Aurelia Butler

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    Mara Corday Dead: Actress and Pinup Model Was 95

    She appeared in magazines like Playboy and sci-fi films in the 1950s. Later, in Clint Eastwood’s “Sudden Impact,” she was a hostage until he uttered five famous words.In the 1950s, Mara Corday — a nightclub showgirl and popular pinup model — was a star of three science-fiction thrillers, including “Tarantula” (1955), in which she fled from a 100-foot-tall spider that had escaped from a laboratory.“The whole world is after him,” Ms. Corday told the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper that year about the terrifying arachnid. “He’s a pretty unhappy spider, I can tell you. I’m a lady scientist, and Leo Carroll and John Agar are playing two top roles.”At a time when sci-fi cinema was focused on subjects like alien invasions, space exploration and nuclear paranoia, Ms. Corday was cast in B-movie tales about nasty, gigantic creatures.In 1957, Ms. Corday played a mathematician in “The Giant Claw,” in which a gigantic bird tears down buildings and foments panic.Columbia Pictures, via LMPC/Getty ImagesIn 1957, she played a mathematician in “The Giant Claw,” in which a gigantic bird (first thought to be a U.F.O.) tears down buildings and foments panic. She returned that year to outsize insects, as a rancher in “The Black Scorpion,” about giant scorpions threatening the countryside after rising out of a volcanic eruption in Mexico.Ms. Corday was a rancher in “The Black Scorpion” (1957) about giant scorpions that threaten the countryside in Mexico.Warner Bros, via LMPC/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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    Billy Joel Documentary ‘And So It Goes’ Traces His Early Days

    The first half of the HBO documentary premiered at the Tribeca Festival on Wednesday night. Joel, who is fighting a brain disorder, sent a message via its directors.The Tribeca Festival’s opening-night premiere of the upcoming HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” was marked, in part, by the absence of Billy Joel himself. Late last month, the musician announced that he was canceling all of his upcoming concerts because of a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which has led to problems with his hearing, vision and balance.After Robert De Niro called Joel “the poet laureate of New York” and helped introduce the film with a dramatic reading of some of his lyrics (“He works at Mr. Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street,” he intoned), one of the film’s co-directors, Susan Lacy, told the Beacon Theater audience that Joel sent his greetings — with typical wry humor: “In fact, he said, ‘Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated.’” The audience roared with laughter. On a note of encouragement, Lacy said Joel “will be back.”The crowd broke out into applause throughout the screening, which included just the first part of the two-part film. It still ran nearly two and a half hours as it covered Joel’s childhood and rise to fame through his infamous 1982 motorcycle accident. (To put that in perspective: It doesn’t get to the writing of “Uptown Girl.” No Christie Brinkley yet.)There are pictures and footage of early Joel performances and stories about the surprisingly robust Long Island rock scene of the 1960s. But “Part One” is largely an intimate portrait of Joel’s relationship with his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, who would eventually become his manager, and it elevates her to a starring role in his life. It also features a host of stories about the making of some of his best-known songs, and tidbits about his Long Island obstinance. Here’s some of what we learned.As Joel’s relationship with Weber first foundered, he attempted suicide twice.Joel and Weber’s relationship began in dramatic fashion: She was married to Jon Small, Joel’s early bandmate, and had a son with him. Joel and Small first played together in a group named the Hassles, then broke off to start a Led Zeppelin-inspired metal outfit called Attila. (An album cover shoot featuring a longhaired Joel standing amid sides of raw beef, wearing fur, is something to behold.) Eventually, Joel fell in love with Weber, but when a guilt-ridden Joel shared his feelings with Small, he got punched in the nose and Weber left.Despondent, Joel overdosed on pills and was in a coma for days. His sister, Judy Molinari, who had provided the pills to help him sleep, recounts her guilt onscreen. “I felt that I killed him,” she says. Joel drank a bottle of furniture polish in another attempt on his life. After moving back into his mother’s house, he checked into an observation ward where his own struggles were put into perspective. From there he started to channel his feelings into music, and the songs that he wrote as a result of the experience would become his first solo album, “Cold Spring Harbor.” After about a year, Weber re-entered his 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

