Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Space Cadet’ Review: Emma Roberts Shoots for the Stars

    In a lightweight comedy, the actress plays a bartender who dreams of becoming an astronaut. One problem: She has no qualifications for the job.Some of Hollywood’s most durable genre conventions have to do with outsiders and underdogs, often two categories rolled into one, who show up the self-important elites. The cowboy who rolls into town and brings justice in a not-quite-law-abiding way. The lovable con artist who makes a fool of the uppity society folks. The washed-up cop or spy called in for one last covert mission. The stereotypical sorority girl who turns out to be a secret legal genius.That last one is, of course, the “Legally Blonde” heroine Elle Woods, a fashion major who decides on a whim to go to Harvard Law School and discovers her unconventional qualifications give her insight that her more buttoned up classmates lack. Rex Simpson, the protagonist of “Space Cadet,” bears more than a passing resemblance to Elle, and not just because the actress Emma Roberts could play, at a squint, Reese Witherspoon’s niece. (Her actual aunt, Julia Roberts, played another scrappy underdog in “Erin Brockovich.”)Roberts’s most famous work might be in Ryan Murphy’s shows “American Horror Story” and “Scream Queens,” in which her knack for playing a certain kind of queen bee — gorgeous, cruel, one crisis away from combustion — makes her a magnetic presence. She’s great at a caricature, elevating those characters to satire without diluting their sugary poison. That flair for exaggeration would seem to make Rex Simpson the right role for her.“Space Cadet,” a comedy written and directed by Liz W. Garcia, is cast closely along the lines of “Legally Blonde,” with some beats lifted so clearly from that movie I started to wonder if they weren’t meant as jabs. Rex is a neon-wearing bartender in Florida who wrestles alligators and loves to party on the beach, but there’s more than meets the eye: She was a bit of a science genius in high school, and dreamed of being an astronaut. When her mother died, she turned down a full ride to Georgia Tech. By the time she attends her 10-year high school reunion with her best friend, Nadine (Poppy Liu), she’s down in the dumps over her failure to, uh, launch.A chance encounter with a former classmate who now runs a private spaceflight company sparks something in Rex. It’s time to chase her dreams. So she pops open the NASA website and decides to apply to be an astronaut. One problem, of course, is that she has absolutely no qualifications for the job. But is that a real barrier to Rex, the woman who invented patent-worthy tanning mirrors?The movie continues in this direction, sending her to NASA in a crop top to become an Astronaut Candidate (or AsCan, a moniker that provides more than a few jokes). Here is where the “Legally Blonde” comparisons come in. There is, for instance, a scene in a classroom where Rex doesn’t know the answer to a stern professor’s question, then one later where she does, demonstrating her growth. There’s a whole sequence in which people look askance at Rex upon her arrival at NASA, thanks to her peppy, kooky outfit that signals unseriousness.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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    Rob Stone, Master Marketer of Hip-Hop, Is Dead at 55

    A founder of the influential music magazine The Fader, he also bridged the worlds of hip-hop and the Fortune 500 with his innovative marketing agency.Rob Stone, who as a founder of the music magazine The Fader and the brand-strategy firm Cornerstone Agency bridged the sounds of the streets and the corporate suites, giving early exposure to rappers like Kanye West and Drake while brokering lucrative endorsements at a time when corporate America was still resistant to hip-hop, died on June 24 in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 55.His longtime professional partner, Jon Cohen, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was lung cancer.Early in his music business career, first at SBK Records and later at Arista, Mr. Stone was charged with finding exposure and radio airplay for new artists. He began to establish himself as a hip-hop insider, working with performers like the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack, as well as with Sean Combs, whose label, Bad Boy Records, had entered into a joint venture with Arista.Before long Mr. Stone decided to set out on his own, and in 1996 he started Cornerstone with Steve Rifkind, the founder of the hip-hop label Loud Records. Mr. Rifkind left the agency after a year and a half and was replaced by Mr. Cohen, who had also worked at SBK and had been Mr. Stone’s best friend since middle school on Long Island.Mr. Stone and Mr. Cohen went on to create eye-opening campaigns for brands like Sprite, Converse and Johnnie Walker that leveraged their relationships with labels and with new artists, who in the early days were all too sensitive to charges of selling out.Mr. Stone, left, in an undated photo with the musician and producer Pharrell Williams and Jon Cohen, who founded The Fader with Mr. Stone.via Jon CohenWe 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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    ‘Despicable Me 4’ Review: This Time They’re Superheroes

