review: 13 Going on Nerdy

    A vibrant coming-of-age story about an awkward teenager in California in 2008 is also a love letter to the director’s mother.When a filmmaker makes a semi-autobiographical movie that’s also a story about growing up, it’s very often about learning to see. In “The Fabelmans,” Steven Spielberg’s youthful stand-in becomes obsessed with looking at the world through a camera lens, and the film functions almost as an apology for a lifetime of always inserting the camera between himself and the world. “Roma” recreates Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexico City in the 1970s; “The Souvenir” recreates Joanna Hogg’s northern England in the 1980s; “The Cathedral” recreates Ricky D’Ambrose’s American suburbs in the 1990s. In each case, we’re given a glimpse of memories the way the directors remember seeing them, often half-captured or framed in a way that proves meaningful to the protagonist’s maturing perspective.What we realize, watching these movies, is that any self-reflective adult restaging youthful memories will see them from a new angle, understanding them in a way their younger self never could. That’s what Sean Wang accomplishes with “Didi,” a film about a Taiwanese American boy named Chris stumbling through the summer in Fremont, Calif., before he starts high school. Chris (Izaac Wang, no relation to the director) lives with his grandmother (Chang Li Hua, the director’s grandmother), his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen), and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen, no relation to Joan), with whom he fights viciously.Like this summer’s “Janet Planet,” which recalls the excruciating nature of being bored and 11 in the summertime, “Didi” leans hard into the exact variety of aimless discomfort that comes with being 13. It’s 2008, so Chris spends a lot of time poking around YouTube, which back then was filled mostly with random, amateur drivel that occasionally went viral. He and his best friends, Fahad (Raul Dial) and a kid everyone calls “Soup” (Aaron Chang), play stupid pranks and film them, like blowing up an old lady’s mailbox. Chris has a MySpace account, but his friends are starting to move toward the cleaner, more sophisticated Facebook. He is obsessed with skateboarding, and with filming skateboarders on his little camcorder. And he has a massive crush on Madi (Mahaela Park), who’s a grade ahead of him.Chris’s family calls him Didi, the Mandarin term for “little brother.” His friends call him Wang Wang. He isn’t quite sure who he is, and hesitates before introducing himself to new people. Entering his teen years, he’s stuck fast in that awkward stage where nothing quite makes sense, everyone is annoying and life is filled with an endless tug of war between immaturity and something more grown-up. Chris and his friends use crude slang to refer to sex and girls and anatomy, but they’re all virgins, and they know it; this is their time for posturing, for trying on personas for size, figuring out who they’re going to be next.Chris is a stand-in for Sean Wang, who built the movie on top of his own memories. So while those recollections are highly specific to the setting and the time period — Chris uses all the AOL Instant Messenger acronyms, chats with the SmarterChild chatbot and checks a friend’s MySpace page to see if he’s still in their Top 8 list — they feel universal, too. When Chris flubs a first kiss, we feel his embarrassment. When he flips out at his mother, and friends look at him askance for his behavior, we feel his confused shame. “Didi” is as much about realizing how others see you as it is about learning to see them for who they really are.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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    Suicideboys Don’t Care for the Music Biz. They Got Its Attention Anyway.

    The rap duo’s raw songs and festival-like touring strategy has paid off: Its latest album opened at No. 5 without traditional industry strategies or support.The Louisiana rap duo Suicideboys have avoided nearly all the trappings of the contemporary music machine. They rarely grant interview requests and make the occasional public appearance with their faces partially covered. Still, Scott Arceneaux Jr. (known as Scrim) and Aristos Petrou (a.k.a. Ruby da Cherry) recently celebrated their biggest opening week on the Billboard chart yet: a No. 5 debut for their fourth album, “New World Depression,” last month.“It’s kind of hard, dude,” Arceneaux, 35, said of dealing with their ever-growing visibility as one of the biggest independent rap groups in the United States. “It’s taken on a life of its own.”Over the last decade, a passionate and adoring fan base has been drawn to Suicideboys’ blend of Southern rap rhythms and pop-punk melodies, all cloaked in the lush, depressive fog of internet-native hip-hop. They became underground heroes by making raw music about triggering subjects, which they relentlessly promoted on their own until their fan base snowballed into a force the music industry couldn’t ignore.In 2021, on the strength of an audience they’d bootstrapped since 2014, they signed an eight-figure distribution deal with the Orchard, a Sony Music subsidiary, that was re-upped last year. Their semiannual Grey Day Tour — a mini-festival that’s featured similarly ascendant peers like the hardcore band Turnstile and the Florida rap aesthete Denzel Curry — has catapulted them onto the list of rap’s highest-grossing touring acts, taking in over $42 million and selling 431,000 tickets in 2023.Video chatting on the day of their new album’s release, the pair were nestled in a room speckled with soundproofing materials at one of their properties deep in the Florida panhandle, their home outside of New Orleans. Petrou, with waves of dark hair cascading from under a backward baseball cap, spoke casually and with curiosity, positioned in the background, while Arceneaux often sat half-profile at the forefront, slightly bowing his bowl-cut mullet when he wasn’t speaking thoughtfully about their journey so far.As cousins who grew up separately in the greater Louisiana area before coming together in New Orleans, Arceneaux and Petrou described their upbringings as chaotic. “Childhood was rough,” Arceneaux admitted. “There was always drama,” Petrou agreed. “Our parents would get into it. We’ve always remained close and very rarely let the family dynamic infect our relationship.”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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    Toumani Diabaté, Malian Master of the Kora, Is Dead at 58

