Aurelia Butler

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    Selena’s Killer Is Denied Parole 30 Years After Murder

    The Tejano music icon was fatally shot by the founder of her fan club, who has been serving a life sentence in Texas. On Thursday, a panel denied her first attempt at parole.A panel in Texas on Thursday denied parole for the woman who killed Selena, a 23-year-old trailblazing Mexican American singer who was making it big in the popular music scene. The decision came a few days shy of the 30th anniversary of the killing, which shocked her fans and spurred a cultlike following.Yolanda Saldívar, the woman who fatally shot her, was the founder of Selena’s fan club; she killed Selena after a confrontation in a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, on March 31, 1995. A jury convicted Ms. Saldívar of first-degree murder, and she was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.Ms. Saldívar’s case had gone into the review process approximately six months before she was to first become eligible for parole this Sunday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole said in a statement. She won’t be eligible for parole for five more years.“After a thorough consideration of all available information, which included any confidential interviews conducted, it was the parole panel’s determination to deny parole to Yolanda Saldivar and set her next parole review for March 2030,” the statement said.The panel cited the violent nature of the killing as the reason for its denial.“The record indicates that the instant offense has elements of brutality, violence, assaultive behavior or conscious selection of victim’s vulnerability indicating a conscious disregard for the lives, safety, or property of others, such that the offender poses a continuing threat to public safety,” the statement said.When she was killed, Selena had just come off a Grammy Award win. She was on the verge of making a breakthrough that could have brought her songs about heartbreak and new love to wider Spanish- and English-speaking audiences.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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    in Movies

    ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli Style Animations Are Almost Too Good

    An update to ChatGPT made it easy to simulate Hayao Miyazaki’s style of animation, which has flooded social media with memes.Animated movies, like those from the famed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, are not made in a hurry. The intricate hand drawings and attention paid to every single detail can make for a slow, potentially yearslong process.Or, you could simply ask ChatGPT to turn any old photo into a facsimile of Mr. Miyazaki’s work in just a few seconds.Many people did precisely that this week after OpenAI released an update to ChatGPT on Tuesday that improved its image-generation technology. Now, a user who asks the platform to render an image in the style of Studio Ghibli could be shown a picture that would not look out of place in the films “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Spirited Away.”On social media, users quickly began posting Ghibli-style images. They ranged from selfies and family photos to memes. Some used ChatGPT’s new feature to create renderings of violent or dark images, like the World Trade Center towers falling on Sept. 11 and the murder of George Floyd.Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, changed his profile picture on X to a Ghiblified image of himself and posted a joke about the filter’s sudden popularity and how it had overtaken his previous, seemingly more important work.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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    Sundance Picks Boulder, Colo., as Its New Home

    The Sundance Film Festival is venturing to a new ski town.After a year of deliberations, copious site visits and scores of plane rides, the board of the Sundance Institute has chosen Boulder, Colo., to host its film festival beginning January 2027.“Boulder is a tech town, a college town, it’s a really creative town,” Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, said. “It’s just a really creative place. And that integration of the artsy community with the university side of it all is really dynamic.”It’s also 10 times the size of Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held since the actor and director Robert Redford started it in 1981. As the festival kept growing, Park City began bursting at the seams.Ebs Burnough, chair of the Sundance Institute, said the move to another mountain town would help Sundance maintain its connection to the natural world. “It’s easy to get drawn into that amazing thing that Robert Redford really believed in, which was that commune between the artist and nature, and to actually be able to get away from the verticalness of cities.”The Macky Auditorium Concert Hall in Boulder will host Sundance Film Festival screenings.via Sundance Film FestivalTo frequent Sundance goers, the move to Boulder is likely to be less jarring than shifting the location to Cincinnati, one of two other finalist cities. Salt Lake City was also in the running, and the loss of the festival will be significant to the state of Utah. The festival generated $132 million in revenue for the state in 2024, according to a report released by the festival.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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    Hollywood Has Not Recovered Jobs Lost During Strikes, Report Says

