Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Jackpot!’ Review: Dystopia, Hollywood Style

    Awkwafina and John Cena star in a fitfully funny near-future comedy with strangely mixed metaphors.In the near future, things are not very different. People wear the same clothes as we do, ride the bus to work, call each other on cellphones and stay in terrible Airbnbs run by hosts from hell. In the near future, everything is still expensive. And if you want to be an actor, you move to Los Angeles.Yet a few things have changed. Following the Great Depression of 2026, the government of California — as desperate for money as its people are — instituted a Grand Lottery in which one citizen of Los Angeles wins some huge sum. Sounds great, but unfortunately whoever wrote the law seems to be a fan of “The Purge.” Until sundown on Lottery Day, anyone who successfully kills the lottery winner (all weapons allowed except guns) gets the winnings. After sundown, murder becomes illegal again, until next year.Somehow the Michigander Katie (Awkwafina) missed this news, and thus had the bad fortune to arrive in Los Angeles to pursue her dream of acting the night before Lottery Day 2030. She, of course, accidentally wins the $3.6 billion jackpot while at an audition. Suddenly, everyone is after her, and the only person she can maybe trust is a “freelance protector” named Noel (John Cena, who may be Hollywood’s most dependably funny actor). He’ll get her safely to sundown. Probably.This is quite the dystopian view of the future, though other movies have proposed that within a few decades, we’ll resort to state-sanctioned violence to secure our daily bread. In the world of Boots Riley’s comedy “Sorry to Bother You,” for instance, game show contestants beat themselves to a pulp to collect money and pay off their debts. Or, of course, there’s “Squid Game.”More dystopian, though, is the sense that in this version of the near future, nobody is capable of relating to anyone except through money. Only hours into her new L.A. life, Katie tells off a man (Adam Ray) who’s complaining loudly about his young daughter’s failure to get acting jobs that will line his pockets — as his daughter sits right next to him. Moments later, Katie meets a kind older woman (Becky Ann Baker) who wishes her luck, and then, quietly, swipes Katie’s watch.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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    Lainey Wilson’s Exhausting (but Rewarding) Country Music Hustle

    The singer and songwriter struggled for years to break through. Now she’s staking a claim for herself — and other women in the genre — with a new album, “Whirlwind.”Lainey Wilson was born and raised in Baskin, La., population 210. Her dad is a fifth-generation farmer. “We grew corn, wheat, soybeans, oats. We did cotton back in the day,” she said proudly in a recent interview. While her ascent to country-music stardom means that her family’s finances are secure, she noted that lately there’s been a lack of rainfall in the northeast part of the state. “This year’s going to be pretty rough,” she added. “Farming has a lot of ups and downs. It’s very similar to the music business.”After years of struggle in Nashville, where she was repeatedly told she was “too country for country,” things are decidedly looking up for the 32-year-old singer-songwriter. In November, Wilson took home five Country Music Association Awards, including album of the year for her breakthrough, “Bell Bottom Country.” She also won the night’s most prestigious honor, entertainer of the year, beating out stadium-filling acts like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs, and becoming the first woman to win that prize since Taylor Swift in 2011.“It’s like I’ve been running for mayor for the past 13 years,” Wilson said of the relentless hustle required to land a publishing deal, to say nothing of scoring hits both solo and as a duet partner, a scene-stealing role on TV’s “Yellowstone” and now, a major C.M.A. achievement. She recalled the six-hour drives to gigs where the bar’s staff was the only audience, endless auditions in front of po-faced music executives, dispiriting meet-and-greets with radio programmers. “People could have cared less about me,” Wilson said with a good-natured smile. “I guess I was just too naïve to quit.”“I have always been blown away by Lainey’s work ethic,” Combs said in an email. The country star used to write songs with Wilson in her camper trailer, back when they were both Nashville greenhorns. “She’s impossible not to root for,” he added.Wilson believes that Nashville is “changing daily” and becoming more inclusive, but there’s plenty of work still to be done.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWilson had taken a couple of days off from a cross-country tour in support of her Aug. 23 album, “Whirlwind,” to attend the Los Angeles premiere of the summer blockbuster “Twisters.” Its soundtrack features her wistful “Out of Oklahoma,” a ruminative ballad about never forgetting where you came from (“And if I ever get a little too far/I remember where I left my heart”).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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    10 Movies Starring Gena Rowlands, From ‘The Notebook’ to ‘Opening Night’