  • 138 Shares119 Views

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    At Combs Trial, ‘Jane,’ an Ex-Girlfriend, to Testify About Sex Abuse

    Prosecutors say the woman, who will take the stand under a pseudonym, endured coerced sex marathons called “freak-offs.” The defense contends they were consensual.A second woman who prosecutors say was sex trafficked by Sean Combs is set to take the stand on Thursday at his federal trial in what is expected to be several days of testimony about drug-fueled sex marathons with male prostitutes known as “freak-offs.”A judge has allowed the woman to testify anonymously, and she is being referred to in court by the pseudonym “Jane.” She is the most significant witness since Casandra Ventura, Mr. Combs’s on-and-off girlfriend of 11 years, whose allegations of physical and sexual abuse gave rise to the criminal case.Prosecutors have said that Jane’s relationship with Mr. Combs mirrored the one he had with Ms. Ventura in many ways. Like Ms. Ventura, they have said, Jane was coerced into freak-offs through violence, financial control and threats related to videos of the sexual encounters, which they said Mr. Combs directed step by step.Unlike Ms. Ventura, who is a singer known as Cassie and a public celebrity, Jane’s identity has not been revealed.The government has described Jane as a single mother who started spending time with Mr. Combs in 2020 and quickly fell in love with the music mogul, agreeing to participate in an initial freak-off to please him.“Jane thought the first freak-off was a one-time, wild night,” Emily Johnson, one of the prosecutors, said at the start of the case. “Jane was wrong.”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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    ‘Sunlight’ Review: A Man Wakes Up in a Camper, Monkey at the Wheel

    In Nina Conti’s absurdist love story, a radio host and a new friend have nowhere to go but up.When it comes to monkey costumes, you can keep your “Better Man” biopic C.G.I. Nina Conti’s “Sunlight” brings its own bizarro, handmade appeal: A gnarly love story that starts with a guy waking up in an RV driven by a simian-suited stranger. It’s a movie within the indie subgenre of comic encounters between lost outsiders, but powered by its own fringe logic of attraction and rebellion.The stranger in the toylike disguise turns out to be a woman (Conti) fleeing her manipulative stepfather, who took over her mother’s motel. That’s where she found Roy (Shenoah Allen) after a failed suicide attempt in his room. Her name, we eventually learn, is Jane. The RV actually belongs to Roy, a mild-mannered radio host burdened by a hectoring mom and tough memories of his deceased father.Not exactly a meet-cute, but their cracked road trip never loses its warmth under the New Mexico sun. The big question looms: Just who is Jane, and why the blank-eyed monkey suit? But we also wonder how Roy got to his wit’s end. “Sunlight” essentially follows two people helping each other extract and preserve what’s left of their sanity and will to live.Conti bases Jane’s furry alter-ego on her monkey ventriloquist act, part of her career in British TV and theater. A little of “Sunlight,” which she directs and co-wrote with Allen, goes a long way. But there’s still something to seeing a performer go for broke, purging a character’s shame and despair through a screwy, confessional sense of humor.SunlightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Ritual’ Review: An Exorcism to Forget

