Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Copa 71’ Documentary Shows Hidden History of Women’s World Cup

    This new documentary unearths footage from a World Cup event that even veteran players didn’t know about. It’s both exhilarating and infuriating.“Copa 71” begins with Brandi Chastain, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and legendary U.S. women’s soccer player, gawking at a screen. “This is unbelievable,” she says, looking at what the filmmaker has just handed her: footage of a stadium filled with people cheering at an old tournament. At first, she thinks it’s a men’s event. Then, as the players file out, she realizes the athletes are women. “Why didn’t I know about this?” Chastain asks in consternation. “It makes me very happy, and quite infuriated.”That’s a neat encapsulation of the effects of watching “Copa 71” (in theaters and on demand), directed by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine. The film tells the story of the all-but-forgotten 1971 Women’s World Cup, held in Mexico City and Guadalajara, which was recorded beautifully on film that went unseen for half a century.The tournament was actually the second such event organized by the Federation of Independent European Female Football; the first was held a year earlier, in Italy. But those details matter less than the context. At the time, soccer (or football, as most of the film’s participants of course call it) was still considered a sport for men, and women who played it were subject to a rich variety of snide and suspicious comments. Aside from the cultural pressures, FIFA, the governing body for what was only men’s soccer at the time, was on a mission to block women from taking part in international football in any organized fashion. In the film’s view, FIFA’s move was as much about retaining power as about the sport itself.All of this is laid out in “Copa 71,” with the help of a few historians and a number of athletes who played in the international tournaments. Their recollections, juxtaposed with images of a huge arena filled with cheering fans of all ages and genders, make this feel like a sports documentary from an alternate universe — especially because it would take 20 more years for FIFA to finally authorize women’s soccer for international play.The 1970s tournaments took place in a time of increasing worldwide activism for women’s rights. While the tournaments were obviously part of that movement, the players didn’t see themselves necessarily as activists. They just wanted to play. And this confounded observers, often men, who couldn’t conceive of women just wanting to do something regardless of men’s involvement or opinions.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

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    Donald Sutherland, ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Hunger Games’ Star, Dies at 88

    Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88.His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Mr. Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness.” He had a home in Miami.With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”Yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows — some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. “Klute,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and a 1978 remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were just a few of his other showcases.And he continued to work well into his last years, becoming familiar to younger audiences through roles in multiple installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise, alongside Brad Pitt in the space drama “Ad Astra” (2019) and as the title character in the Stephen King-inspired horror film “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022).Mr. Sutherland’s chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone.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

  • 125 Shares109 Views

    in Music

    James Chance, No Wave and Punk-Funk Pioneer, Dies at 71

    With the Contortions and James White and the Blacks, the songwriter and saxophonist set out to challenge musicians and stir up audiences.James Chance, the singer, saxophonist and composer who melded punk, funk and free jazz into bristling dance music as the leader of the Contortions, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 71.His brother, David Siegfried, said Mr. Chance had been in declining health for years and succumbed to complications of gastrointestinal disease at the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in East Harlem.During the late 1970s explosion of punk culture in New York City, the Contortions were at the forefront of a style called no wave — music that set out to be as confrontational and radical in sound and performance as punk’s fashion and attitude were visually.Contortions songs like “I Can’t Stand Myself” and “Throw Me Away” filled the rhythmic structures of James Brown’s funk with angular, dissonant riffs, to be topped by Mr. Chance’s yelping, blurting, screaming vocals and his trilling, squawking alto saxophone. He was a live wire onstage, with his own twitchy versions of moves adapted from Brown, Mick Jagger and his punk contemporaries.Although the Contortions often performed in suits and ties, their music and stage presence were proudly abrasive. In the band’s early days, Mr. Chance was so determined to get a reaction from arty, detached spectators that he would jump into the audience and slap or kiss someone. Audience members often fought back.“I got a big kick out of provoking people, I don’t deny that,” Mr. Chance said in a 2003 interview with Pitchfork.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