    The crew is back, but this time around they need to lie low. Sort of.If one wonders how a franchise on its sixth film in under 15 years (counting spinoffs) could still have any good ideas, one solution, apparently, is to simply throw all ideas at the screen. That’s the approach taken in “Despicable Me 4,” the latest, messily passable iteration of the deliriously successful franchise that follows the adventures of the reformed supervillain Gru.This one, helmed by the animated franchise’s longtime director and producer Chris Renaud, is a stream of mostly high-octane B-plots: Members of Gru’s family are struggling to adjust to life in witness protection after a new villain (Will Ferrell) becomes hellbent on revenge; Gru reluctantly mentors his teenage neighbor, who aspires to villainy; the Minions become lab-grown superheroes; and so on.As the movie noisily stretches itself out in too many directions, it largely sheds any meaningful charm or heart and struggles to cohere around a central story with actual stakes. It extends on a problem in the franchise that began with the third film, which relied more on gimmicky narrative and visual pyrotechnics and empty slapstick to keep things afloat. (What’s better than one Gru? Two!)There’s still occasional fun to be had and a budget that’s clearly put to use, but we’re mostly here, it seems, to keep the Minion cash cow chugging along. In all of the chaos, you may find your mind drifting off to the better, simpler days of the first film that set off the enterprise, when it was just a story of a bad guy gone good, but a genuine story nonetheless.Despicable Me 4Rated PG for Minion-related violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Seven Samurai’: Masterless Warriors in a Cinematic Masterpiece

    Akira Kurosawa’s epic has always been known for its action-film artistry, but there is emotional heft and nuance as well.Few movies have been more influential than “Seven Samurai,” an existential action film directed by Akira Kurosawa that, at longer than three hours, seemingly muscled its way into existence.“Seven Samurai,” made in Japan in the early 1950s, was by far the most expensive film then made in the country. And it required the longest shoot, in part because the exhausted director needed hospitalization. Trimmed by nearly one-third, it was introduced to the world at the 1954 Venice International Film Festival, sharing the Silver Lion award with three other movies.The abridged version opened in the United States in 1956 as “The Magnificent Seven,” a title soon to be appropriated by Hollywood. The full version did not arrive until 1982.Rarely screened since, Kurosawa’s masterpiece is showing — complete with intermission — for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration. Its power is undiminished.The U.S. occupation of Japan ended only months before Kurosawa and his team began planning a film that, however ambiguously, would reassert Japan’s martial spirit. Production of “Seven Samurai” coincided with an equally elemental movie, allegorizing Japan’s nuclear martyrdom, “Godzilla” — both at the same studio, Toho.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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    Niclas Larsson, Film Director, Waits for Success in New York’s Garment District

    The film director grew up in Sweden with a love of American movies. Now he would like you to see his surreal debut, “Mother, Couch,” in a theater.If old age is not for snowflakes — well, try directing a 90-minute feature film about old age in the iPhone era, as Niclas Larsson has done.Mr. Larsson, 33, greeted me on a recent morning into his 15th-floor terraced apartment in a former button factory in Manhattan, looking eerily like his dog, a blond lurcher named Ted, the way many owners do. He had settled here, the garment district of Midtown Manhattan, after rejecting “hipper” quarters in Brooklyn and the financial district.A native Swede with a deep appreciation of Americana, he was offering strong black coffee and strong opinions on where his new movie, “Mother, Couch,” should be seen, like the Angelika theater downtown, where it opens on Friday, and the Nuart in Los Angeles.“Hollywood is like, What’s going on?” Mr. Larsson said, considering the summer box office, which has thus far been a faint shadow of last year’s Barbenheimer. “No one knows what’s going on. But I want to give the nerds the option of going to the theater. It’s made for a theater. It’s shot on 35 — it’s all the film nerdy things in there.”“You know what also about a theater that we forget is the God perspective of people telling us a story,” he went on. “People forget — the big shadow plays they did around the fires in the Stone Age? They did them large, because it’s important.”“Mother, Couch,” based on “Mamma i soffa,” a 2020 Swedish novel by Jerker Virdborg, and shot to some local excitement in Charlotte, N.C., indeed takes on large themes, including mortality, parenthood and that Gen Z bugaboo, capitalism.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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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Wayne Shorter

