Aurelia Butler

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    AMC Theaters, Looking for Movies, Turns to Blumhouse

    The theater chain and the entertainment company are teaming up for a five-day festival of old horror films in 40 cities, compensating for a lack of new films.For five days starting on March 29, people who buy tickets to certain movies at certain AMC Theaters will see video messages starring … Jason Blum?It’s a long way from Nicole Kidman, whose breathy “We come to this place for magic” branding spot has become legend. But Mr. Blum, a horror film producer, has been working to build his entertainment company, Blumhouse, into more of a consumer-facing brand. The goal is to create an association between its name and everything scary, sort of like Marvel and superheroes. That, in turn, could make Blumhouse more valuable as an acquisition target in the years ahead.AMC and Blumhouse, which has made more than 200 horror movies and shows, are teaming up for what they are calling the Halfway to Halloween Film Festival. (It’s more like 40 percent of the way.) Previously released Blumhouse horror movies, including “Split,” “Ouija: Origin of Evil,” “The Purge,” “The Invisible Man” and “Insidious,” which will have its 13th anniversary on April 1, will be on offer in 100 AMC theaters in 40 cities.Mr. Blum, 55, will introduce each film with a tailored message, offering an anecdote about the production or a tidbit of trivia. James Wan, who directed “Insidious,” will appear in a video, as will Mike Flanagan, who directed “Ouija: Origin of Evil.” Ticket buyers will also see elaborate ads known as sizzle reels for Blumhouse, which will promote the event through its social media channels.“Horror has always attracted misfits, me included, and participating in events like this allows me to celebrate that,” Mr. Blum said, before referring to one of the company’s signature films. “I like taking risks on stories that other people find too risky — like ‘Get Out’ — and having a brand allows me to do that.”Anya Taylor-Joy in “Split,” which took in $278 million in 2017.Universal/BlumhouseWe 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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    Becky G’s Rowdy Obsession and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Willow, Tierra Whack, Willie Nelson and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Becky G, ‘Boomerang’Becky G knows better than to keep returning, like a boomerang, to a liar who doesn’t love her — but she can’t resist. And the ingenious, rhythm-forward production of “Boomerang” makes her obsession sound like a village-wide celebration, with the plink of a thumb piano, flamenco-like handclaps, a thudding reggaeton bass line and a rowdy backup chorus that cheerfully supports her misplaced affections.Zsela, ‘Fire Excape’In “Fire Excape,” Zsela croons what turns out to be a love song — but only eventually, after she notes, “There’s a fire in the ocean when the oil starts spilling.” The song takes shape over a lurching, stop-stop beat, with some gaping silences, odd harmonic turns and sudden electronic surges, but amid the asymmetries Zsela proffers some husky reassurance: “We’ll get along quite fine, thank you.”Willow, ‘Symptom of Life’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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    Thomas Adès Takes a Step Toward the Classical Music Canon

    As Adès premieres an orchestral work, “The Exterminating Angel” is receiving something rare in contemporary opera: a new production.Pity living composers, toiling away in a field that has long favored dead ones. If they get a precious commission, the cycle tends to go something like this: The work premieres, and then travels to any other ensemble or company that helped to pay for it. After that, who knows. The fate of contemporary music typically comes down to marketability — hits still exist! — and to that strange, slippery thing called legacy.One recent work that is worthy of the canon yet seemed doomed to obscurity is Thomas Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” It had a prestigious start, premiering at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, then playing at the Metropolitan Opera the next year. But it was immense: written on a grand scale, with more than a dozen principal roles, a chorus and an orchestra equipped with idiosyncratic sounds like that of the spooky, electronic ondes Martenot.In his book, “The Impossible Art,” the composer Matthew Aucoin recalled hearing an opera administrator say that putting on “The Exterminating Angel” was “like watching money burn.” Regardless of its merits, there didn’t seem to be much hope for this work’s future.How extraordinary, then, that “The Exterminating Angel” has not only been revived, but has also received something even rarer in opera: a new production, by Calixto Bieito, at the Paris Opera. (It continues through March 23 and is streaming on the company’s platform until Saturday.) And, revised by Adès, with the composer in the pit, it sounds better than ever.“The Exterminating Angel,” with a libretto by Adès and Tom Cairns adapted from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film, is one of the finest operas of the century so far, alongside works by George Benjamin and Kaija Saariaho. It represents opera at its most fundamental, an elevated expression of humanity on the edge. There is sex, violence and desperation. While the meaning can’t easily be explained, crucially for opera, the plot can be described in a single sentence: People enter a room, then lose the will to leave it.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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    Down the Rabbit Hole in Search of a Few Frames of Irish American History