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Music

    Travis Scott Arrested in Miami Beach for Intoxication and Trespassing

    The rapper, who was charged with trespassing and disorderly intoxication, later admitted he had been drinking alcohol and stated, “It’s Miami.”The star rapper Travis Scott was arrested early Thursday in Miami Beach, Fla., after causing a disturbance on a yacht docked at a marina, according to a police report. He was later released on bond after paying a total of $650 on both charges, local news reported.Mr. Scott, 33, whose real name is Jacques Bermon Webster II, was arrested at 1:44 a.m. on charges of trespassing and disorderly intoxication after the police were called to the marina and told that “people were fighting on the vessel,” according to the report.Once there, officers found Mr. Scott yelling at passengers on the ship. The officers “could sense a strong smell of alcohol coming from the defendant’s breath,” the report said; they led him down a dock and toward a boardwalk, with Mr. Scott walking backward and yelling obscenities along the way.Mr. Scott got into a vehicle that was waiting for him but soon began walking back to the yacht, the report said, in defiance of the officers’ warning to leave the premises. He was then taken into custody.According to the report, Mr. Scott later admitted he had been drinking alcohol “and stated, ‘It’s Miami.’”On Thursday, Mr. Scott posted on social media what appeared to be a doctored image of his mug shot, with sunglasses and earphones added. In a statement, Bradford Cohen, a lawyer for the rapper, said: “Mr. Scott was briefly detained due to a misunderstanding. There was absolutely no physical altercation involved, and we thank the authorities for working with us towards a swift and amicable resolution.”Mr. Scott is one of the most popular rappers in music today, with three No. 1 albums and a recent arena tour. His shows have a reputation for an extremely high-energy response from crowds, and in late 2021, 10 fans died as a result of a crowd crush at Mr. Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, his hometown.Last year, a grand jury declined to criminally indict Mr. Scott and others involved in putting on the festival. But he and others, including Live Nation, the festival’s promoter, and Apple, which livestreamed the show, have faced civil suits over those deaths. Of those 10 civil suits, all but one have been settled.Kitty Bennett More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Movies

    Donald Sutherland Didn’t Disappear Into Roles, and That Was a Good Thing

    The actor understood the range of human feeling, but he came of age when movies distrusted institutions, and that suspicion was part of his arsenal.In a 2014 interview in GQ, the actor Donald Sutherland recalled that a movie producer told him he wasn’t getting a role he’d auditioned for because “we’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.”It’s true: In film and TV roles that stretched over 60 years, Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, never radiated the sense that he was some random guy you might cross paths with at the grocery store. If you did, you’d remember him, maybe a little uneasily. With a long face, piercing blue eyes, perpetually curled upper lip and arched, wary eyebrows, he had the look of someone who knew something important — a useful characteristic in a career that often involved movies about paranoia and dark secrets. His voice could clear a range from excitedly high to a menacing bass that would make you feel like ducking for cover.As an actor, he could do it all. His turn as the titular private detective opposite Jane Fonda in Alan Pakula’s 1971 “Klute” rides a tricky knife’s edge — is he a good guy? Does that term have a meaning in this case? There’s his role as a slowly more horrified scientist in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and his movie-stealing monologue as Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s 1991 “J.F.K.,” loaded with the urgency of obsession. Even when playing a goofball — the womanizing prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 “M*A*S*H,” for instance, or Vernon L. Pinkley in Robert Aldrich’s 1967 “The Dirty Dozen” — his loping, laconic figure stood out against the background, someone who knew a little better than he let on.Sutherland worked constantly and, unlike some actors of his generation, never really seemed like he belonged to a single era. He’d already been at it for more than 40 years when he showed up in Joe Wright’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice,” in what seemed like a minor part: Mr. Bennet, put-upon father to five daughters in yet another adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In the book, he’s sardonic and contemptuous of all but his oldest two daughters, Jane and Lizzy; the reader doesn’t walk away with particularly warm feelings about him.But Sutherland’s version of Mr. Bennet was a revelation, without being a deviation. In a scene granting Lizzy (Keira Knightley) his blessing to marry her beloved Mr. Darcy, tears sparkle in his eyes, which radiate both love and, crucially, respect for his headstrong daughter. Suddenly this father was not just a character, but a person — a man who can see his daughter’s future in a moment and is almost as overcome as she is.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

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    The 40 Best Songs of 2024 (So Far)

    Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs. After six months of listening, here’s what they have on repeat. (Note: It’s not a ranking, it’s a playlist.) Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Espresso’Atop a mid-tempo beat that recalls the muffled retro-funk of Doja Cat’s smash “Say So,” Sabrina Carpenter plays the unbothered temptress with winking humor: “Say you can’t sleep, baby I know, that’s that me, espresso.” Make it a double — you’ve surely heard this one everywhere. LINDSAY ZOLADZTyla, ‘Safer’Following her worldwide 2023 hit “Water,” Tyla pulls away from temptation in “Safer,” harnessing the log-drum beat and sparse, subterranean bass lines of amapiano. Her choral call-and-response vocals carry South African tradition into the electronic wilderness of 21st-century romance. JON PARELESOne We MissedAriana Grande, ‘We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)’At once strobe-lit and silky, Ariana Grande appropriately channels Robyn — the patron saint of crying in the club — on this nimbly sung, melancholic pop hit, a highlight from her bittersweet seventh album, “Eternal Sunshine.” ZOLADZOne We MissedBillie Eilish, ‘The Greatest’Billie Eilish extols her own composure and skill at dissembling — holding back her unrequited love — in “The Greatest” from “Hit Me Hard and Soft.” Delicate picking accompanies her as she sings about how she “made it all look painless.” Then she shatters that composure, opening her voice from breathy to belting while the production goes widescreen with drums and choir. When the music quiets again, her furious restraint is as palpable as her regret. PARELESMdou MoctarKadar Small for The New York TimesWe 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

  • 100 Shares199 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Green Border’ Review: Migrants’ Elusive Race for Freedom

    Agnieszka Holland focuses on the Polish-Belarusian border as a Syrian family tries to make it to the European Union.The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat. A brutal, deeply affecting drama set against the migrant crisis in Europe, it is the latest from this great Polish director, a filmmaker whose eclectic résumé includes several films about the Holocaust, a romance starring the young Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud and episodes of the HBO series “The Wire” and “Treme.” One of the pleasures of Holland’s work is that you never know exactly what to expect; all that is certain is that it will always be worth watching and that, for her, art is a moral imperative.A fiction firmly rooted in fact, “Green Border” dramatizes the crisis through different players — migrants, guards and activists — converged in and around the border of Poland and Belarus. There, in the so-called exclusion zone, an area that’s off-limits to most, migrants largely from the Middle East and from Africa try to enter the European Union via Poland. In this haunted, contested, dangerously swampy slice of land, men, women and children, families and friends, struggle to traverse national boundaries while evading and at times enduring violence from armed patrols.Divided into numbered sections, the movie opens on a crowded plane (it seems to be from Turkey) where the discreet, hovering camera pans across different passengers, their faces masked and unmasked, anxious and introspective. The camera soon settles on a tense Syrian husband and wife, Bashir and Amina (Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous), who are traveling with his father (Mohamad Al Rashi as Grandpa) and the couple’s three children. When their eldest, a sweet preadolescent boy named Nur (Taim Ajjan), asks the woman seated between him and the window if they can trade places so he can take in the view, this small circle opens. Enter Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), a middle-aged Afghan gutsily making the journey alone.It’s crucial to Holland’s convictions, I think, that the first plane passengers you see aren’t actually members of this little group. Holland doesn’t go in for overexplanation in her movies. Rather, during this one’s brief, minimalist title sequence — it opens with an inviting aerial view of a lushly green forest that soon turns black and white as “Green Border” materializes onscreen — the words “October 2021 Europe” appear, followed by “1. The Family.” (The black-and-white palette remains, which fits this Manichaean world even as it points to the past.) As the movie then cuts from one passenger to the next, from young to old and from adult to child, it soon seems evident that, for Holland, the freighted word family isn’t limited to a chosen few.Holland sets a brisk pace in “Green Border” that begins rapidly accelerating once the plane touches down. After it lands — the flight attendants hand out roses to the passengers, welcoming them to Belarus — Bashir’s family piles into a van that his brother in Sweden has hired. The family plans to join him; for her part, Leila, who hops in too, is hoping to stay in Poland. All the travel plans have been arranged in advance; routes have been charted, drivers hired, bags packed, cash spent. A great deal more money will pass from hand to hand by the end of “Green Border,” a movie in which each life carries a steep price tag.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

  • 100 Shares109 Views

    in Music

    Kendrick Lamar’s Drake Victory Lap Unites Los Angeles

    Kendrick Lamar’s sold-out homecoming at the Kia Forum, an arena just outside Los Angeles, promised pyrotechnics with its name alone: “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends.”The “Pop Out” ensured drama — it’s from a line in Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” his recent No. 1 song, and a scathing salvo in his war of words with Drake.The “& Friends” guaranteed surprise appearances from high-profile names: ultimately Dr. Dre, YG, Tyler, the Creator, Roddy Rich, Schoolboy Q and Steve Lacy, among many others. The whole thing would go down on Juneteenth, the annual celebration of Black emancipation in America, after a battle in which Lamar questioned Drake’s status within the Black 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