Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    “Barbie” and “Poor Things” Show Two Versions of Female Liberation

    The Oscar best picture hopefuls “Barbie” and “Poor Things” look nothing alike, but their central characters go on similar journeys.One takes place in a bright, plastic world where everything is coated in pink. The other takes place in an isolated black-and-white world that transforms, “Wizard of Oz” style, into a flashy, steampunk domain.Though they’re very different stylistically, the Oscar-nominated films “Barbie” and “Poor Things” are both modern feminist fables about the making of a woman. Both reframe the common stops on the coming-of-age story: The protagonists begin in a state of childlike innocence, then, each in her own way, pass through motherhood, ending in a place where they are both and neither mother and daughter, creating their autonomy from the place between these two states of womanhood.“Poor Things,” from the director Yorgos Lanthimos, takes its concept from Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” in which a genius scientist jigsaws together and gives life to a monster who wreaks havoc while on an existential quest for knowledge. Here the Dr. Frankenstein is Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), and his monstrous creation is Bella (Emma Stone), a woman he has resurrected.At first Bella babbles and stumbles around like a precocious toddler, learning to speak and move by imitating the adults around her. She then goes through a kind of adolescence beginning the moment she discovers sexual pleasure. Her sexual curiosity spurs larger curiosities about the world.Through sex she discovers what she wants, and claims her agency to pursue it. She travels the world with a spineless cad, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), enjoying the rampant sex they have along the way. She’s fiercely independent the whole time, even though she has traveled far from the bleak, isolated black-and-white world of the Baxter home, where she was hidden away and always under supervision, into a colorful, wild world that appears as awe-inspiring and unfamiliar to her as it may to the audience, who find fresh new versions of cities like Lisbon and Paris.It’s when Bella decides to work in a Paris brothel that she experiences the most freedom. She goes to lectures, political meetings and reads voraciously while earning her keep through sex. She’s no longer simply the naïve daughter, seeing the world through Godwin’s warnings and advice. And she’s not the partner for Duncan, forced to tolerate his tantrums and fits in exchange for access to the larger world.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

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Music

    Disgraced but Embraced: Pop Culture Pariahs Are Making Big Comebacks

    Shane Gillis hosted “S.N.L.,” the show that rebuffed him. Ye topped the Billboard chart after making antisemitic remarks. Has the mainstream given up on banishing bad actors?Last weekend, the comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live,” five years after he was fired from the show before ever appearing on it, when old podcast appearances in which he’d used slurs were brought to light. During his opening monologue, Gillis showed how he had evolved since then, which is to say, only slightly. In a tame bit about his parents, he fondly recalled spending time with his mother when he was younger, noting sweetly, “Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend.”For the past two weeks, Ye — formerly Kanye West — has sat at the top of the Billboard albums chart with “Vultures 1,” his collaborative album with the singer Ty Dolla Sign. In late 2022, Ye began a public stream of antisemitic invective that, for a while, effectively imploded his career, leading to the dissolution of his partnerships with Adidas and the Gap. He seemed, for a time, persona non grata. But he, too, has returned to something approaching old form, with a single, “Carnival,” that went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, and a series of arena listening sessions that have been the hallmark of his album rollouts in recent years.Ye debuted his latest album, a collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign, at a series of arena listening events.The New York TimesCancellation was always an incomplete concept, more a way of talking about artists with contentious and offensive personal histories than an actual fact of the marketplace. Except in the most extreme cases, moral failure has never been an automatic disqualifier when it comes to artistic work.What changed in the years since the beginning of the #MeToo movement is the presumption that strong enough discursive pushback might indeed lead to actual banishment. That proved to be true in the wake of #MeToo, in which powerful men like Charlie Rose, Bryan Singer and Matt Lauer were effectively cast out of public life after allegations of sexual misconduct. (And it should be noted: Most of those facing banishment, or the threat thereof, have been men. Roseanne Barr is perhaps the most high-profile woman to meet that fate, following racist and antisemitic public statements.)The sense that bad actors could be weeded out at the root was satisfying liberal fantasy, though. What’s happened instead is the emergence of a class of artists across disciplines — call them the disgraced — who have found ways to thrive despite pockets of public pushback. Their success suggests several possibilities about cultural consumption: Audiences that don’t care about an artist’s indiscretions can be more sizable than the ones that do; those who publicly agitate on these matters might be privately relenting; or that perhaps some audiences may have a tolerance — or maybe even an appetite — for offense.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 Shares179 Views