    She delivered vulnerable portraits in movies as varied as “A Woman Under the Influence,” with John Cassavetes, and the drama “The Notebook.”Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday at the age of 94, was widely regarded as one of the best actresses of her generation, known for her vulnerable portraits of women in states of crisis. Her most acclaimed performances came through her prolific and intensely creative collaboration with her husband, the director, writer and actor John Cassavetes, who gave her parts like the housewife in turmoil in “A Woman Under the Influence.” Even after his death in 1989, Rowlands would continue to work with family members, starring in the directorial efforts of their son, Nick, and her daughter Zoe. And while she became a star of the 1970s with films that broke new ground in independent cinema, in her later years she was introduced to a younger generation, thanks to Nick Cassavetes’s blockbuster tear-jerker, “The Notebook.” Here is where to watch some of her best work.Rowlands with John Marley in “Faces,” an early collaboration with John Cassavetes.United Archives, via Getty Images1968‘Faces’Stream on the Criterion Channel or MaxPerhaps the first true example of the magic Rowlands and John Cassavetes could make together came in the form of “Faces.” (Before that, she had an uncredited role in his debut, “Shadows,” as well as a part in his more conventional “A Child Is Waiting,” starring Judy Garland.) But “Faces,” made on a shoestring budget, was the project that started to reveal how unique their partnership could be. In Cassavetes’s drama about tensions between a married couple played by John Marley and Lynn Carlin, Rowlands is Jeannie, a call girl who becomes entangled with the husband in the equation. In Cassavetes’s tight close-ups and long takes you can see how Rowlands embodies the naturalistic milieu he was developing. When we first meet Jeannie she’s a good-time gal, partying with much older men, singing “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” but soon her eyes snap into focus, unwilling to be denigrated, as she develops affection for Marley’s character.Peter Falk with Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence,” directed by John Cassavetes.Everett Collection1974‘A Woman Under the Influence’Stream on the Criterion Channel or MaxWe 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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    Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Brought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94

    Gena Rowlands, the intense, elegant dramatic actress who, often in collaboration with her husband, John Cassavetes, starred in a series of introspective independent films, has died. She was 94.The death was confirmed by the office of Daniel Greenberg, a representative for Ms. Rowlands’s son, the director Nick Cassavetes. No other details were given.In June, her family said that she had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Rowlands, who often played intoxicated, deranged or otherwise on-the-verge characters, was nominated twice for best actress Oscars in performances directed by Mr. Cassavetes. The first was the title role in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), in which her desperate, insecure character is institutionalized by her blue-collar husband (Peter Falk) because he doesn’t know what else to do. The critic Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times that Ms. Rowlands was “so touchingly vulnerable to every kind of influence around her that we don’t want to tap her because she might fall apart.”Her second nomination was for “Gloria” (1980), in which she starred as a gangster’s moll on the run with an orphaned boy.Ms. Rowlands and John Marley in “Faces,” which Renata Adler of The New York Times called “a really important movie” about “the way things are.” Like many of her movies, it was directed by Ms. Rowland’s husband, John Cassavetes.United Archives, via Getty ImagesBut it was “Faces” (1968), in which she starred as a young prostitute opposite John Marley, that first brought the Cassavetes-Rowlands partnership to moviegoers’ attention. Critics spread the word; Renata Adler described the film in The New York Times as “a really important movie” about “the way things are,” and Mr. Ebert called it “astonishing.”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 New Venue Beckons Jazz Musicians and Beyond to Upstate New York