    The silent film “The Callahans and the Murphys” was pulled after an uproar over stereotyping. What happened next tantalized one fan of old movies.One moment I am sprawled on a couch in my New Jersey home, lost in another classic old movie. The next, I am falling through the floorboards and tumbling like Alice into the wondrous unknown, only to land in a bunkerlike government structure built into the side of a Virginia mountain.Yes, I had gone down a rabbit hole, down into the black-hole past. As I plummeted, I learned about “lost” movies, an unlikely box office star, a secure facility where national memories are stored — and a silent film whose comic Irish stereotypes once caused uproars in theaters.Follow me down, why don’t you?My descent began as I watched “Dinner at Eight,” a 1933 classic featuring several early MGM luminaries, including Marie Dressler, a stout actor in her early 60s whose impeccable timing and weary resilience had made her the biggest star in Hollywood. Depression-era audiences adored her, sensing that she, too, knew hard times. And she did.Wanting to know more about Dressler, I opened my laptop and down the hole I went. I learned that Dressler’s success had come after decades of triumph and travail. By 1927 she was nearly broke and considering a housekeeping job when a dear friend, the celebrated screenwriter Frances Marion, offered Dressler a lead role in her next picture: “The Callahans and the Murphys,” a silent comedy so controversial, I read, that it was yanked from circulation and is now considered lost.Wait. What?I am a first-generation Irish American who is fairly steeped in the reflections of me and mine in popular culture — from the simian Irish caricatures of Thomas Nast to Christopher’s nightmare in “The Sopranos” that hell is an Irish bar called the Emerald Piper. But my ignorance of “The Callahans and the Murphys” sent me deeper into the well of curiosity.The plot, I learned from news accounts and MGM records, centered on two tenement Irish families in a place called Goat Alley, where, a title card explained, “a courteous gentleman always takes off his hat before striking a lady.” Mrs. Callahan (Dressler) and Mrs. Murphy (Polly Moran) are quarreling friends with large, commingling broods; the Callahans’ daughter is dating Murphy’s bootlegger son. There are fleas and chamber pots and thumbed noses and a St. Patrick’s Day picnic that — hold on to your shillelagh! — devolves into a drunken brawl.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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    Once You Watch an Ernie Gehr Film, You’ll Never See the World the Same Way

