Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Eric LaRue’ Review: When Pain Won’t Stay Quiet

    Judy Greer stars in a searing drama about the mother of a school shooter and all the things we try not to say.Most of us would say we’re “at a loss for words” when senseless tragedy strikes. We try to use words anyhow — to comfort, to explain, to process, to apologize. It’s a human impulse. But it’s insufficient, and can harm as much as it helps.That insufficiency of language is the stealth subject of “Eric LaRue,” the feature directorial debut of Michael Shannon. Stealth, because its premise is a bit of a misdirect. Like last year’s “Ghostlight,” it’s a gut-punching indie drama borne out of the Chicago theater scene. The playwright Brett Neveu adapted it from his play by the same name, produced in 2002 at A Red Orchid Theater, of which Shannon is a founding member. Writers who come from theater tend to evince a keen understanding of how, in talking to one another, we reveal and conceal what’s inside of us — and that’s at the core of Neveu’s script.But that premise, it’s a tough one to sit down and watch: Janice LaRue (a remarkable Judy Greer, in a lead role at last) is the mother of a school shooter. Her teenage son, Eric, is in prison, and she is trying to put her life back together, or at least figure out if that’s something she wants to do.Her husband Ron (Alexander Skarsgard, sporting an admirably off-putting arrangement of facial hair) is not helping: he’s eager to move on from the incident, and is making headway, thanks to his overly friendly colleague Lisa (Alison Pill). She’s convinced him to join to her church, an evangelical congregation pastored by the imperious Bill Verne (Tracy Letts), who instructs Ron to act like the head of his household and tell Janice how things will go in their home.Janice is not interested, either in being told what to do or in Ron’s new church family, and not really interested in Ron at this point, either. She’s still attending their less trendy Presbyterian church, pastored by the well-meaning but blundering Steve Calhan (Paul Sparks), who tries to counsel her in his office but doesn’t have many helpful things to say.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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    What’s His Age Again? Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus (Now 53) Looks Back.

    In early March, Mark Hoppus, the singer and bassist for the long-running pop-punk trio Blink-182, and his wife, Skye, were special guests at a Sotheby’s modern and contemporary art auction in London. The sale featured a piece from their collection, a rare Banksy titled “Crude Oil (Vettriano),” up alongside works by Yoshitomo Nara, Gerhard Richter and Vincent van Gogh.“It was such rarefied air that we’ve never been a part of before,” Hoppus recalled at his home a week later, outfitted in chunky black glasses, a Dinosaur Jr. long-sleeve T-shirt, navy blue Dickies and Gucci Mickey Mouse sneakers. The painting sold for nearly $5.5 million, part of which will go to charity.It would have been hard to predict such a highfalutin turn for Hoppus back in 1999, when Blink-182 released its magnum opus, “Enema of the State,” which catapulted the band to MTV “Total Request Live” stardom and sold five million copies domestically. The video for the album’s first single, the jocular “What’s My Age Again?,” famously features the band members running unclothed through the streets of Los Angeles. (“Naked dudes are so ridiculous,” Hoppus said. “It just looks comical to me.”) Blink-182 followed up that LP with its first No. 1 album, “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket,” two years later.Despite Blink-182’s reputation for high jinks, naughty puns and charmingly adolescent hits like “All the Small Things,” Hoppus is remarkably thoughtful in person. Jim Adkins, whose group, Jimmy Eat World, supported Blink-182 and Green Day on a 2002 tour, said in an interview that Hoppus exhibited “human empathy.”“I know ‘Mark from Blink-182 is emotionally mature’ might seem like an oxymoron if you don’t know him,” Adkins admitted, “but I would say that.”Blink-182, from left: Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge in 1999.Lester Cohen/Getty ImagesWe 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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    Joe DePugh, Pitcher Who Inspired Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days,’ Dead at 75

    A gifted athlete, he gave a clumsy teenage Bruce Springsteen his first nickname, Saddie. Years later, the Boss returned the favor, memorializing him in a song.Joe DePugh, the Little League teammate of Bruce Springsteen who inspired the rocker’s hit song “Glory Days,” a rousing, bittersweet anthem to their hardscrabble childhoods in Freehold, N.J., where time passed by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” died on Friday in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 75.The cause of death, in a hospice facility, was metastatic prostate cancer, his brother Paul said.In the early 1960s, before Mr. Springsteen became the Boss, he was a clumsy baseball player whose athletic abilities were so sad that Joe, the team’s star pitcher, gave him the nickname Saddie.“Bruce lost this big game for us one year,” Mr. DePugh told The Palm Beach Post in 2011. “We stuck him out in right field all the time, where you think he’s out of harm’s way. But this important game, we had a bunch of guys missing, and we had to play him.”In the last inning, Saddie dropped an easy fly ball.“Actually, it hit him on the head,” Mr. DePugh said, “and we lost the game.”They remained friends in high school, bonding over their turbulent home lives and their distant, alcoholic fathers. After graduation, Saddie took off to play rock ’n’ roll in bars and nightclubs. Joe, who excelled at multiple sports, tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers but wound up playing basketball at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.In 1973, when they had been out of touch for years, these two boyhood friends bumped into each other at the Headliner, a roadside bar in Neptune, near the Jersey Shore. Mr. Springsteen was walking in; Mr. DePugh was walking out.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 Movie That Can Help You Understand Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Senate Speech