    The Mill, an arts center with art galleries and a performance space in an old flour mill, opened over the weekend. Its owners hope it sparks a “ripple effect.”Fourteen years ago, Taylor Haskins, a veteran jazz trumpeter, and Catherine Ross Haskins, a visual artist, moved from Brooklyn to Westport, N.Y., a picture-book town on Lake Champlain, 275 miles north of Manhattan. It became “the place on Earth that we love,” Taylor said. “But sometimes it could use a little bit of an injection of the outside world.”So three years ago, they bought an abandoned, 11,000-square-foot flour mill on Main Street, gutted it and refashioned it as the Mill, a center for contemporary visual arts with a chapel-like performance space.The venue, which had its official opening on Saturday, is exhibiting and commissioning esteemed visual artists. And it is booking musicians — including the pianist Guillermo Klein, the slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s Sexmob and the violinist Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire — who don’t often drive up to the Adirondacks for a gig. (They’d typically perform at downtown Manhattan clubs like the Village Vanguard or Joe’s Pub.) The hope, Taylor said, is to create “a cultural oasis” that the community will embrace.The Haskinses, both 52, are financing the project with their own funds. During their years in New York City, they watched as empty industrial buildings were given new lives, too often as condos (they lived in one), but sometimes in creative ways. They thought they’d give it a try: “We could fail,” Catherine said. “But what are we even alive for if we don’t do something we believe in?”Visitors gather in one of the Mill’s five galleries.Sinjun Strom for The New York TimesPieces in Mayer’s Slumpies series installed in one of the Mill’s galleries.Sinjun Strom for The New York TimesSituated about 100 miles south of Montreal, the Mill isn’t yet on anyone’s performance circuit. At the same time, it is one node in a network of far-flung venues that operate largely under the media radar. “It reminds me of places I’ve encountered not in the U.S. — in Japan, in Poland, in France,” said the harpist Zeena Parkins, who performed at the opening on Saturday. “And it’s always the energy of one or two people that makes this incredible thing happen just because they love the music and they love the art, and they’ve developed a trust with their community.”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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    Jay Kanter, Agent for Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, Dies at 97

    Later a studio executive, he was among the last of the power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century.Jay Kanter, whose long career as an agent to the stars — including Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly — and later as an influential studio executive made him one of the last of the generation of power brokers who dominated Hollywood in the late 20th century, died on Aug. 6 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 97.His son Adam Kanter confirmed his death.An acolyte of the superagent Lew Wasserman, Mr. Kanter was renowned as much for the career he led as for the stories people told about him.He was a junior agent at MCA, Mr. Wasserman’s agency, in 1948 when he was asked to retrieve Mr. Brando from the train station.Mr. Kanter took Mr. Brando to his aunt’s house, and the next morning to a meeting with the director Fred Zinnemann, who wanted to cast Mr. Brando in his next movie, “The Men.” Apparently Mr. Kanter made a good impression, because when he suggested that they proceed to MCA to meet some of its agents, he recalled, Mr. Brando replied: “I don’t have to meet anybody. You’re my agent.”Mr. Brando’s Hollywood career was on the verge of stardom. And now, so was Mr. Kanter’s.“Suddenly I was getting all these calls from these heads of studios,” he recalled in a 2017 interview, and within a few years he represented a long line of A-list talent.The Kanter-Brando story became a bit of Hollywood lore, so much so that it provided the inspiration for a 1989 sitcom, “The Famous Teddy Z,” about a Hollywood star who picks out a mailroom clerk (played by Jon Cryer) as his agent.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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    Cailee Spaeny of ‘Alien: Romulus’ Is Learning How to Be a Star