    He believed that music could transcend national borders set by colonialism and restore ancient ties, even as it embraced the changes of a globalizing society.Toumani Diabaté, a virtuoso of the kora, a 21-stringed West African instrument, which he often put into dialogue with other musical traditions from around the globe, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali. He was 58.His death, in a hospital, was caused by kidney failure, said his manager, Saul Presa.Born in Mali to a line of griots, or traditional West African musician-historians, that he traced back more than 70 generations, Mr. Diabaté was devoted to celebrating the heritage of Mandé-speaking peoples throughout West Africa, and to sharing that history with the world.“If you think of West Africa as a body, then the griot is the blood,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “We are the guardians of West Africa’s society. We are communicators.”He believed that music could transcend national borders set by colonialism and restore ancient ties, even as it embraced the changes of a globalizing society. That mission inspired him to create his flagship ensemble, the Symmetric Orchestra.“I started building this band to rebuild Manden empire in a cultural way,” he said in a 2011 interview with Uncut magazine, referring to the Mali Empire that once covered the Upper Niger River basin from present-day Mali to Senegal. “The musicians are all from West African, Manden countries. I took the best from Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mauretania, and I put them all together.”Mr. Diabaté recorded two duet albums with the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré. They both won the Grammy Award for best traditional world music album.World CircuitWe 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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    Why Is ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Projected to Set Records?

    Opening-weekend estimates have been a Hollywood fixture since the 1980s. But surveys of moviegoers can fail to capture those who infrequently visit the theater.Savvy moviegoers may have noticed that these are very uncertain times at the box office. Not only are ticket sales this summer down about 17 percent compared to last year, according to Comscore, but it seems challenging to anticipate what will hit and what will flop.The domestic opening-weekend totals for would-be tent poles “The Fall Guy” and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” came in lower than expected, while “A Quiet Place: Day One” and last weekend’s “Twisters” far exceeded their estimates.So how do Hollywood studios and their analysts make these predictions? And what explains why they fail?Box office projections, typically derived from more general audience sentiment data known as “tracking,” have been a fixture of the industry since the 1980s. The idea that studios should know in advance how a film will perform — down to a specific dollar figure — was promoted by the Coca-Cola Company, which bought Columbia Pictures in 1982 and thought it should be run more like a conventional maker of consumer products.“They were used to certain metrics of units sold,” said Kevin Goetz, the founder and chief executive of the analytics firm Screen Engine/ASI and the author of “Audience-ology.” “They pushed the National Research Group to come up with an estimate figure for their movies, and thus began what is essentially a parlor game of predictions.”How Does Tracking Work?To get a dollar estimate for a given movie, tracking companies poll prospective audience members weeks or even months in advance. Their questions are designed to gauge three metrics: awareness, interest and choice, meaning where the film ranks among others the respondent is interested in seeing.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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    Maestro Accused of Striking Singer Won’t Return to His Ensembles

    John Eliot Gardiner is stepping down from three renowned period groups he founded, after he was accused of hitting a singer last year.John Eliot Gardiner, an eminent conductor who was accused of striking a singer in France last year, will not be returning to three renowned period ensembles he founded, the board overseeing them announced Wednesday.Gardiner, 81, who is one of the world’s most celebrated conductors, will no longer lead the three groups: the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.The board of the Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, the nonprofit that oversees all three ensembles, said Wednesday that it had decided that Gardiner, who had been on leave since the incident in France last summer, “will not be returning to the organization.”“The M.C.O. takes seriously its obligations to protect victims of abuse and assault and preventing any recurrence remains a priority for the organization,” the group said in a statement.Gardiner sought to frame the decision as his own, saying in a later statement on Wednesday that it came after “a great deal of soul-searching since the deeply regrettable incident” in France.He drew widespread criticism after he was accused of striking the singer, William Thomas, a rising bass from England, on the face last summer after a performance of the first two acts of Berlioz’s opera “Les Troyens” at the Festival Berlioz in La Côte-Saint-André. Gardiner was apparently upset that Thomas had headed the wrong way off the podium at the concert, people at the festival said at the time.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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    Lincoln Center’s Audiences Deserve Music Worthy of Them