    Many entertainment industry workers have been jobless for months, leading state officials to consider increasing subsidies to keep film and television production in California.Hollywood has yet to recover the jobs in film and television production that were lost when strikes by writers and actors brought production to a halt in 2023 as the industry was shifting, according to a report released Thursday.The report by the Otis College of Art and Design found that jobs in the entertainment sector in 2024 remained 25 percent below their 2022 peak, when the industry was working to make up for time lost during the pandemic shutdown.One measure of production, the number of shooting days in Los Angeles County, decreased by 42 percent last year compared to 2022, according to the report.“The film, TV, and sound sector appears to be settling into a new normal characterized by lower employment and production levels when compared to its pre-strike peak,” the report said.Michael F. Miller Jr., a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees who oversees film and television production for the union, said that over the two-year period from 2022 to 2024, roughly 18,000 full-time jobs had evaporated. One recent survey of more than over 700 crew members found that almost two in three reported that their income fell short of expectations last year.The new report found that the entertainment sector added almost 15,000 jobs last year, but that the gains were not enough to make up for all the jobs lost during the strikes.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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    Scowl Made Hardcore Purists Angry. Now the Band Is Doubling Down.

    The punk band fronted by Kat Moss wound its way from a local scene to national attention. Its second album, “Are We All Angels,” unpacks the pain of the journey.Last fall, on the second-floor stage of a cramped tavern called Neck of the Woods in San Francisco, Kat Moss was throwing elbows, shoving men twice her size into a packed circle pit and screaming into a microphone.Moss, the frontwoman for the Bay Area hardcore band Scowl, held her own. In the tight-knit circle of Northern California punks, this sweating, pulsing, tattoo-covered cluster of bodies were her people. Just before midnight, the crowd streamed out of the swampy bar into the cold air, bruised and smiling. In this crowd, stage diving, moshing and the occasional foot to the face all come from a place of love.But as Scowl’s star has risen from a group of underdogs playing house shows across the West Coast to a broader national audience, Moss and her four bandmates have been engaged in a different kind of fight — one with the gatekeepers who believe the band isn’t hardcore enough.The band was blasted on message boards and social media in 2023, accused of “selling out” when it struck a brand deal with a corporate sponsor. (Many hardcore contemporaries have done similar ones.) The group later took heat for putting out what some saw as pop sensibility masquerading as punk. Scenesters chafed when megastars like Post Malone and Hayley Williams of Paramore said they were fans of the group. And some of the most aggressive purists didn’t appreciate Moss’s proclivity for posting beauty tutorials on her personal social media channels. (Her mop of neon lime hair is hard to miss in a crowd.)Scowl isn’t shying away from the conflict. Instead, its members want to push the limits of their sound and what they feel hardcore music can be. With Scowl’s second album, “Are We All Angels” out April 4, the group is moving from the stalwart hardcore label Flatspot Records to Dead Oceans — home to Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski. It has enlisted Will Yip, a producer known for broadening the sound of punk bands. And it has leaned more into a slower, heavier sound with grungy riffs and catchier choruses.Scowl’s members want to push the limits of their sound and what they feel hardcore music can be. Mariano Regidor/Redferns, via 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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    in Movies

    ‘A Working Man’ Review: Blue Collar, Bloody Hands

    Jason Statham plays a construction worker who’s as deft at breaking bones as he is at building high-rises.The writer-director David Ayer began his career concocting scripts for action thrillers that put some psychological nuance into their boom-boom pyrotechnics. Yes, Denzel Washington’s chest-beating boasts in “Training Day” (2001) made theaters quake even if they weren’t equipped with Dolby, but there were further dimensions to his character.It seems as if he threw all that sort of thing out of his tool kit around the time of “Suicide Squad” (2016). Ayer’s pictures are purely blunt-force objects now, and effective ones. And all the more persuasive when Jason Statham stars in them.In “A Working Man,” whose script was coauthored by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, Statham plays a construction worker with a violent past from which he’s trying to distance himself. (Fat chance in this kind of movie.) When the daughter of his boss is kidnapped, he’s is compelled to go to labyrinthine and brutal lengths to get her back.This movie follows up on Statham and Ayer’s 2024 “The Beekeeper,” a similar payback punishment picture whose forced premise wasn’t helped by its garishly dressed villains. The villains here are garishly dressed too, but there’s a rationale: They’re Russian. In any event, Statham racks up bad-guy kills like he’s collecting Pokémon.As the kidnapped daughter, Jenny, Arianna Rivas takes fruitful advantage of her character’s efforts to fight back, showing acrobatic action chops. The star’s old “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” mate Jason Flemyng plays a slimy oligarch, and David Harbour is Statham’s wise pal (and armorer); it’s a satisfying cast all the way down. In a peculiar touch, near the end of the movie, its slimiest villain, played by Kenneth Collard, puts on a costume that makes him look like the Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins’s legendary villain, Coffin Joe. I dug it.A Working ManRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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    in Movies