    in Movies

    Robert M. Young, Filmmaker Who Indulged His Wanderlust, Dies at 99

    The subjects of his documentaries included Indigenous peoples, civil rights sit-ins and the war in Angola. His narrative films included “Extremities” and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.”Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, died on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles. He was 99.The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrew.In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005, Mr. Young recalled what attracted him to filmmaking.“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to be having adventures, I wanted to be living in the world.”He more than fulfilled that ambition.In the 1950s, he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and at a reef near the Bahamas that portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Mr. Young, center, working on the 1956 documentary “Secrets Of The Reef,” which portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Everette CollectionIn 1960, he was hired by NBC News for its new documentary series, “White Paper.” That year he directed “Sit-In,” about the Black college students whose protests led to the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The next year he worked on a report about the Angolan war for independence against Portugal, for which he walked hundreds of miles with Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was unhappy with the report.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

  • 63 Shares109 Views

    in Music

    11 Essential Kim Gordon Songs

    Hear her latest work and enduring classics from Sonic Youth and beyond.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesDear listeners,Recently, I had the honor of interviewing Kim Gordon, the legendary co-founder of the now-defunct alt-rock pioneers Sonic Youth, who has lately become a formidable and fearless solo artist. As I prepared to write this profile, I revisited her great 2015 memoir “Girl in a Band”* and listened repeatedly to a playlist featuring some of my favorite Gordon songs, which I’m going to share with you today.Gordon is at heart a California girl — “too young to be a hippie but brushed by whatever rebellion and amped-up freedom there was in the air,” as she put it in her book. Art school brought her east, and the allure of late-1970s New York eventually introduced her to a downtown scene in which anyone, even non-musicians, could pick up an instrument and start a band. Intoxicated by that D.I.Y. ethos, Sonic Youth formed in 1981 and, improbably, kept putting out great, challenging and singularly influential records for the next 30 years.The band broke up in 2011, shortly after Gordon announced that she and her bandmate Thurston Moore were divorcing after 27 years of marriage. Gordon has been admirably candid about her anger and sadness in the wake of that split, but the woman I encountered in our series of interviews was long past all of that now, deep in a new chapter of life and art.Today’s playlist highlights some of Gordon’s recent work — especially the brash, wild singles from her second solo album, “The Collective,” which comes out March 8 — and contrasts it with some of her enduring classics.I try to keep Amplifier playlists relatively short, but this one proved quite a challenge: Given Sonic Youth’s three-decade run and remarkably dense discography (not to mention Gordon’s work in other bands like the improvisational duo Body/Head) this mix easily could have been 50 or 60 songs long. So consider this not a completist collection of Gordon’s music, but merely a tantalizing and deliciously distorted sampler.Bettin’ on the bullllll in the heather,Lindsay*Though I read “Girl in a Band” when it first came out, this time around I listened to the audiobook — an experience I highly recommend since Gordon reads it herself, in her inimitable deadpan. As her friend Kathleen Hanna marveled when I interviewed her for the profile, “She has that voice when she talks to you, in normal.”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

    St. Vincent Channels Nine Inch Nails, and 11 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Cardi B, Mdou Moctar, T Bone Burnett 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 at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.St. Vincent, ‘Broken Man’“I can hold my arms wide open/but I need you to drive the nail,” St. Vincent — the songwriter and guitarist Annie Clark — sings in “Broken Man.” It’s a volcanic buildup of a song, from the sparsest ticking electronics to a hard-rock stomp to a full-scale pileup of guitars, drums and horns. Clark sings about power, defiance, abject need and imminent breakdown, riding an onslaught of a song that lives up to the title of her album due in April: “All Born Screaming.” JON PARELESMdou Moctar, ‘Funeral for Justice’Over a hurtling beat and a chain of frantic, trilling, overdriven guitar riffs, the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar insists that African leaders should work together and push back against foreign interests, to “Retake control of your resource-rich countries.” The band couldn’t sound more urgent. PARELESPharrell Williams and Miley Cyrus, ‘Doctor (Work It Out)’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

