Aurelia Butler

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    Twice’s ‘With You-th’ Tops the Billboard Chart

    The act’s six-song EP “With You-th” debuts at No. 1, while Morgan Wallen celebrates a year of “One Thing at a Time” by hitting the No. 2 spot.The nine-woman K-pop group Twice leads the Billboard album chart for the first time this week with its latest mini-LP, thanks to collectible CD and vinyl sales, while Morgan Wallen marks a full year of blockbuster streaming numbers.Twice’s “With You-th,” a six-song EP, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 95,000 sales in the United States. The vast majority of its consumption — 90,000 copies — was through purchases of physical copies, which included 14 collectible variations on CD and three vinyl LP versions, according to the tracking service Luminate.“With You-th” also garnered 6.3 million streams, the lowest streaming total for a No. 1 album in almost five years, since Celine Dion’s “Courage” opened with 3.9 million in 2019 — a period when sales “bundles” helped albums top the charts by including the music with purchases of concert tickets or merchandise. (After an industry uproar, Billboard tweaked its rules to rein in the practice.)Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” rises one spot to No. 2 in its 52nd week on the chart, with the equivalent of 67,000 sales. Since it came out a year ago, Wallen’s album has remained remarkably popular, holding at No. 1 for a total of 18 weeks and never dipping below No. 6 on the all-genre album chart — and even then, only hitting that low point two times.Week after week, “One Thing” has been a streaming champion, logging a total of 8.3 billion streams since it came out. Even after a full year, each of the album’s 36 tracks is clicked an average of more than two million times on streaming services weekly — by comparison, the six songs on the brand-new Twice album had an average of a little over one million streams apiece.Also this week, “Vultures 1,” by Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Ty Dolla Sign falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, while Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is in fifth place. More

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    Composer, Uninterrupted: Christian Wolff at 90

    Wolff, the last representative of the New York School that included John Cage and Morton Feldman, will celebrate his birthday with a concert at Judson Memorial Church.If artistic stature worked by osmosis, Christian Wolff could claim greatness based on that alone. “My father met Brahms,” he said, easing into conversation at a sturdy wooden table in the dining room of his Hanover, N.H., home. That meeting was in 1896, when Brahms was in Bonn, Germany, for Clara Schumann’s funeral. Wolff’s father was 6 or 7.Wolff’s grandfather, a violinist, conductor and professor, knew Brahms personally and professionally, he said. His great-grandfather, also a conductor, was a supporter of Robert Schumann. “And my great-great-grandfather was a champion of Beethoven’s, so there is something back there” he added, laughing at the implications of such a heritage.Wolff, who turns 90 on Friday, is associated with a different pantheon. He is the last living representative of what’s known as the New York School of composition, a group that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor. Their tight-knit circle shifted midcentury American music away from classic European models. And it radiated out, intersecting with other arts and artists who were making New York a leading center of modernism: the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the poet John Ashbery, the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and many others.New York School days: Christian Wolff, the dancer Viola Farber and John Cage at the marathon performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” at the Pocket Theater in the East Village in 1963.Larry Morris/The New York TimesWolff only lived in New York City for just under 20 years. Even so, he retains historical and aesthetic ties to it. Accordingly, he’ll be in town this weekend for a series of events celebrating his birthday at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. On Saturday, a multigenerational group of friends and acolytes will present works spanning his career, including a new piece Wolff composed for the occasion.The location is auspicious. Judson Memorial Church, a hotbed of experimental art and dance in the 1950s and ’60s, is just blocks away from the site of the Washington Square tenement where Wolff’s family settled after fleeing wartime Europe. It was there that his parents, Kurt and Helen Wolff, established Pantheon Books, which published Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Paul Valéry, as well as the first English translation of the “I Ching.”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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    Why Is There No Oscar for Best Choreography?