    “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” starring Jimmy Stewart as a naïve senator, explores the idealism — and reality — behind the tactic.Late in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra’s 1939 ode to democracy, free speech and the filibuster, a CBS newsman is trilling into his microphone near the Senate chamber. Inside that august room, he tells his listeners, is a man engaging in “the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form.”“The rrrrright,” he calls it, rolling that r, “to talk your head off!”He is referring to Jefferson Smith (played by a 30-ish Jimmy Stewart, all big eyes and gee-willikers wonder), the fish-out-of-water junior senator from some unnamed Western state and political party, who’s held the Senate floor all night and is still at it. He’s filibustering an appropriations bill to protest graft and injustice, specifically injustice against himself and more generally against the people of his state, his country and heck, why not, the whole world.I thought of Smith and his idealism while watching Senator Cory Booker on Tuesday, 24 hours into his own record-setting speech to protest the actions of the Trump administration. (Technically it wasn’t a filibuster because it did not come during a debate over a specific bill or nominee.) Stewart’s performance is calibrated to heightened Hollywood standards, to be sure, but by the end of the movie’s daylong filibuster, Smith looks as if he’s got the flu: sweaty, haggard, staggering around, voice reduced to a painful rasp. By contrast Booker, who’s about 25 years older than that character, remained coherent and composed and also audible, even when he concluded at the 25-hour mark.Cory Booker emerging from the Senate after his record-setting speech.Eric Lee/The New York TimesIn truth, I always think of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (for rent on Apple TV+) when this kind of speech comes up. I saw it dozens of times as a teenager, as it was a favorite in the home-school community to which my family belonged. It’s both very funny and profoundly idealistic, with its underlying belief that anybody who tries a feat this athletic and grueling — as the CBS newsman reminds the crowd, sitting down ends the filibuster — must be in the right. “Either I’m dead right or I’m crazy!” Smith hollers at one point.“You wouldn’t care to put that to a vote, would you, senator?” one of his irritated colleagues replies. We know the movie’s answer.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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    Val Kilmer Brought a Wonderfully Weird Sensibility to Every Role

    Even his choice of parts could be eccentric. In the end, he’s best thought of as a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body.Val Kilmer doesn’t even need to appear onscreen as Iceman in “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022) for the audience to feel his presence.Early on, Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” Mitchell is texting with his old rival, Iceman, but even though he’s just represented by words on a screen, you know exactly who that is, the joy of Kilmer’s boisterously cocky performance in the original 1986 film echoing through your memory.It makes the moment Kilmer actually shows up, late in the film, all the more powerful. Maverick has come to him for counsel. Kilmer still projects a regal energy, only now his character has earned his haughtiness, which presents as wisdom. Time has softened him a little, but Kilmer does not play Iceman as humbled. Instead, he’s more confident than ever, a sage of sorts even if the years have taken away his voice, as they did with Kilmer himself, who suffered from throat cancer.It seemed like everyone involved knew that the scene in “Maverick” would serve as a swan song for Kilmer, who died Tuesday at the age of 65 from pneumonia. But as brief as the sequence is, it is a reminder of just what kind of actor Kilmer was, one who thrived on unexpected choices and was constantly eager to surprise, no matter what the context.In his youth, Kilmer looked like the ideal movie star, with smoldering good looks that were punctuated by naturally pouting, kissable lips. That classically beautiful appearance could have led him down a different path, and, sure, Hollywood occasionally tried to make a traditional leading man out of him. Most notably he was constrained as the vigilante in the cowl in Joel Schumacher’s “Batman Forever” (1995). But he thrived more as a character actor, bringing a bit of weirdo spice to the screen.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 Minecraft Movie’ Review: Block by Bizarre Block

