Aurelia Butler

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    Will Smith Taps Nostalgia as He Attempts a Post-Slap Comeback

    “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the latest entry in a nearly three-decade- old franchise, will be Smith’s first wide-release film since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022.During the Latin pop star J Balvin’s set at Coachella in April, a surprise guest star suddenly appeared onstage: Will Smith, wearing a familiar black suit and sunglasses, launched into the title song of “Men in Black,” his 1997 Hollywood blockbuster.It was the beginning of a frenetic spring for Smith as he carefully re-enters the public eye to promote “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” his first wide-release movie since he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars in 2022, a move that threatened to derail his career.Smith has been back walking red carpets, bantering on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” and eating spicy chicken until his eyes watered on “Hot Ones,” the popular YouTube show. He told Fallon his publicity tour had taken him to eight cities in 12 days, with stops in Dubai and in Riyadh for what he described as the first Hollywood premiere in Saudi Arabia.“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the latest entry in a nearly three-decade old franchise, is opening nationwide on Friday. The film industry will be closely watching how it does to see whether the moviegoing public is ready to welcome Smith back after an event so shocking and ignominious that it achieved proper-noun status: the Slap.Whether by accident or agreement, the Slap has not come up much in Smith’s prerelease publicity blitz. But the film itself seems to refer to it, archly, as several critics have noted: In it, Smith gets slapped by his co-star, Martin Lawrence, and called a “bad boy.”Lawrence appeared on “The Tonight Show” with Smith and praised him effusively. “He is one of the most professional actors out there, most talented actors out there, he has a brilliant mind, he’s a genius and he’s upstanding,” he said.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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    Garfield’s Journey From Comic Strip to Weird Internet Incubator

    He hates Mondays, he’s No. 1 at the box office and he’s been the subject of a lot of weirdness over the last 40-plus years.You may have noticed that “The Garfield Movie” was the No. 1 movie in America last week, earning $14 million and taking over the top spot from the infinitely more hyped “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” It has grossed $55 million in North America and $156 million globally in two weeks.“The Garfield Movie” found the top of the box office in its second week of release.Dneg Animation/Sony Pictures, via Associated PressAfter more than 45 years of daily strips (that still get made every day), three feature films, 76 books, three animated series, dozens of video games and a literal boatload of merchandise, we may ask, how did we get here?In an attempt to answer that question, we took a trip down the Garfield rabbit hole.So Much MerchandiseThe first thing you come across is the merchandise. There are T-shirts, phones, watches, furniture, clocks, slippers, tents, wallets, trading cards, eye shadow and roller skates with Garfield’s leering image.There was even a Garfield toilet seat cover. “It turned out to be a great product. It was real colorful,” Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, told The New York Times in 2019. (There are, in fact, numerous Garfield toilet seat covers.)This is no accident. Davis released the three-panel newspaper comic strip in 1978 with an eye toward selling his creation.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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    ‘The Watchers’ Review: Now They See You

    The folk-horror genre welcomes a young new voice in the director Ishana Night Shyamalan, but she’s singing a familiar old tune.Seeing the name Shyamalan on a movie trailer leads to certain expectations: plot twists, incremental reveals that change the nature of reality, foreboding supernatural vibe. Check, check and check with “The Watchers” — even though in this case the filmmaker isn’t M. Night Shyamalan, of “The Sixth Sense” and “Split” fame, but his daughter Ishana.After making her debut as a director on “Servant, an Apple TV+ series Ishana has moved on to features with this folk-horror tale about a troubled young woman, Mina (Dakota Fanning, fresh from a big turn in the Netflix series “Ripley”), who finds herself stranded when her car breaks down in foreboding Irish woods while she was ferrying a parrot (you read that right) from Galway to Belfast.Ishana is 24, and “The Watchers” shows that she truly is Jung at heart: At times the movie feels as if an eager undergraduate patched it together from the greatest hits of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, most notably the forest as both physical and psychological place, the mirror as revelator and the presence of the double.Fine, so this is a lofty way to say that the film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.As dusk sets in, Mina is rescued from the forest’s terrifying noises and encroaching shadows by Madeline (Olwen Fouere), Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who live in a Brutalist house where an entire wall is a one-way mirror. This is so that every night, mysterious creatures called the Watchers can observe those who are, in effect, their prisoners; as Madeline tells Mina, whoever goes out after sunset dies. Fleeing at dawn isn’t an option because there is no escape from the forest within a day’s walk.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 to Rob a Bank’ and the Limits of a True-Crime Documentary