    Imaginative dance abounds in Hollywood, but its creators remain unheralded at awards time.If you’ve watched this year’s Oscar-nominated films — actually, if you’ve been in a movie theater at all recently — you’ve almost certainly seen the work of a choreographer.Some of the most prominent dances have earned critical praise: Constanza Macras’s delightfully unhinged duet for “Poor Things.” Justin Peck’s ardent dream ballet for “Maestro.” Fatima Robinson’s showstopping love letters to Black social dance for “The Color Purple.” Jennifer White and Lisa Welham’s fizzily heroic numbers for “Barbie.”Other choreographers contributed in quieter, though no less essential, ways. Nobody would call the “Killers of the Flower Moon” fire scene — in which workers stoke a hellish blaze as part of an insurance fraud scheme — a dance number. But the choreographer Michael Arnold shaped the actors’ demonic movements for maximum biblical effect.Collectively, the films above earned 37 Oscar nominations. None of their choreographers will be honored, or likely even mentioned, at the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday.Why isn’t there an Oscar for best choreography? It’s a question people in the dance world have been asking for decades.And there’s no satisfying answer.Imaginative, world-expanding dance helped make Hollywood what it is, defining the movie musicals of its golden age. So many classic movies live and breathe through their dance numbers, marvels of choreographic wit and technical ingenuity. Today’s film choreographers also shape far more than steps, creating scenes that propel plot in ways that dialogue can’t. It makes sense that dance scenes frequently go viral: Good film choreography can capture, succinctly and with striking clarity, the essence of a character, relationship or problem.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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    Kate Winslet on ‘The Regime’ and Resilience In Hollywood

    Kate Winslet was standing in front of a microphone, breathing hard. Sometimes she did it fast; sometimes she slowed it down. Sometimes the breathing sounded anxious; other times, it was clearly the gasping of someone who was winded. Before beginning a new take, Winslet stood stock still, hands opening and closing at her sides; she looked like a gymnast about to bound into a floor routine. Every breath seemed high-stakes, even though she was well into a long day of recording in a dim, windowless studio in London. Listen to this article, read by Kirsten PotterOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Winslet was adding grace notes to scenes of herself in “The Regime,” a dark satire created by Will Tracy, a writer and producer on “Succession,” that began airing on Max in early March. Winslet plays Elena Vernham, a dictator ruling precariously over an imaginary Central European country, and she was in the studio rerecording (as is common practice) lines that needed improving, including snippets of Elena’s propaganda: “Even if the protests happening in Westgate were real, which they are not” and “He’s still out there, working with the global elite to destroy everything we’ve built.” Sometimes Winslet laughed out loud after delivering a line, and sometimes she fell completely silent, absorbed in watching a scene of herself with her new recording looped in. “God, she’s such an awful, awful cow,” she said at one point, sounding appalled but also a little awed. The part of Elena, a despot on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is a departure for Winslet, who has chosen, over the course of her career, a wide range of characters who have in common an intrinsic power. Elena is erratic and grasping, with a facade of strength that covers up a sinkhole of oozing insecurity. Winslet gave a lot of thought to how Elena would sound: She chose a high, tight voice, the sound of someone disconnected from the feelings that reside deep in the body. Elena has the slightest of speech impediments, a strange move she makes with her mouth, a hand that flies to her cheek when she is under real stress — those tells are her answer to King Richard’s hump, the body politic deformed. Onscreen, as Elena, Winslet is coifed and practically corseted into form-fitting skirt suits, with lacquered fake nails. The day she was recording, in early January, Winslet might have been any woman at the office: blond hair, a hint of roots starting to show, jeans of no particular timely style that she occasionally tugged up from the waist, a black V-neck sweater she occasionally pulled down at the hem. It’s only when you look directly at her, face to face, that you see the extraordinary — the dark blue eyes, the beauty marks (not one, but two), the elaborately curved mouth.As Winslet recorded, Stephen Frears, one of the show’s two directors, guided Winslet with considerable understatement from his seat across the room: a half-nod here, a thumbs-up there. “Was that all right, Stephen?” Winslet called over after one take; she peered over in his direction, expectant, obedient, professional. Frears, who directed “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” among others, was silent, with his eyes closed, his head back. Winslet and a few members of the production team waited for his approval. As the moment stretched on, it seemed that Frears was not deep in thought but deep in sleep. Winslet appeared to register a brief moment of surprise, then smiled and moved on — all right, no problem. 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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    Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis in Close-Up at Jazz Concerts

