Aurelia Butler

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    Bruce Springsteen Releases EP Including Remarks That Angered Trump

    After Bruce Springsteen criticized the Trump administration on tour, the president said he should “KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT.” Instead, Mr. Springsteen included his comments on a new release.After Bruce Springsteen opened a tour of England last week with a denunciation of President Trump, the president taunted Mr. Springsteen on social media and wrote that he “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT” until he returns to the United States.Mr. Springsteen, undeterred, released a six-track EP this week which begins with his remarks that America “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”The new EP, “Land of Hope & Dreams,” offers a mix of songs and Mr. Springsteen’s pointed political remarks from his May 14 concert in Manchester, England.In the introduction to the song “My City of Ruins,” Mr. Springsteen takes on a somber tone, telling the audience that in the United States the authorities were “persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent.” He said that the nation was cutting aid to the poor, abandoning allies, rolling back civil rights protections, defunding universities and deporting people without due process.“A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” Mr. Springsteen said. “They have no concern or idea for what it means to be deeply American.”Mr. Springsteen’s remarks were perhaps not surprising, given that he endorsed Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign and has supported a long list of Democratic candidates over the years. But they were notable since a number of other major stars have seemed to mute their criticisms of the president.After Mr. Springsteen’s comments were reported last week, Mr. Trump responded with a social media post calling him a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!).” After saying Mr. Springsteen should stay silent until he returns to the United States, the president added: “Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”Mr. Trump has continued to criticize Mr. Springsteen since then, including on Monday, when he called for a “major investigation” into Mr. Springsteen and other celebrities including Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey and Bono. More

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    How Do You Follow One of the Craziest Cannes Movies Ever?

    Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d’Or for “Titane,” returns with the body-horror tale “Alpha.” The critical reception has not been kind.Many filmmakers dream of earning a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, but success here comes with a steep downside: It sets sky-high expectations for your follow-up and the European critics can be merciless if that next film falls short.After “The Artist” premiered at Cannes in 2011 and went on to win the best picture Oscar, the director Michel Hazanavicius returned three years later to the festival with “The Search,” which was so roundly booed that it never found a major U.S. distributor. The director Olivier Assayas followed his French hit “Clouds of Sils Maria” (2014) with “Personal Shopper” (2016), a film I actually preferred but French critics hissed at during the end credits.And after Nicolas Winding Refn won the best director award at Cannes for the Ryan Gosling film “Drive” (2011), his next two movies were booed here. I’ll never forget that when Refn’s “The Neon Demon” concluded with a dedication to the director’s wife, Liv, a critic stood up next to me and shouted expletives at poor Liv in a thick French accent.The latest filmmaker to face this gilded dilemma is Julia Ducournau, the French director who won the Palme d’Or four years ago for “Titane.” Rarely has that top prize gone to a movie so gory and wild: It followed a lesbian serial killer who has sex with a car, and that was just the first act! Ducournau’s Palme win felt bracingly new, not least because it was only the young director’s second movie. Where would she go from there?In the years since, rumors swirled that Ducournau felt significant pressure to deliver a worthy follow-up. On Monday, she finally unveiled that film, “Alpha,” and Cannes critics pounced. Topping a movie as audacious as “Titane” was always going to be difficult, but the brutal reception suggests that some critics here were eager to cut Ducournau down to size.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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    Morgan Wallen Retreats Into Sadness, While His Protégés Party On

    The country superstar’s “I’m the Problem” is a despondent self-portrait. But a generation of singers blending Southern rap and Nashville songwriting are thriving.It seems like the more melancholy Morgan Wallen becomes, the more successful he gets. In just a few short but smash-filled years, he has become the most prominent and committed miserablist in pop — the contemporary star most preoccupied with failure, and the most adept at turning it into something like beauty.Unlike Drake, who is perhaps his closest analogue, Wallen almost never dwells on his successes. He forever lives in the space just beyond loving himself, and allowing himself to be loved. As a result, even his best and most engaging songs have a somber pallor hovering just over them.On “I’m the Problem,” his moody and melodramatic fourth album, Wallen is almost unrelentingly despondent. Women are ruining him, and whiskey is rescuing him (by ruining him even further). Some representative moods: “I just wanna love somebody that don’t want me falling apart”; “Every square inch of this house is as messy as you left me”; “Too young to feel this old.”It’s tragic, concerning and pointedly effective stuff: “I’m the Problem” is already on track to become one of the most commercially successful releases of the year. At 37 songs and almost two hours long, it’s a structural beast, a chart-clogging data dump. But rather than use that grand scale to explore different sonic approaches, Wallen largely digs in to several microtones of weariness.“Kick Myself” laments the one thing an addict can’t ever escape: himself. “Just in Case” tells a story of never letting anyone get too close. “Jack and Jill,” a morbid song about a broken couple, recalls “Whiskey Lullaby,” the unbearably tragic Brad Paisley-Alison Krauss duet from 2004.After Morgan Wallen, Lil Nas X and Shaboozey, Nashville is going hip-hop yet again. “Oil Money” by Graham Barham is the latest example of a long lineage, our critic explains from the driver’s seat.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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    Chris Brown Released on $6 Million Bail by London Court