    The actress Cailee Spaeny, the seventh of nine children born to committed Southern Baptists, left school in Missouri at 13. She had found work at a theme park, Silver Dollar City, in the Ozark Mountains, which allowed her to strike out on her own.“I was just so ready,” she said. “I definitely had a feeling that I needed to experience something else really early on. I wanted out of this Midwestern box.” Silver Dollar City was that first step.The next year, she took another one, convincing her mother to drive her across the country to Los Angeles, where she quickly secured an agent and a manager. More trips followed, more nights sleeping in the spare rooms of friends of friends or families met at church. Finally, when she was 17, she booked a role in the action movie “Pacific Rim Uprising.”Casting directors noticed her then. Wryly, Spaeny narrated what happened next. “This fresh-faced little girl comes to town,” she said. “She’s from the Midwest, she’s got a bit of an accent, bright-eyed, bushy tailed. They jump on that opportunity.”Spaeny, now 26, is still reasonably bushy tailed. She has wide-set eyes, an open countenance suggestive of some Great Plain and an unfussy femininity that she can ratchet up or way down as a role demands. There’s also an intensity to her, a tinge of the steeliness that had her paying her own way when she was barely a teenager. Hollywood jumped on that, too.Coming off “Uprising,” she booked four roles in a single week, and then she booked more, moving briskly from teen fare (“The Craft: Legacy”) to auteur-driven films like Alex Garland’s “Civil War” and Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” in which Spaeny played the lead. Now she is starring as Rain in “Alien: Romulus” (in theaters Aug. 16), the latest entry in the space horror franchise.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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    Production Company for Katy Perry’s ‘Lifetimes’ Video Under Investigation in Spain

    Local authorities opened an investigation into the production company for filming in a protected area without clearance, according to a news release.The production company behind Katy Perry’s music video for her single “Lifetimes” is under investigation in Spain for filming in a protected area without clearance, the authorities said Tuesday.The government of the Balearic Islands, an archipelago off eastern Spain, said in a news release that its Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Natural Environment has opened an investigation into the filming in the Parc Natural de Ses Salines. It is a national park and UNESCO World Heritage nature reserve that stretches across the islands of Ibiza and Formentera.According to several published reports, part of the video was apparently filmed within the dunes on the islet of s’Espalmador, a preserved area that Balearic Islands tourism authorities say is “highly valuable” ecologically because of the plants and animals that live there.“In no case had the production company requested authorization from the Regional Ministry to carry out the filming,” according to the news release, which is in Spanish.The government agency also said that filming was not an environmental crime and is permitted with appropriate authorization. Authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comments on Tuesday evening.“Lifetimes,” which premiered on Thursday and is a single off Perry’s upcoming studio album “143,” features the star singing and dancing on a beach and on a boat, cliff jumping and performing in a crowded nightclub. The video was directed by Stillz and produced by WeOwnTheCity, according to the end credits. Perry teased the video’s release in several posts on her Instagram account in recent days. “Sending love from Ibiza,” Perry wrote on Instagram on Thursday, the day the video premiered, using an orange heart emoji for love. The post features “Lifetimes” lyrics and a series of postcards from locations including Ibiza and Formentera, where the national park is, set against images of what appears to be seaside cliffs. The postcards appear to be outtakes from Perry’s video.WeOwnTheCity did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Katy Perry had yet to comment.According to Formentera Island Council Tourism’s website, the park includes rich, biodiverse land and marine habitats stretching from southern Ibiza to northern Formentera. The park is also a nesting area for more than 200 species of migratory birds and is home to Posidonia, a seagrass endemic to the Mediterranean Sea that plays an important role in maintaining and protecting the water and marine life. The park has been listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO since 1999, the tourism agency said.The islet of S’Espalmador is part of the park and has “one of the best-preserved and most amazing beaches,” with crystal-clear waters and a forest of pine trees and junipers, according to the Balearic Islands tourism authorities.Perry’s “143” album is set to be released in September.Jesus Jiménez More