    Terence Blanchard and Anthony Davis, recent pioneers at the Metropolitan Opera, returned to earlier works in a pair of performances over the weekend.In the musical “Jelly’s Last Jam,” which just had an acclaimed revival in the New York City Center Encores! series, Jelly Roll Morton, a pianist and composer who claims he invented jazz, pays for his hubris. But while the show occasionally excoriates him, its fictionalized tale revels in his real-world achievements.On Saturday, during the final weekend of the run, Nicholas Christopher summoned wave after wave of electricity as Morton — not only during the song and dance numbers, but also during scenes in which he managed to create an affecting portrait of a figure who needed to hustle to receive his due credit.Morton’s biography resonated in two other concerts presented in New York on Friday and Saturday. These performances likewise featured the music of composers who have cut significant profiles in jazz, but with a privilege never afforded to Morton: Their works have made it to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the largest performing arts institution in the United States.Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was the first opera by a Black composer to be presented by the Met, where it will be revived in April. At Jazz at Lincoln Center on Friday, he began a two-night retrospective with a program that delved into his early experiences playing with Art Blakey as well as his later work scoring films for Spike Lee.Then, at the NYU Skirball on Saturday, some early, sizzling early chamber music by Anthony Davis — whose opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” arrived at the Met last fall — received a rare airing from the International Contemporary Ensemble in a performance that also featured Davis playing some ferociously elegant solo piano.With their Met premieres, Blanchard and Davis have attained a status for Black jazz artists that would have made Morton, an opera lover, envious. But as these concerts demonstrated, there is much more in each composer’s catalog for audiences to mine.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 ‘Dune’ Popcorn Bucket and the Golden Age of Movie Merch

    The hilariously suggestive misfire is a reminder of the days when too-weird-to-be-true film mementos could be found in every kitchen cupboard.When I first encountered an image of the popcorn bucket that AMC Theaters is selling to promote Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” I stared at it for a beat trying to process what I was looking at. The item is supposed to represent a giant sandworm, the beasts that slither under the desert planet Arrakis. On top of the normal container sits a lid that depicts the cylindrical body of the creature emerging from the ground. The opening where you are ostensibly supposed to reach in to snatch some kernels is fashioned like the worm’s maw with its many tendril-like teeth, here rendered in plastic. The bucket is intricately designed, but appears, well, especially anatomical — to put it politely — and somewhat difficult to use to actually get treats into your mouth.The “Dune” popcorn bucket has become a genuine mini phenomenon. The film’s cast and crew have been asked to comment on it, and Villeneuve even told The Times, charmingly, “When I saw it, I went, ‘Hoooooly smokes.’” There was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that rhymed “bucket” with a phrase that is unprintable here. Yet, the more I followed talk of the bucket, the more I wanted to possess it. (And no, not for the reasons you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter, please.) As a fan of movies and their ephemera, I began to feel as though I needed to have this piece of hilariously suggestive memorabilia in my home.The bucket, both in its sheer strangeness and in the way it has become a cultural moment, reminded me of an earlier era of collectibles — of tie-ins like those McDonald’s “Batman Forever” mugs with badly drawn versions of Jim Carrey’s Riddler that seemed to be a mainstay in 1990s cupboards. But it also is reminiscent of the too-weird-to-be-true marketing misadventures of yore, things that are so unintentionally off-putting that they are also sort of amazing. See the Jar Jar Binks lollipop in which the Gungan alien’s mouth opens to reveal a candy tongue that you are supposed to suck. Ew, to say the least.In some ways the “Dune” bucket is “ingenious,” said Griffin Newman, an actor and merchandise obsessive, because it inspires people to go to movie theaters to buy it. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThere’s even a history of this with “Dune” itself. When David Lynch’s 1984 version of the Frank Herbert epic was released, you could buy a sandworm action figure that, once again, looked unnervingly phallic. (There’s one on eBay if you’re willing to shell out.)Not all of my nostalgia is for the unsavory. The recent frenzy reminded me of the things I used to covet when I was a wee fan starting to fixate on film. My main obsession was Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, so when Burger King released a line of light-up goblets with the visages of characters like Aragorn and Arwen etched on their sides, I knew I needed them. (I had other “LOTR”-themed glassware as well, including mugs that revealed the inscription on the Ring of Power when you filled them with hot liquid. Pretty sure those are still in my parents’ house.)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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    Adam Sandler’s ‘Spaceman’ Has an Identity Crisis, Like Many Space Movies