    The story of a Seattle-area bandit is rife with big questions, but the movie doesn’t explore them. Not every podcast needs to be a film.There is a platitude, beloved of the documentary community, that truth is stranger than fiction. It’s often correct. But lately I’ve been worried that the glut of documentary content required to fill the yawning maw of streamers is putting this axiom to the test more frequently. Not all stories are worthy of the documentary treatment.Such, unfortunately, is the issue with “How to Rob a Bank” (on Netflix), yet another true-crime documentary. Its directors, Seth Porges and Stephen Robert Morse, have turned out great work in the past — Porges as co-director of the fascinating “Class Action Park”; Morse as producer of the influential “Amanda Knox.” This film feels more perfunctory, a strong example of the kind of documentary that could have just been a podcast. (Of course, it has been.)The film tells the true story of Scott Scurlock, a free-spirited fellow known to Washington State law enforcement agents as the Hollywood Bandit. (Sometimes they dropped the bandit part.) In the 1990s, he pulled off a whopping 19 confirmed bank robberies in the Seattle area, stealing more than $2.3 million, with the aid of a few friends and some elaborate disguises.“How to Rob a Bank” is filled with re-enactments of the robberies and interviews with friends and associates, who explain that Scurlock was a gentle soul who lived in an enormous treehouse that was a hub for his friends. He also cooked meth for a while, was an adrenaline junkie and journaled a lot about trying to find his purpose in life. Police officers and investigators are less sanguine about Scurlock, noting at one point that bank robbery is not a victimless crime, even if nobody gets hurt physically. It can be traumatic to anyone who was inside the bank, and to a teller facing a gun. Scurlock tried to paint his crimes as altruistic, and did give away some of his money to friends in need. But people were still hurt — including, ultimately, Scurlock himself.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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    The True Story Behind Glen Powell’s Character in ‘Hit Man’

    The romantic shenanigans are the stuff of Hollywood, but the film’s fake contract killer is based on a real man profiled in a Texas Monthly article.“Hit men don’t really exist!” an exasperated undercover pretend assassin says in Netflix’s new romantic action comedy, “Hit Man.” But the very existence of the film, which is loosely based on a seemingly strait-laced community college instructor who moonlighted as a fake assassin for the Houston police, proves just how much they fascinate us.Though plenty of officers have worn wires and impersonated hit men in murder-for-hire investigations, the film’s inspiration, Gary Johnson, was the “Laurence Olivier of the field,” according to a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. Over a decades-long career, relying on a bevy of accents and a penchant for being a sympathetic listener, Johnson, who died in 2022, managed to ensnare more than 60 people who tried to hire him.That’s just the kind of character that’s catnip for a leading-man-in-the-making like Glen Powell, who plays a version of Johnson in “Hit Man.” Of course, the actor and his director Richard Linklater, who wrote the script together, added a few Hollywood touches, including a rom-com plot involving the fictional Johnson and a woman (Adria Arjona) hoping to hire him to kill her husband.But some of the movie’s most outlandish plot elements — like the teenager who tries to pay Johnson partly in Atari computer games — did really happen. Here’s the story behind the movie and a look at hit men in real life.Who was Gary Johnson, whose life inspired the film?To his neighbors, he was a mild-mannered, middle-aged man who lived alone with two cats and worked in human resources at a company downtown, as he told them. (The baggy jorts and love of birding are Hollywood inventions.)In reality, Johnson, who spent a year as a military policeman in Vietnam, was an investigator for the district attorney’s office in Houston. On the side, he taught classes in human sexuality and general psychology two nights a week at a local community college. (The film switches it up, making Powell’s character a professor working for the police on the side and relocating the action to New Orleans.)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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    Jennifer Lopez and Black Keys Tour Cancellations Raise Questions for Industry