    “He always was a genius,” Herbie Hancock says of his friend and collaborator. Hear a sampling of that genius in these 13 tracks.This month we feature Wayne Shorter, the iconoclastic composer and tenor saxophonist whose work with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report and through his own solo discography has influenced generations of like-minded visionaries to push the boundaries of jazz. Since his death in 2023 at 89, it’s felt like he’s still around. That’s because his music always felt so otherworldly and progressive, as if it were beamed in from outer space or somewhere deep into the future.Shorter rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early ’60s as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where his husky and complex sound proved a worthy complement to Blakey’s propulsive rhythms. By 1964, Miles came calling: He wanted Shorter to join his quintet — an all-star squad that included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — but it was no easy sell. Davis “had even gone as far as telephoning Art Blakey’s backstage dressing areas to speak to the saxophonist,” the author Ian Carr wrote in his definitive Miles Davis biography. As a member of the quintet, Shorter once said, “it wasn’t the bish-bash, sock-’em-dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash … and colors started really coming.”Shorter was thought to be a catalyst for one of Davis’s most fruitful creative periods. “All of us wrote some songs, I wrote a couple of things myself, but the main writer: Wayne,” Hancock told me over the phone recently. “If we were going to go to a recording session, Miles would ask Wayne, ‘Did you bring the book?’ Once in a while, we would play things written by Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But most of the things we recorded were written by Wayne.” The quintet broke up in 1968; Shorter worked with Davis until 1970.In 1971, Shorter helped pioneer jazz fusion, releasing the first album by the group Weather Report with the keyboardist Joe Zawinul. The group created a genre-bending style of music that incorporated jazz, rock, funk and improvised electronic arrangements. By the late ’80s and ’90s, Shorter’s output didn’t slow down, but his focus shifted to deeper spiritual enlightenment, which led to a deeper friendship with Hancock, who was also a practicing Buddhist. In recent years, even though they’d been collaborators for several decades, Hancock and Shorter became best friends.“He always was a genius, just an amazing human being,” Hancock said. “Most jazz players are composers, too. But I would say that the majority of us who are still living and were around during the major part of Wayne’s life, if we had to pick someone to be No. 1, I think we all would probably pick Wayne.“Even though I know Wayne passed away,” he continued, “he’s been in my heart for a long time and he’s still there. So in a certain way I don’t see him anymore. But he hasn’t died for me. It’s not gone forever. He’s still there.”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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    ‘This Closeness’ Review: So Near, So Far Away

    An indie comedy set in an Airbnb leans into the ways we distance ourselves from one another.City living presupposes closeness. Even when you’re alone in your apartment, dozens of people are likely to be sitting, cooking, napping, fighting or having sex within feet of you, separated by walls that are usually way too thin. But to live an urban life without getting overstimulated requires developing an artificial sense of distance, the ability to be alone in public, to ignore others while maintaining a sense of alertness. A pair of noise-canceling headphones. A bit of tunnel vision.“This Closeness,” a microbudget indie directed by Kit Zauhar, wittily examines the ways we create and avoid closeness in modern life, both by choice and, especially when we’re young, necessity. The main couple at its center, Tessa (Zauhar) and Ben (Zane Pais), are New Yorkers who’ve rented a room in an Airbnb in Philadelphia so Ben can attend his five-year high school reunion. It’s the kind of Airbnb you get when you can’t or don’t want to spend much money: They’ll have a bedroom to themselves, but share the bathroom and common spaces with a host, a stranger named Adam (Ian Edlund).Sharing space with a stranger isn’t all that weird when you’re a recent college graduate who probably has lived with at least a few randomly selected roommates in the recent past. But viewed objectively, that’s still weird — proximity without closeness, made weirder to Tessa and Ben because their temporary roommate, Adam, is an awkward guy who claims his roommate Ian actually listed the place, but isn’t there at the moment. (It’s one of the film’s inside jokes that Adam is played by Ian Edlund.)What’s going on? Normal 20-something stuff, really: fights and weirdness, tensions over how to split the refrigerator space and how long people take in the bathroom, moderately cruel jokes heard through too-thin walls. There’s also the kind of thoughtlessness you almost have to develop in order to survive proximity — Ben goes out to dinner with old friends and returns with one of them, Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick), in tow. Having been in shared living situations before, I recoiled reflexively at how much noise they made the instant they came through the door.All of “This Closeness” is set in the apartment, as much a smart budgetary choice as a formal one. The claustrophobic feeling is effective; the characters can escape, but we can’t. But in that small, bare apartment they’re having a rich array of interactions, both with the flesh-and-blood humans occupying the same space — Ben and Adam spar, in faux-politeness, over a malfunctioning air-conditioner in Ben and Tessa’s room — and with those outside its walls.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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    San Francisco’s Arts Institutions Are Slowly Building Back

    Although attendance remains down from prepandemic levels, the city’s arts groups are having some success getting audiences to return.On a recent clear day, visitors were wandering through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to gawk at works by Yayoi Kusama and Alexander Calder, and, a few blocks away, making their way through the galleries at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Museum of the African Diaspora.That evening, music lovers poured in to Davies Symphony Hall to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the San Francisco Symphony and into the War Memorial Opera House across the street, where the San Francisco Opera was giving the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”Although attendance at the city’s arts institutions remains down from prepandemic levels — with tourism, hotel occupancy and office attendance yet to fully recover — its cultural ecosystem has been showing signs of inching its way back.Arts organizations around the nation have been struggling to regain audiences since the pandemic, with Broadway attendance about 17 percent lower than before and precipitous declines at many regional theaters, museums, orchestras and opera companies.San Francisco has its own particular challenges: People are returning to work, but the city’s office buildings remain emptier than those in Los Angeles or New York. Fewer people are taking Bay Area Rapid Transit downtown; the number of riders exiting at downtown stations is still down by more than half since 2019.The city and its cultural organizations have been struggling to overcome what Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, referred to as the “doom narrative,” the widespread media coverage of the city’s challenges, both real and exaggerated.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