    Jack Black and Jason Momoa star in this adaptation of the megahit video game that leans into the mindless silliness of mid-aughts comedy.Occasionally, amid the cycles of nostalgic clip-sharing that periodically occur online, you might happen upon the Berries and Cream video. The viral Starburst commercial, involving a briefcase-toting pilgrimesque lad, is a concise distillation of the particular brand of mid-to-late-aughts humor that dominated the early internet: quaintly absurd, silly, and above all, random. When, early on in “A Minecraft Movie,” a makeshift rocket pack is sent hurtling toward a nearby potato chip factory, obliterating its giant mascot chip and leaving executives inside wailing, that genre of ad improbably blazes in the mind.That this adaptation of the megahit video game, directed by Jared Hess, fully commits to capturing that era of stupidly “epic,” or epically stupid, laughs shouldn’t come as a surprise. Hess, after all, laid a lot of groundwork for early internet humor with his 2004 indie comedy “Napoleon Dynamite.” And the star here, Jack Black, was the lead in Hess’s 2006 follow-up, “Nacho Libre.”This retro sensibility might, on paper, make for an out-of-touch comedy, but there’s something almost refreshingly bold in the full-tilt inanity here — in taking a blockbuster budget and embracing idiocy, as if to knowingly say, “I mean, it’s a Minecraft movie.”That charitable read is most immediately guided by Black, whose comedic persona of earnest goofiness has survived our age of irony. He plays Steve, a disillusioned office worker who decides to chase his dream of working as a miner. When he axes into a mysterious magic cube, it opens a portal to the Overworld, the blocky world of Minecraft, with its limitless potential for creation.But when a crew of ragtag outsiders, led by a washed-up video game champion named Garrett (Jason Momoa), unwittingly get their hands on the cube and enter the Overworld, they become caught in a battle for the universe’s survival.Most of this plays out with a camp quality of so-dumb-it’s-sort-of-fun. The visuals often appear intentionally, even egregiously artificial, something that only partly works; Hess’s early success was rooted in a deliberately askew visual grammar that worked in an indie medium, but with a studio extravaganza, it often simply translates as — well, a Starburst commercial.But those who can buy into Hess’s sensibility will get a nostalgic kick: Momoa, who is at times genuinely funny and at other times just capably creating sketches, is essentially doing a rendition of Rex, a side character from “Napoleon Dynamite.” (Also, for fans of that movie, there is more than one bit about tater tots.)The silliness of “A Minecraft Movie” will appeal to kids who love the game, to adults who think fondly of this comedy era, and perhaps to few else. But the movie could have gone a more polished and predictable route, like another of Black’s game-related movies, “Jumanji.” In a world of such factory-line adaptations, there’s more of an identity here, even if it’s a mindless one.A Minecraft MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Val Kilmer in ‘Batman Forever’ Was a True 1990s Moment

    The actor took only one turn in the famous batsuit. That film, “Batman Forever,” couldn’t be a more representative artifact of its era.In June 1995 a pop confection hit thousands of movie screens. It seemed to embody what both boosters and critics have identified as that decade’s end-of-history nonchalance. It was, of all things, a Batman movie. And holding it together, the sturdy straight man surrounded by abject goofiness, was Val Kilmer, the actor who died at the age of 65 on Tuesday.“Batman Forever” was the third movie in a franchise kicked off in 1989 by the director Tim Burton’s brooding “Batman.” Starring Michael Keaton in the title role and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, “Batman” was, by the standards of the time, dark for a comic-book flick.Burton’s and Keaton’s follow-up, “Batman Returns” (1992), failed to repeat the original’s box-office success. So a new director, Joel Schumacher, was brought in expressly to make what one journalist termed a “Batman Lite.” Schumacher was a fan of Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 western “Tombstone” and tapped him as his leading man.This was not Burton’s Batman. “There’s not much to contemplate here,” the critic Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, “beyond the spectacle of gimmicky props and the kitsch of good actors (all of whom have lately done better work elsewhere) dressed for a red-hot Halloween.”Schumacher favored showy camera angles and a garish color scheme. The villains — Jim Carrey played the Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones was Two-Face — were freely permitted to chew the scenery. Batman’s suit had nipples. The movie was weird.It was also a box-office smash. It broke an opening-weekend record and eventually brought in more than $336 million worldwide, besting its predecessor by tens of millions of dollars.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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    Val Kilmer: A Life in Pictures

    Val Kilmer, an actor known for his work in “Top Gun,” “The Doors” and “Batman Forever,” died on Tuesday at the age of 65. Here are some snapshots from his life and career.Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, Via APCher and Kilmer in 1984, the same year he made his feature debut in the slapstick Cold War spy movie “Top Secret!”George Rose/Getty ImagesKilmer in 1988, the year he appeared in the children’s fantasy film “Willow.”Bonnie Schiffman/Getty ImagesKilmer in a series of black-and-white photos in 1986.Paramount PicturesKilmer starred opposite Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” in 1986.Michael Tighe/Donaldson Collection, via Getty ImagesKilmer, posing in 1994, starred as the profligate gunslinger Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” the year before.Warner Bros./Sunset Boulevard and Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn 1995, Kilmer took on “Batman Forever,” in which he battled Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey). Nicole Kidman played Dr. Chase Meridian.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc, via Getty ImagesKilmer, Carrey and Kidman at a Las Vegas convention in 1995.Carolco/Getty ImagesKilmer being apprehended by the police in a scene from the 1991 film “The Doors.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesKilmer posing for one of his earliest movies, “Real Genius” (1985).Fairchild Archive/Penske Media, via Getty ImagesSean Penn and Kilmer at a book party in Venice, Calif., in 1995.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc, via Getty ImagesKilmer in 1997, the year he starred in “The Saint,” a thriller about a debonair, resourceful thief playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian mob.M. Caulfield/WireImage, via Getty ImagesKilmer worked with Robert Downey Jr. and Shane Black on “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” in 2005.Donato Sardella/WireImage, via Getty ImagesKilmer in 2006. He was one of the youngest students ever admitted to the acting program at Juilliard. More