    When listeners were given the power to program an orchestral concert, the results were surprising.I love the classical music canon, and I hate it.To be precise, I hate the way we assume audiences will invariably choose it over what’s new and unusual. If you listen to marketing departments, there may be grudging tolerance for some fresh sounds at the start of a concert, but basically, people want the standards — more than ever, as their ticket-buying behavior over the past few years suggests they are only more enamored of chestnuts like “The Planets” and Beethoven’s Ninth.So it was a small but sweet triumph over this narrative when, on Saturday at David Geffen Hall, an audience did exactly the opposite. Finally, the familiar and the less so were put to a fair fight — and who do you think won?The battlefield was Symphony of Choice, a kind of preview performance at the start of the three-week, 13-concert season of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center. That’s the slightly awkward name of what was once the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, before the center’s warm-weather offerings were consolidated as Summer for the City two years ago.Streamlining previously competing series and festivals has made the schedule clearer. But it has also meant the disappearance of ambitious classical programming in favor of the sort of smaller-scale, pop-culture-oriented events that Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center’s chief artistic officer since 2021, produced when she ran Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater.Amid the silent discos, mindfulness sessions and comedy nights, you get the sense that classical music is now viewed with faint irritation, as a stodgy and expensive waste of resources. People already know Lincoln Center for operas and symphonies during the regular season, the thinking goes, so the center’s audience isn’t going to be expanded in the summer through more of that — especially if those symphonies aren’t packageable as “experiences.”Which is why Symphony of Choice gave me pause when I first heard about it. The goal was for the Festival Orchestra, newly under the direction of the young conductor Jonathon Heyward, to offer a taste of its programs over the next few weeks. The gimmick was a crowdsourced popularity contest.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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    He Wrote Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ and Has 2 More in the Vault

    Steve Porcaro of Toto, who played on some of the biggest hits of the ’80s, has sold the rights to his music, including a pair of unreleased tracks with the superstar.After more than four decades, Steve Porcaro is still amazed that his song ended up on the biggest-selling album of all time.In 1982, when he was a keyboardist in Toto — the band of studio insiders that dominated rock radio with sleekly crafted hits like “Africa” and “Hold the Line” — Porcaro was tinkering with a new tune, a mid-tempo ballad inspired by his attempt to comfort his young daughter after a playground quarrel. The rest of the group wasn’t into it.But Porcaro kept working on the song at the studio of his Toto bandmate David Paich, the group’s primary songwriter, who was pitching Quincy Jones some rock-oriented material for Michael Jackson’s next album. One day, they put two of Paich’s songs on a cassette for Jones; on the flip side was a rough demo of Porcaro’s ballad.When Jones heard that tape, it was Porcaro’s tune that entranced him, with its mellow mood and searching chorus: “Why, why?/Tell her that it’s human nature.” With lyrics added by John Bettis, “Human Nature” became a key cut on “Thriller,” which sold 34 million copies in the United States alone and transformed pop music in the 1980s.“It was a total, absolute fluke,” Porcaro recalled in a recent video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles, which is lined with gold and platinum albums by Toto and Jackson.“Human Nature” is now part of the latest in the music industry’s big catalog transactions. This week, Porcaro signed a deal, estimated in the low eight figures, to sell the rights to his music to the Jackson estate and the independent music company Primary Wave, they confirmed.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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    A Rarely Seen David Bowie Rom-Com Gets a New Life

    “The Linguini Incident,” a low-budget ’90s film directed by Richard Shepard and featuring Bowie and Rosanna Arquette, makes its way to Blu-ray in a director’s cut.Even David Bowie’s biggest fans might be unaware of his solitary foray into romantic comedy, and for good reason: It was barely released in 1992, and has been all but impossible to see since. Now, its director has restored, reclaimed and recut the film in question, “The Linguini Incident,” which made its Blu-ray debut this week.Richard Shepard was only 25 when he directed the quirky, New York-set indie, which was his solo feature directorial debut. (He directed an earlier film, “Cool Blue,” alongside Mark Mullin.) As was typical of the era, the low budget was gathered from multiple sources. “The whole movie was financed very weirdly,” Shepard said in a Zoom interview. “We had home video money and foreign sales money and mysterious money — a lot of mysterious money.”His first casting coup came early, when he landed Rosanna Arquette, already a star with “After Hours” and “Desperately Seeking Susan” on her résumé. So what made her take a chance on this young novice? “I loved the script,” Arquette said in a phone interview. “I just thought it was well-written and funny … and then, lo and behold, we had David Bowie, so that was really exciting.”Shepard sent the script to Bowie on a lark, with the idea that he and the fellow rock legend Mick Jagger could play the film’s flamboyant restaurateurs. “We naïvely just sent it to them, to play those small parts, with no money offered, no anything,” Shepard recalled. “We get this note back from Bowie saying, ‘I’m interested in your movie, but I don’t want to play that supporting role. I would like to play the lead.’”Shepard with Bowie, center, on the set of “The Linguini Incident.”via Richard Shepard
    Bowie wanted to play Monte, a British bartender at a hip, downtown restaurant who tries to talk one of his co-workers, the aspiring escape artist Lucy (Arquette), into a green card marriage, but is instead sidetracked into helping her rob their employers. Marlee Matlin, Eszter Balint, Buck Henry and Andre Gregory were among the cast; the future Oscar nominee Thomas Newman would compose the score, and Robert Yeoman, Wes Anderson’s go-to cinematographer, was behind the camera. The film was shot in 30 days in 1990.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