Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Prime Minister’ Examines a New Zealand Leader and a Global Issue

    The film is a memoir of sorts for Jacinda Ardern, who governed at a time of multiple disasters. But it was misinformation that proved hardest to cope with.When she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, Jacinda Ardern was the world’s youngest female head of state, at 37. From the start, she was playing on hard mode. After giving birth to a daughter not quite eight months later, she led her country through a series of generational catastrophes — shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, a deadly volcanic eruption, the Covid-19 pandemic — all while pushing a hefty set of progressive reforms through the legislature and getting re-elected, too.The new documentary “Prime Minister” (in theaters) mostly covers this tumultuous period, showing how Ardern, the Labour Party leader at the time, navigated her choices while also giving space to her misgivings. But it’s not a biopic or a puff piece. It’s more of a memoir: a bigger story told through the events of one person’s life. That tale goes far beyond Ardern, even beyond New Zealand.The directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe drew on a variety of sources. There’s footage from 2024, with Ardern teaching as a fellow at Harvard and working on her new book, “A Different Kind of Power.” But that’s just the framing device. The bulk of “Prime Minister” leans on video that her husband, Clarke Gayford, shot during Ardern’s time in office, including intimate glimpses of her home life and private thoughts, as well as audio interviews that haven’t been previously released.The result can be uncommonly frank. Ardern talks about reluctant governing and impostor syndrome. Her political journey, she says, has been a battle between two parts of herself, “the one that says that you can’t and the one that says that you have to.” She speaks her mind but is also in tune with her emotions. You can hear her voice crack when she contemplates the grieving families of the people slain in the Christchurch massacre, or considers the implications of pandemic lockdown policies on children who depend on school for food and women who will face domestic violence in isolation.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

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    Inside the Jury Room at the Weinstein Trial, Rancor and Recrimination

    As the panelists deliberated over whether the former Hollywood mogul should be convicted of sex crimes for a second time in Manhattan, accusations began to fly.Inside the jury room at the second New York sex crime trial of Harvey Weinstein, things were getting tense.The 12 jurors had already acquitted the former Hollywood mogul on one felony sex crime charge, and they had begun to deliberate on a second when the discussions suddenly turned pointed, and personal.One juror, who had been calm and had even prayed with the others, abruptly began accusing another of having been “bought out” by Mr. Weinstein or his lawyers.The moment, which occurred on the second day of deliberations in a case that was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office after its earlier sex crime conviction against Mr. Weinstein was overturned, foreshadowed the rancor and dysfunction that would ultimately consume the panel.Although it ultimately voted to convict him of the second felony sex crime, it reached no decision on the third charge in the case, deadlocking on Thursday over whether Mr. Weinstein raped an aspiring actress in a hotel room in 2013.This account of what occurred in the jury room is based on interviews with several jurors, particularly one panelist who came forward twice to voice concerns to the judge about the behavior of his fellow jurors.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

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Music

    Brian Wilson and Beach Boys’ Style Showed What California Living Looked Like

    In Pendleton shirts and khakis, Mr. Wilson and the Beach Boys showed the world what easy Southern California living looked like.The band name was a fluke. Looking to cash in on the burgeoning surf culture in the United States, the record executive who first brought Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine together on the obscure Candix Records label in Southern California wanted to call the assembled musicians “The Surfers.’’But another group, as it happened, had already claimed the name. And then there was an additional problem: only one of the band members, Dennis Wilson, actively surfed.And so, as Brian Wilson — the architect of the band’s sound and image, whose death, at 82, was announced by his family on Wednesday — tweeted back in 2018, the promoter Russ Regan “changed our name to the Beach Boys.” He added that the group members themselves found out only after they saw their first records pressed.Originally, the band had another name. It was one that speaks not only to the aural backdrop the Beach Boys provided for generations but also to their enduring influence on global style. As teenagers in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the band had styled itself the Pendletones. It was a homage to what was then, and in some ways still is, an unofficial uniform of Southern California surfers: swim trunks or notch pocket khakis or white jeans, and a blazing white, ringspun cotton T-shirt worn under a sturdy woolen overshirt.The shirts the Pendletones wore were produced by the family-owned company, Pendleton Woolen Mills of Portland, Ore., and had been in production since 1924. The shirts were embraced by surfers for their over-the-top durability and the easy way they bridged the intersection between work and leisure wear. The blue and gray block plaid, which Pendleton would later rename as the “Original Surf Plaid,’’ was worn by every member of the Beach Boys on the cover of their debut album, “Surfin’ Safari.” It was a look that, novel then, has since been quoted in some form by men’s wear designers from Hedi Slimane to Eli Russell Linnetz and Ralph Lauren.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

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Rigmor Newman, Behind-the-Scenes Fixture of the Jazz World, Dies at 86