    Al Pacino speaks in an exaggerated accent and Dan Stevens looks overly concerned in this movie directed by David Midell.When a movie begins by announcing that “The following is based on true events,” the intent, one presumes, is to get the viewer to sit up and get ready.It doesn’t help when the true events contain well-worn genre elements, as is the case with “The Ritual,” an exorcism story directed by David Midell. The trailer for this movie says that it tells “the true story that inspired ‘The Exorcist.’” And indeed, we have several elements remembered from that picture: a young woman possessed; a young priest who is having trouble with his faith; and an imposing older priest whose conviction carries the day.Did I say imposing? In William Friedkin’s 1973 movie, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), casting a long shadow and speaking in stentorian tones, was immediately formidable. Here, two priests in a small town in Iowa in 1928 are enlisted to perform the exorcism. As Father Theophilus, a hunched Al Pacino speaks in an exaggerated accent that wavers between Crazy Guggenheim and “It’s-a me, Mario.” As the younger priest, Father Joseph, Dan Stevens doesn’t have much to do besides look extremely concerned.The movie doesn’t serve its actresses particularly well either. During her possession scenes, Emma (Abigail Cowen) is obliged to contort herself and froth at the mouth, while Mother Superior (Patricia Heaton) is called upon to furrow her brow a lot. Topping it all off is a deliberately shaky and agitated shooting and cutting style that heightens nothing. Just watch “The Exorcist” again.The RitualNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Slumlord Millionaire’ Review: Costs of Living

    A documentary looks at New York City residents pushing back against housing troubles.The documentary “Slumlord Millionaire” aims to put a face to a problem that far too many readers in New York will already be familiar with: the high cost of housing in the city. The film, directed by Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez, tells the stories of a cross section of people who in different ways are pushing back.In Brooklyn, the film follows Samantha Bravo-Huertero and her family in Sunset Park as they pursue a legal remedy against a landlord whom they claim neglects maintenance and discriminates against Latino residents. Elsewhere in the borough, Janina Davis recounts how she lost control of her dream brownstone in Clinton Hill to a developer.The movie tags along with Moumita Ahmed, from Jamaica, Queens, during her run for City Council in 2021, when she emphasized the issue of tenants’ rights. And in Manhattan, a group of residents in Chinatown is shown banding together to protest the construction of luxury towers that they fear will displace them.Both the horror stories (mold-induced asthma; rats that, in one woman’s words, “will come marching in, almost like troops”) and the complaints (that politicians and courts are more receptive to moneyed interests than to renters) are far from new. And because “Slumlord Millionaire” has assembled a dynamic and engaging group of activists, it seems churlish to complain that it hasn’t found a way to make the material cinematic.But its bullet-point-laden interviews often seem more suited to a news segment than an unfolding documentary. And it would help, particularly in the discussion of rent stabilization, if the film acknowledged more economic complexity than it does.Slumlord MillionaireNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Another ‘Gomorrah’ TV Series About the Mob? Some in Naples Say, ‘Basta.’

    With another “Gomorrah” spinoff being filmed, some Neapolitans say they’re fed up with all the shows portraying the “malavita,” or the lawless life. “Why must only bad things be said about us?”A banner fluttered in March over a narrow alley in Naples crammed with tourist shops selling Nativity figurines. Naples, it proclaimed, “doesn’t support you anymore.”The “you” is the wildly successful Italian television crime drama “Gomorrah,” which days earlier had begun filming a prequel — “Gomorrah: Origins” — in the city’s gritty Spanish Quarter, tracing the 1970s roots of the show’s leading Camorra crime syndicate clan.Perhaps no modern pop culture reference has clung more stubbornly to Naples, Italy’s third-largest city, than “Gomorrah,” the title of Roberto Saviano’s 2006 nonfiction best seller about the Neapolitan mafia. A critically acclaimed movie followed in 2008, and the TV series premiered in 2014 and ran for five seasons. Two more movies debuted in 2019: “The Immortal,” a spinoff, and “Piranhas,” based on a Saviano novel about crime bosses as young as 15. And now there’s “Origins.”So excuse some Neapolitans if they say they’ve had enough.“They filmed the first one, they filmed the second one,” said Gennaro Di Virgilio, the fourth-generation owner of an artisanal Nativity shop. “Basta.”Once too dangerous and corrupt to attract many foreigners, Naples has been in the thrall of a tourism boom for years. Social media has lured visitors to the city’s history, food and sunshine, helping Naples shake off some of its seedy reputation, though youth unemployment and crime remain stubbornly high.But the city keeps getting typecast, some Neapolitans say, as Gomorrah, reducing its residents to those engaged in the “malavita,” the lawless 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