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Review: Jews Flee to China in New York Philharmonic’s ‘Émigré’

    “Émigré,” a bland oratorio about brothers who flee to China to escape Nazi persecution, was given its American premiere by the New York Philharmonic.In Handel’s oratorio “Israel in Egypt,” which the New York Philharmonic performed in October, Jews are living in captivity across the Red Sea from their ancient homeland. In “Émigré,” a new oratorio that was given its American premiere by the Philharmonic on Thursday at David Geffen Hall, they’ve gone a lot farther: to Shanghai, where thousands fled Nazi persecution.Few milieus could be as seductively dramatic as that Chinese city in the 1930s, with its cosmopolitan glamour and wartime danger. But “Émigré” evokes none of this theatrical allure, failing to grab the ear or the heart.With music by Aaron Zigman (known primarily for films like “The Notebook” and “Sex and the City”) and a libretto by Mark Campbell with contributions by Brock Walsh, the piece sketches the historical situation through the story of two German Jewish brothers who settle in Shanghai, which was appealing for its open immigration policies. One of the brothers falls in love with a Chinese woman; her father and the other brother object to the match; amid the violence of the Japanese occupation, tragedy ensues.It’s a promisingly sturdy plot. But the 95-minute score is so blandly cloying, the rhymed-couplets text so stiff and the characters so cardboard, that not a moment ends up surprising or moving.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

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Movies

    How Sean Ono Lennon Helped His Parents Send a Message.

    To keep their legacy relevant for a new generation, he worked on the short “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko.” Now it’s up for an Oscar.Three years ago, Sean Ono Lennon was asked to develop a music video for the 50th anniversary of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” the 1971 protest song by his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, which has become a rare type of perennial — a warmhearted Christmas tune that doubles as an antiwar challenge, telling ordinary citizens that peace can be achieved “if you want it.”But Lennon, 48, was not interested in making a simple video. That “felt unnecessary” for such a well-known track, he said in a recent interview. What intrigued him more was the possibility of expanding the song’s message through a narrative film. After about two years of work, that project became “War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” directed by Dave Mullins, which was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short film.The 11-minute picture is set in a World War I-like battle zone where two soldiers on opposing sides take part in a secret chess game, communicating their moves via a homing pigeon that dodges bombs over a snowy No Man’s Land. In the story’s climax, both armies are ordered into bloody hand-to-hand combat while the opening lines of John and Yoko’s song ring out: “So this is Christmas/And what have you done?”“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said of the project. It’s aimed at “people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted.”ElectroLeagueFor Sean Lennon, who in recent years has gradually taken on the responsibility of managing his parents’ artistic legacies — his mother, 91, has officially retired — the film is part of a continual process to keep that work relevant for younger generations. He is well aware that even a Beatle’s classic can fade away without tending.“It’s not about mining the past,” Lennon said by phone. “You’re competing with generations of people who have not grown up with the same culture and art that most people my age and older take for granted. So, for me, it’s very important that the message of peace and love, which may be a trope, are not forgotten.”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

  • 113 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    How an Argument Resonates in ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

    The director Justine Triet narrates a sequence from her film, which is nominated for best picture. Triet is also nominated for best director.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A couple has an argument that escalates in this scene from “Anatomy of a Fall,” the drama from Justine Triet that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023, then went on to receive five Oscar nominations this year, including best picture.In the film, the couple’s fight begins as audio that is presented in court where Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is on trial for the death of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis).Then, Triet makes the choice to show visuals of the fight, rather than only providing us the sound. We move from the courtroom into this domestic scene in the kitchen. Narrating the sequence, she explained that “sound has the power to give the perfect illusion of the present,” so she wanted to add visuals to give a more complete picture of the fractures between these two people.Triet decided to shoot the scene with two cameras, “not to lose any of their energy,” she said. And she wanted to the scene to take place during daylight, with the sun shining through a window.“Often, very dramatic, intimate scenes are used to being filmed at night, as if intimacy were separate from the rest of life,” she said. “And here, I choose the opposite. And the contrast between light and violence is even stronger for me.”Read the “Anatomy of a Fall” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More