    She was a concert promoter, a nightclub impresario and the producer of an award-winning 1992 film about the Nicholas Brothers dance duo.Rigmor Newman, who began her career in Sweden as a singer and beauty queen and went on to become a fixture in the U.S. jazz world as a concert and film producer as well as a talent manager, died on April 26 in the Bronx. She was 86.Her daughter, Annie Newman, said she died in a hospital from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Her death was not widely reported at the time.Ms. Newman, who sang at the Nobel Prize banquet in Stockholm in 1957, arrived in New York in the early 1960s after marrying Joe Newman, a standout trumpeter in the Count Basie and Lionel Hampton orchestras.She later managed the Nicholas Brothers, a gravity-defying dance duo that dazzled cinema audiences starting in the late 1930s, and became heroes to many Black Americans. Harold Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers became her second husband.Among her many professional incarnations, Ms. Newman served as the executive director of Jazz Interactions, a nonprofit organization promoting jazz throughout the New York metropolitan area, which Joe Newman helped found in the early 1960s.Ms. Newman appeared with the trumpeter Joe Newman, whom she married, on the cover of his 1960 album “Counting Five in Sweden.” Given the racial climate of the day, the image was a symbolic triumph.World Pacific RecordsWe 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

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Music

    James Lowe, Rock Outsider With the Electric Prunes, Dies at 82

    His band’s output ranged from the 1966 psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” to what he called a “Catholic Mass done in rock veneer.”James Lowe, the frontman of the 1960s rock band the Electric Prunes, whose “free-form garage-rock” approach, as he called it, yielded the swirling psychedelic hit “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” died on May 22 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 82.His daughter Lisa Lowe said he died in a hospital of cardiac arrest.The Electric Prunes arrived on the rock scene with a jolt: a menacing electric buzz that sounded like an oncoming swarm of deadly hornets.The sound, which opened “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” was the result of a playback error on a tape of the guitarist Ken Williams noodling with a fuzz box and a guitar tremolo bar. It was so raw and powerful that Mr. Lowe argued to keep it. The track would come to be hailed as a cornerstone of garage psychedelia.With its trippy title and astral sound, “Too Much to Dream” was widely interpreted as a drug song, but its lyrics actually detailed the woe of an abandoned lover. Then again, the Electric Prunes, who swung from paisley pop to proto-punk to, yes, religious hymns sung in Latin, were always difficult to pin down.“We were always outsiders,” Mr. Lowe recalled in a 2007 interview with Mojo, the British rock magazine. “We weren’t hip enough to be crazy, drugged-out characters.” In addition, he said: “The music was too eclectic. It sounds like 10 different bands on those records.”Despite its maximalist sensibility, the band, which emerged from the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, scored two early hits.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

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    Brian Wilson Wrote the California Dream, but He Didn’t Live It

    An artist nearly synonymous with Los Angeles made his name crafting songs playing up his home state’s beachy vibes. His inner life, however, was anything but sunny.Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.Wilson, whose death at 82 was announced by his family on Wednesday, was as closely associated with Los Angeles as anyone in music history. In 1988, The Los Angeles Times polled a passel of industry veterans and asked them to name the greatest L.A. band of all time; the Beach Boys came in second. (The Doors won, a dubious choice.) When Randy Newman wanted to mock the city in “I Love L.A.,” his covertly acerbic 1983 hit, he shouted, with almost-convincing enthusiasm, “Turn up the Beach Boys!”Wilson’s fantasia of California — a Zion where everyone wore huarache sandals and drove deuce coupes — thrilled millions of people worldwide and aligned with a period in the state’s growth. Between 1962 and 1970, the Beach Boys’ heyday, the population of California increased by three million people. Wilson couldn’t claim credit for the boom, but no tourism board or corporate recruiter could design a better pitch. The songs were specific and local, but also universal. How else to explain “Surfin’ Safari” topping the singles chart in Sweden?When they recorded their first 45, “Surfin’,” the local record label Candix suggested the band change its name from the Pendletones to the Beach Boys, to emphasize the surf theme. Dennis, the outgoing, often reckless Wilson brother, surfed regularly in South Bay, and told Brian it was a popular and emerging trend. The first single was successful, so Brian stuck with the theme. The beach was their brand. Four early Beach Boys singles and every one of their first three albums had the word surf in their titles.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

  • 163 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    Enzo Staiola, Who Starred in ‘Bicycle Thieves’ as a Child, Dies at 85

    Discovered on the street in Rome, he had a brush with stardom when he was cast in what many consider one of the greatest films of all time.Enzo Staiola, who played the staunch 8-year-old accompanying his father on a quest to recover a stolen bicycle in Vittorio De Sica’s classic 1948 film, “Bicycle Thieves,” died on June 4 in Rome. He was 85.His death, in a hospital, was widely reported in the Italian press.The father’s character, played by a sad-eyed real-life factory worker, Lamberto Maggiorani, is the star of the film, which was originally released in the United States as “The Bicycle Thief” and is routinely cited as one of the greatest films of all time.But Mr. Staiola (pronounced STY-ola), who played the child, Bruno, is in many ways the emotional center of De Sica’s work, which is considered a founding document of Italian neorealism and “a fundamental staging post in the history of the European cinema,” the film historian Robert S.C. Gordon wrote in his 2008 book, “Bicycle Thieves.”The story, set in impoverished postwar Rome, revolves around Antonio Ricci, Mr. Maggiorani’s struggling character, who must get his bicycle back to keep his new job hanging advertising bills around the city. The job requires the use of a bicycle. But he must also retrieve the bike to avoid disappointing his trusting son.The character of Bruno is portrayed with poise and vulnerability by a little boy who, until then, had been more interested in playing soccer in his working-class Roman neighborhood than in acting.The father’s quest, unfolding through a series of sharply etched mishaps in the streets of the city, takes on weight for the audience as the despair becomes not just that of an adult but also of a plucky boy with expressive eyes, the young Mr. Staiola.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