    With the release of Adam Sandler’s odd, middling and expensive new Netflix film, a look at space movie misfires of the past and how history repeats itself.Not long into “Spaceman,” Adam Sandler’s new somber sci-fi space movie on Netflix, it becomes quite clear that it’s struggling to channel something greater, something better, something already respected.Sandler’s character, a Czech cosmonaut named Jakub, has spent many months alone in a ship investigating a mysterious purple cloud — alone except for an alien arachnid called Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). Hanus speaks to Jakub — about fear, guilt, pain and the origins of the universe — in a soothing yet stilted tone, evoking the voice of HAL 9000, the conflicted A.I. entity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” from 1968.The central themes in “Spaceman,” loneliness and disconnection, are fundamental in many cerebral space movies including “2001,” but perhaps more so in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet space drama, “Solaris,” about a small crew of scientists who come mentally undone. “Spaceman” also has some “Gravity,” some “Interstellar,” some “First Man,” some “Ad Astra,” the New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review.Many middling sci-fi space movies have faced such fates: measured not by what they are but by what they wished they were. Often these films have the potential to be brilliant. “Spaceman” was directed by Johan Renck, who won two Emmys in 2019 for his work on the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl”; Sandler, while a comedian, has soared in complex dramatic roles, notably in “Uncut Gems” and “Punch-Drunk Love”; Jakub’s wife is played by Carey Mulligan, who is up for a best actress Oscar this month for “Maestro.”What is toughest to forgive, though, is that “Spaceman” commits the biggest movie no-no of all: It’s boring. “It is not fun-bad,” Wilkinson writes. “It is maudlin-bad, belabored-bad and also pretty boring-bad.”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 ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘The Zone of Interest,’ We Hear What We Are

    Humans have spent much of history coming up with novel ways to exterminate one another, but the defining feature of modern violence is its technologization. With a chilling practicality, systems and tools designed to enhance productivity can also separate the killers from the killing, stifling pesky human impulses like empathy and conscience. But a bomb has only one purpose. So does a concentration camp.Both “Oppenheimer” and “The Zone of Interest” tangle with the psychology involved in creating highly efficient killing machines. Choosing to center on people who make and deploy lethal tools at roughly the same historical moment — an era of unprecedented technological advancement — the filmmakers faced a challenge. Viscerally depicting the psychic gulf between methods of massacre and their creators is not simple in a medium like film. Cinema tends to enforce closeness between us and the characters; we see the wrinkles in their skin, understand them as humans, feel their emotions and project our own onto them. To portray cognitive dissonance requires something unexpected.The solution, for both of these movies, lay in the second most powerful tool available to filmmakers: sound. Not the music, but the knocks and steps and whizzes and shrieks. Generally we’re used to the sound in a film supporting the images. In both “Zone” and “Oppenheimer,” though, sound plays against image in a way that draws attention to itself, disconcerting the audience. Both films are up for Academy Awards in multiple categories, including best picture, which means their nominations for sound design are easy to overlook. But the way each uses sound is striking. It’s engineered as an unsettling agent, a means to carry moral weight from the screen to the audience on a level that approaches the subconscious.THE DIRECTOR OF “OPPENHEIMER,” Christopher Nolan, has long played around with sound in his films, which are often very loud and propelled by an intense, driving score. (Watching one of his films can feel at times as if you’re immersed in one very, very long montage.) Nolan also prefers not to rerecord actors’ dialogue, leaving them mixed into the sound as they were recorded during the performance, which can make them a little hard to hear. He knows, and he doesn’t mind.“Oppenheimer,” with sound design by the frequent Nolan collaborator Richard King, is no different. Most of the three-hour movie, about the creation of the atomic bomb, is guys in suits, talking about fission and geopolitics and other brainy matters over a pulsating score by Ludwig Goransson. But right around the two-hour mark, something startling occurs.If you’ve seen the film, you know the moment. The scientists of the Manhattan Project and select military officials have gathered in the New Mexico desert for the Trinity test, the first trial detonation of a nuclear bomb. It is the wee hours of July 16, 1945. If the test goes well, two more bombs will be deployed in mere weeks to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese — and, the scientists hope, end the war.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