    High-profile cancellations from Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys have armchair analysts talking. But industry insiders say live music is still thriving.For the concert business, 2023 was a champagne-popping year. The worst of the pandemic comfortably in the rearview, shows big and small were selling out, with mega-tours by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Drake and Bruce Springsteen pushing the industry to record ticket sales.This year, as with much of the economy, success on the road seems more fragile. A string of high-profile cancellations, and slow sales for some major events, have raised questions about an overcrowded market and whether ticket prices have simply gotten too expensive.Most conspicuously, Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys have canceled entire arena tours. In the case of the Black Keys — a standby of rock radio and a popular touring draw for nearly two decades — the fallout has been severe enough that the band dismissed its two managers, the industry giant Irving Azoff and Steve Moir, those men confirmed through a representative.At Coachella, usually so buzzy that it sells out well before any performers are announced, tickets for the second of the California festival’s two weekends were still available by the time it opened in April.Those issues have stoked headlines about a concert business that may be in trouble. But the reality, many insiders say, is more complex, with no simple explanation for problems on a range of tours, and a business that may be leveling out after a couple of extraordinary years when fans rushed to shows after Covid-19 shutdowns.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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    ‘Banel & Adama’ Review: A Parable of Two Young Lovers

    The filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates this elliptical story, set in unnamed Senegalese village, with daubs of strong colors and strikingly vivid imagery.A love story suffused in beauty and mystery, “Banel & Adama” draws you in right from the start. Set in an unnamed Senegal village during an unspecified time, it opens on two young lovers quietly blissing out on each other. The two are first seen in striking close-up — early on, the movie cuts from an image of her lush, pretty mouth to a shot of one of his steadily adoring eyes — like puzzle pieces that the movie bids you to fit together. Given the dreamy vibe as well as the bright, vivid palette, it is an invitation that you readily take up.Banel and Adama — played by the appealing Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo, both nonprofessionals — live in a small house in a small village that looks like it could exist today but also decades earlier. (The villagers use kerosene lamps, and I don’t recall anyone using a cellphone.) There, Adama tends a modest herd of cattle as Banel keeps him company, their smiles, laughs and movements pleasantly in sync. Like all besotted lovers, they seem to exist in a private realm, one that the French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates with cozy framing, daubs of strong colors and a bold, graphic sensibility.The story emerges in morsels of naturalistic dialogue and brief, on-point scenes that incrementally sketch in the characters’ intimacy, shared history, familial relationships and distinct temperaments. Two years earlier, Adama, now 19, married Banel, his brother’s widow and second wife. Tradition, as his mother and others insist, decrees that he now assume the role of the village chief, a position he refuses. He’s content simply to be with Banel, and together they plan to move out of the village once they dig a nearby house out of a mountain of sand. Each day, they dig and they dig, a task that soon groans with portentous symbolism.Sy has a terrific eye and, working with her cinematographer Amine Berrada, she quickly hooks you with the beauty of Banel and Adama’s world, pulling you into their everyday life with hints of drama and myth, though mostly with the graceful compositions and the region’s natural riches, its green fields and blue skies. The camera moves just so, never racing or crawling, which allows you to luxuriate in the details that fill in the picture and deepen the realism. Sy’s attention to physical surfaces — shimmering water, nubby cloth, smooth bark — is particularly adept and helps create a sense of texture so strong you can almost feel it in your hands.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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    ‘The Spark’: How Irish Kids Created the Song of Summer

    Think you can stop what they do? I doubt it.It started with the beat, Heidi White said.On a March day at The Kabin Studio, an arts nonprofit in Cork, Ireland, Heidi, 11, and a group of other children were trying to write a rap with the help of Garry McCarthy, who is a music producer and Kabin Studio’s creative director. It was part of a weekly songwriting program.“It’s a safe space for young people in the community to come create music, hang out and just to make bangers,” Mr. McCarthy said.On this day, the group was trying to write an anthem for Cruinniú na nÓg, a government-sponsored day in Ireland devoted to children’s creativity, scheduled for June 15. Everyone was feeling a little shy and the ideas weren’t exactly flowing, Heidi said.“Then Garry had put on a drum-and-bass beat, and suddenly it was like a switch flipped and everyone started getting involved,” she said. “It was like magic.”That infectious beat has also captivated viewers around the world. The group’s song, “The Spark,” has become a sensation on social media, hailed by some on TikTok as an early contender for song of the summer. (This isn’t the first time a tune made for social media has been praised as such. See here: A 2023 earworm about margaritas.)What could have easily sounded grating to adult ears — think Kidz Bop — is instead unrelentingly catchy. The song’s accompanying music video, which culminates in all of the kids rapping, loudly, in unison on the top deck of a bus, is utterly charming.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