    The R&B singer was charged last week with grievous bodily harm over a 2023 incident in England. His release from custody means he can proceed with a world tour.Chris Brown, the R&B singer, has been freed from custody by a London judge as he awaits a court case over accusations of an assault in a nightclub.Mr. Brown, 36, was arrested last week at a hotel in Manchester, England, and charged with grievous bodily harm.The singer is accused of attacking a music producer with a tequila bottle at Tape London, a nightclub in the Mayfair district, on Feb. 19, 2023.Lawyers representing Mr. Brown applied for him to be bailed at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court in South London on Wednesday, and London’s Metropolitan Police said the application had been granted.The judge’s decision means that Mr. Brown will be able to perform on an international tour that is scheduled to begin in Amsterdam on June 8. He is then set to visit European countries including Germany, Britain, Ireland, France and Portugal before traveling to the United States.The BBC reported that the judge, Tony Baumgartner, imposed a series of conditions on Mr. Brown, including that he must surrender his passport when not on tour and stay away from Tape London.Mr. Brown’s representatives agreed to pay into the court a security fee of five million pounds ($6.7 million), which can be forfeited if any of the conditions are breached.He has not yet been asked to enter a plea in the case, and British law bans the reporting of any details that could prejudice a jury at a future trial.Omololu Akinlolu, 38, an American rapper who performs under the name HoodyBaby, was charged with grievous bodily harm two days after Mr. Brown, in relation to the same incident.Mr. Brown and Mr. Akinlolu are scheduled to appear at a hearing at Southwark Crown Court on June 20. More

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    Kid Cudi Will Soon Take Center Stage at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial

    Casandra Ventura had testified that the mogul threatened to have the entertainer’s car blown up after learning about their relationship.Prosecutors confirmed this week that Kid Cudi, the rapper whose romance with Casandra Ventura is said to have sent Sean Combs into a jealous, threat-filled rage, will be testifying in the music mogul’s sex-trafficking and racketeering trial.Kid Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, could take the witness stand as soon as Wednesday, but the precise timing of his testimony is uncertain.Ms. Ventura, who is known as the singer Cassie, testified last week that after Mr. Combs discovered her relationship with Mr. Mescudi in 2011, Mr. Combs made a series of threats to her, including that Mr. Mescudi’s car would be “blown up” in his driveway.In 2023, after Ms. Ventura filed the lawsuit that kicked of Mr. Combs’s legal troubles, Mr. Mescudi confirmed that his car had exploded. But he has yet to speak publicly about the details of his role in the case.As part of the racketeering conspiracy charge against Mr. Combs, the government has accused him of running a criminal enterprise that helped him commit a series of crimes dating back to 2004. Among the list of allegations is that Mr. Combs’s associates set fire to a rival’s car with a Molotov cocktail.A lawyer for Mr. Combs, Teny Geragos, said in the defense’s opening statement that Mr. Combs was “simply not involved” in the allegations of arson put forward by prosecutors.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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    ‘Lilo & Stitch’: How a Fuzzy Blue Alien Became a Disney Cash Cow

    Step aside, Moana, Elsa and Simba. In recent years, Stitch has quietly become one of Disney’s most popular — and most merchandised — characters.Eight-year-old Elle Bauerlein of Wake Forest, N.C., is obsessed with Stitch. “Honestly, I think about him all the time. Like, 10 hours every day.”Her American Girl doll, currently clad in a Stitch onesie complete with alien-eared hood, is technically named Stacy, but Elle prefers to call her “S” in tribute to Stitch. If she had to pick a favorite Disney princess it would be Moana, but only because Moana spends time on beachy activities similar to Stitch. Her pillowcase is Stitch. Her backpack is Stitch. Her Crocs are Stitch.The third grader was born more than a decade after the 2002 Disney animated film “Lilo & Stitch” was released in theaters, and yet, for the past two years, the rambunctious title character has been a fixture in her life.She’s not alone.In an act of belated cultural permeation, Stitch — the destructive but adorable alien experiment who crash-landed in Hawaii and befriended a young girl named Lilo — has become a crucial character in the Walt Disney Company’s modern empire, mainly in the form of a dizzying array of licensed merchandise.At PetSmart, you can find a Stitch squeaker toy for your dog. The discount chain Five Below has Stitch neck pillows, portable power banks and slime. Stitch clothing and accessories line the shelves at Primark. Yoplait offers berry- and cherry-flavored Stitch yogurt. Even Graceland has a tie-in collection of Stitch pompadoured plushies dressed in various Elvis Presley ensembles. If you’re overwhelmed, don’t worry: There’s also a cottage industry of TikTokers who devote their entire accounts to showcasing the latest Stitch-centric items to their legions of followers.While Disney does not release official sales data, the company’s annual financial reports for 2023 and 2024 included “Lilo & Stitch” on a short list of nine examples of its “major” licensed properties, putting it on par with classic titans like Winnie the Pooh and Mickey and Friends, and conglomerates like Star Wars and the collective Disney princesses.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 Figured Out How to Adapt Video Games. I Wish It Hadn’t.