    A MoMA series shows how the artist pushes the boundaries of cinema in short movies that both delight and baffle.Movies have been around for well over a century, and for roughly half that time, the American filmmaker Ernie Gehr has — playfully, thoughtfully, beautifully — shown us just how far out, exciting and liberating they can be.Gehr makes moving images that open your mind and pleasurably rearrange your thoughts. His movies tend to be short, have sound and, these days, were shot in digital. By conventional standards not a lot happens; they don’t tell stories per se, even if they say a great deal. What interests Gehr is light, energy, shape, color, rhythm, time, space and the medium’s plasticity. He chops the image up, twirls it around, makes it sing. You could call his work abstract, experimental or avant-garde, but a more fitting description is that it’s just, well, cinematic.A contested, oft-abused word, cinematic can be fuzzy shorthand to describe images that look and move the way we think movies look and move (or should). Gehr challenges such thinking, which is exemplified by one of his most significant early works, “Serene Velocity” (1970), a silent color film that doesn’t have a single soul or any camera moves in it. Instead, partly by changing the focal lengths on a zoom lens, Gehr created an illusion of movement in which a precisely centered shot of a college basement hall becomes a trippy, propulsive, at times eyeball-popping inquiry into film form. He’s still challenging conventions just as trippily.On Friday, the one-week series “Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Francisco Valente, this dynamic sampler includes both newer work and restored rarities that have been arranged into six programs. Gehr, who is 82 and lives in New York, is scheduled to appear at each show. MoMA is a fitting place to check out his movies, which in their formal rigor, aesthetic concerns and sheer visual pow make them ideal counterparts to the abstract and nonfigurative work hanging on the museum’s walls.Gehr started making films in the 1960s after serving in the Army and landing in New York, where he chanced upon the work by the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, a titan of the art. Although Gehr ended up going in a different artistic direction, he was excited both by Brakhage’s work and by the very idea that he, too, might make movies. In an era in which most of us have a video camera in our back pocket, it is impossible to overstate just how mind-blowing it once was for many aspiring filmmakers to realize that they didn’t need to be in Hollywood or have stars, crews and astronomical budgets.Instead, if a would-be filmmaker like Gehr was lucky enough to be in New York in the 1960s — then an epicenter of off-Hollywood cine-adventurousness — he could even borrow a camera. That’s exactly what Gehr did after he visited the Millennium Film Workshop, which was then run by the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and lent equipment for free. Gehr soon had a camera in hand that used 8-millimeter film (a precursor to Super-8), a cheaper alternative to 16-millimeter. Lightweight and easy to use, these cameras made making movies on your own entirely doable.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 Surprise Ending of ‘Dune,’ the Popcorn Bucket

    What’s in the $24.99 tub, exactly? Lindsay Moyer, a nutritionist, reviews the contents of the movie-snack “vessel.”In the “Dune” movies, a gigantic sandworm can rise from the desert and devour soldiers and military vehicles in its gaping maw. In real life, humans watching movies devour popcorn. These two ideas have been combined to spawn the “Dune” popcorn bucket, a sandworm-shaped tub that is having a cultural moment. The bucket arrives on the heels of other recent popcorn collectibles, like the 16-inch Barbie Corvette snack holder. But is there more to these vessels than meets the eye?Lindsay Moyer thinks about popcorn. She is the senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group focused on food systems and healthy eating. She sat down with The New York Times to discuss what she sees when she considers “Dune: The Popcorn Bucket.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Have you seen the “Dune” popcorn bucket?I’ve seen photos. I haven’t seen it in real life.First impressions?It looks pretty wild. It looks like it would actually slow you down in terms of eating. It doesn’t seem ideally designed to serve yourself popcorn out of.Because it is shaped like a worm’s mouth?Yeah, because of all the stuff sticking out of it.Do you like popcorn?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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    Gene Wilder and Frida Kahlo in Their Own Words in 2 New Films