    ‘Julie Keeps Quiet’ Review: Coping at Her Own Speed

    A teenage regional tennis star moves on at her own pace after her ex-coach is dismissed under a cloud of suspicion.“Julie Keeps Quiet” ignores the usual movie playbook on post-trauma drama with its unusually internal portrait of a teenage tennis player, Julie. After her ex-coach is suspended under murky circumstances, she prefers not to share details of his behavior. But her feelings in the aftermath run deep, and this Belgian film’s virtue lies in its fidelity to her path and her pace.Her life is rooted in the routine and repetition of training and school among (supportive) peers, whether serve-and-volleys or German class. She evades questions from administrators and friends about Jeremy (Laurent Caron), her former instructor, even though he still calls her with doom-laden pep talks. You wonder when the story, written by the director, Leonardo van Dijl, and Ruth Becquart (who plays Julie’s mother), will tip her into a spiral.Instead, her low-key confidence as a player — her biggest smile in the film comes with success on the court — slowly manifests in her growing resolve and clarity in addressing the Jeremy situation. She recalibrates with a new coach, Backie (Pierre Gervais), and takes breathers with her dog. (The tennis star Naomi Osaka lends her imprimatur as an executive producer.)Tessa Van den Broeck, a newcomer, plays Julie with zero affectation. She seems plucked from a high school roll call, or maybe from a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose company co-produced this one. Nicolas Karakatsanis’s twilit 35-millimeter cinematography mirrors her character’s preoccupied state, echoed by Caroline Shaw’s cracked-lullaby score. It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.Julie Keeps QuietNot rated. In Dutch and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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    in Movies

    ‘The Penguin Lessons’ Review: A Unique Approach to Teaching

    Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, an English teacher in 1970s Argentina, whose small new friend makes his class a hit.A movie aspiring to be a droll animal-led comedy and an examination of a dictatorship has an intimidating number of needles to thread. The director of “The Penguin Lessons,” Peter Cattaneo, also made “The Full Monty,” so he has some experience with crowd-pleasing films, at the same time being deft with unusual subject matter.The movie begins with a familiar disclaimer that it’s based on true events. The actor Steve Coogan plays Tom Michell, a teacher from southern England who is unhappily assigned to an upper-class boy’s school in 1970s Argentina. (Jeff Pope’s script is based on Michell’s memoir of the same title.)On an idle day at the beach in nearby Uruguay, Tom encounters a penguin emerging from an oil spill. Hoping to impress a woman he’s met there, Tom brings the creature back to his hotel, cleans it off and tries to return it to the ocean. No luck. The penguin believes he’s made a friend.Once Tom returns to Argentina, he contrives to make the penguin he has named Juan Salvador a teaching tool, and his English class becomes wildly successful. (While Juan Salvador is supposedly a creature of the wild, he executes all sorts of cute bits that only a trained performer can pull off.)Things get serious when one of Tom’s housekeepers is swept up in the military dictatorship. Tom opts to abandon his apolitical facade because the penguin has taught him how to care about others. While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much. On the other hand, the misuse of Nick Drake’s “Northern Sky” on the soundtrack is egregious. The rest of the picture is largely winsome and inoffensive.The Penguin LessonsRated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More