    Polished adaptations like “The Last of Us” and “Minecraft” lack the awkward charm of the genre’s early years.How do you turn a video game about zombies into a television show? If you’re making “The Last of Us,” HBO’s Emmy-winning post-apocalypse drama, you take a sober approach, treating the zombie-killing action as an opportunity to articulate profound things about the human condition. You remind viewers that what matters is not the spectacle of the end of the world, but the resilience of the survivors as they cling to their tattered humanity. And so, like the PlayStation game on which it is based, “The Last of Us” becomes a grim show with big themes: the power of hope, the futility of vengeance, the terrible things we’ll do to survive.But if you were making “House of the Dead,” based on the 1990s arcade game, you went in guns blazing. This 2003 film, from the notoriously disreputable German director Uwe Boll, contained practically no coherent ideas, and its primary motivation seemed to be to cram as many bare breasts, exploding corpses and nu-metal songs into one movie as the Motion Picture Association of America would allow. The game it was based on was not exactly a paragon of artistic merit to begin with. But even by the crude standards of the source material, Boll’s film, with its constant slo-mo and goofy “Matrix”-style camera movements, felt especially tasteless.Everything I know about movies and television tells me that “The Last of Us” is the superior adaptation — subtle instead of broad, mature instead of childish, concerned with real feelings instead of lizard-brain titillation. And yet every time I watch it, some recess of my soul yearns for the lurid, tooled-up lunacy of stuff like “House of the Dead.” “The Last of Us” is a duly touching story of trauma and grief, but it feels as if everything lately is a duly touching story of trauma and grief. When was the last time you put on a movie and saw slow-motion shots of a woman in a Star-Spangled Banner leotard dodging a sledgehammer-wielding zombie?It’s not the trashiness itself that I’m nostalgic for. What made “House of the Dead” charming was its idiosyncrasies, and idiosyncrasy is precisely what the current generation of video-game adaptations has managed to iron out. Hollywood has learned how to produce successful, respectable game adaptations by slotting them into proven formulas, like comic-book blockbusters and prestige TV. You know what to expect: either a serious-minded, no-nonsense drama, as with “The Last of Us” or “The Witcher,” or an irreverent, wisecracking comedy full of inside jokes and fan service, as with “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Sonic the Hedgehog” or “A Minecraft Movie.” Adaptation is a solved problem.The earlier Mario was played by Bob Hoskins; the new one is voiced by Chris Pratt.But before Hollywood solved it, the industry simply let artists — and, yes, sometimes hacks — attack the problem with creative abandon. The results were as delightfully singular as they were critically reviled. You could walk into Andrzej Bartowiak’s “Doom” movie with no idea that you were about to encounter a five-minute point-of-view action sequence shot in one unbroken take. You could also read a one-star review of it by Roger Ebert, who hated it so much that he ended up provoking a debate over whether video games could ever be art. These movies had a lowly reputation, but I look back on them with gratitude and affection. For all their faults, they were alive with creative possibility — with the freedom to be bad on fresh terms.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 if Making Cartoons Becomes 90% Cheaper?

    “Fear not! For I shall lead ye to riches beyond your wildest dreams!”Inside a tiny recording booth in downtown Los Angeles, John Peck waited for a verdict from the voice-over engineer: Did the line sound pirate-y enough?Try again, the engineer suggested, perhaps with more throaty emphasis on “wildest.” It might make the animated character Mr. Peck was voicing — a buccaneer with a peg leg — a tiny bit funnier.Mr. Peck, 33, cleared his throat and gave it a whirl, prompting chuckles from the production team. A couple of clicks on a laptop later, and an artificial intelligence tool synced Mr. Peck’s voice with a cartoon pirate’s mouth movements. The character was destined for an episode of “StEvEn & Parker,” a YouTube series about rapscallion brothers that attracts 30 million unique viewers weekly.Just a few years ago, lip-syncing a minute of animation could take up to four hours. An animator would listen to an audio track and laboriously adjust character mouths frame by frame. But Mr. Peck’s one-minute scene took 15 minutes for the A.I. tool to sync, including time spent by an artist to refine a few spots by hand.Toonstar, the start-up behind “StEvEn & Parker,” uses A.I. throughout the production process — from honing story lines to generating imagery to dubbing dialogue for overseas audiences. “By leaning into the technology, we can make full episodes 80 percent faster and 90 percent cheaper than industry norms,” said John Attanasio, a Toonstar founder.“This is how you build the next generation of hot intellectual property,” Mr. Attanasio added excitedly.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