    These documentaries draw us in by giving the sense that we’re getting the story straight from the artists. But we’re not always getting the full picture.Famous artists are a favorite subject for documentaries right now — probably because people love to watch them. And there are a lot of different ways to tell the story of someone’s life; the more famous they were, the more tools at the filmmaker’s fingertips.Take, for instance, the new documentary “Remembering Gene Wilder,” a uniformly affectionate look at the life and work of the comic actor who died in 2016. (The film opens in theaters in New York on Friday, followed by a national expansion.) Though he did perform onstage, Wilder’s most memorable work was in films like “The Producers,” “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles.”Clips from those films and many others are combined with reflections from many of Wilder’s friends and colleagues, including his frequent collaborator Mel Brooks, Alan Alda, Carol Kane, Richard Pryor’s daughter Rain Pryor and Wilder’s widow, Karen Boyer. Pictures from Wilder’s youth and home video round out a portrait of a man whom everyone describes as gentle, innocent, kind, more or less saintly — and, of course, absolutely hilarious.There’s a danger to this kind of movie, in that viewers get the sense that they’re getting the whole story even though selection bias is inevitably at work. (“Remembering Gene Wilder” mentions only two of Wilder’s four wives, for instance, and judging from the 2018 documentary “Love, Gilda” — about his third wife, the comedian Gilda Radner — there’s a great deal of story left untold.) But the filmmakers made the smart choice to weave narration from the audiobook of Wilder’s memoir into the narrative, drawing the audience closer by giving the sense that we’re hearing the story straight from him.That’s also the technique at work in Carla Gutiérrez’s new documentary, “Frida” (on Prime Video), about the painter Frida Kahlo (1907-54). Her story has been told before, of course. But Kahlo kept copious, frank diaries about her life, her thoughts and her desires in diaries, and her artwork is highly personal. The actress Fernanda Echevarría reads from Kahlo’s journals and letters (in Spanish and English, depending on the language in which they were written), with occasional input from others close to Kahlo.The effect is immediate and personal, as if Kahlo is sitting right there with you, being funny and passionate and scathing and vulnerable. Gutiérrez uses archival footage of Kahlo, as well as paintings that are often animated, as if you’re seeing them come to life the way Kahlo might have in her mind’s eye. The result feels more raw and unfiltered than the one in “Remembering Gene Wilder,” more private and revelatory. But Kahlo always presented herself as a woman painting outside the lines, so it’s only appropriate that a movie about her would, too. More

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    Justin Timberlake Looks Back but Doesn’t Reckon on ‘Everything I Thought It Was’

    On “Everything I Thought It Was,” his sixth solo album, this artist feigns new vulnerability but relies on old tricks and his ’N Sync bandmates.Shortly before writing the song that would become his first single in six years, Justin Timberlake worked with his musical director Adam Blackstone on an arrangement of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” in the style of Donny Hathaway’s famous cover.As they rehearsed the version that Timberlake would sing at a small jazz club where Blackstone had a residency, they discussed the song and, as Timberlake recounted in a recent interview with Zane Lowe, “the idea that you just don’t hear that from men often — that they would express an emotion that makes them vulnerable.” Inspired by Lennon and Hathaway’s soul-baring, the lyrics to “Selfish,” the lead single from Timberlake’s new album, “Everything I Thought It Was,” began to pour out.A truly vulnerable Justin Timberlake — one stripped of the Teflon charm that has coated his music and career thus far — is a tantalizing concept, especially at this moment. In the years since his minor 2018 misstep “Man of the Woods,” Timberlake’s image has tarnished somewhat. Audiences are reconsidering mid-2000s pop cultural events like the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction seen ’round the world at the Super Bowl halftime in 2004, and the media’s cruel treatment of Britney Spears, Timberlake’s ex-girlfriend.In February 2021, amid the re-evaluation of Spears’s career and nearing the end of her court-ordered conservatorship, Timberlake posted a long, since-deleted statement on Instagram, apologizing specifically to Jackson and Spears. He added, “I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn or did not speak up for what is right.”Is “Selfish” a musical reckoning with all of this? Well, not exactly. The song does bear some sonic hallmarks of introspection: It’s muted, minor-keyed and sung in a slightly deflated tone. But, lyrically, Timberlake seems to have confused vulnerability with humblebragging. “It’s bad for my mental,” he sings in his nimble croon. “But I can’t fight it when you’re out lookin’ like you do, but you can’t hide it.” This is not exactly a soundtrack for dismantling masculine bravado: The song’s most intimate confession is that Timberlake gets jealous when other men look at his girl — and that they are always looking at his girl, because damn, she is hot.Still, the song debuted at the respectable, if not spectacular, position of No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, and, after he performed it on the Jan. 27 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” it was warmly received by one unexpected well-wisher. “I am in love with Justin Timberlake’s new song ‘Selfish,’” Spears wrote on Instagram the next day, in a post where she also apologized “for some of the things I wrote about in my book.”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