Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    The Point of ‘Saltburn’ Isn’t What You Think It Is

    The streaming hit has generated much chatter for its transgressive scenes. But those are diversions, camouflaging what the director is really doing.I had a grand old time watching Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn” at a critics’ screening before the general public got to it, which means I was mostly unspoiled by discourse. This enjoyment came as a surprise: I did not much like “Promising Young Woman,” the writer-director’s previous, Oscar-winning outing, which aimed too high and landed with a thud. A critic should enter every movie with as blank a slate of expectations as possible. Still, for “Saltburn,” my internal eyebrow came pre-cocked.But it was sumptuous. It was silly. “No, Barry, no,” I murmured, giggling, when Barry Keoghan’s Oliver stood over that grave, contemplating the unspeakable. It was a movie about a middle-class kid who went home with his posh friend for summer vacation, slowly revealing himself to be a monster, and it was blatantly ridiculous. I loved watching it, feeling the sort of glee usually set off by a Skittles binge. As a devotee of two weird genres in particular — gothic campus yarns and “great house” tales — I just lapped it up. (So to speak.)In the intervening months, “Saltburn” has received an outsized amount of attention. It did respectably in its theatrical release, buoyed by a younger demographic in love with Jacob Elordi, a star of “Euphoria.” Critics compared it, unfavorably, with “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” citing its mishandling of class anxiety, its failure to adequately excoriate the rich and, perhaps most of all, the feeling that it was trying too hard to be shocking.Then, just before Christmas, “Saltburn” dropped on Amazon Prime Video. It became a bona fide viral hit, with word of mouth making it one of the streamer’s biggest debuts. TikTok users turned it into memes, (sort of) recreating the final scene scored to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor,” which, in turn, shot up to No. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 100 chart. Keoghan and Elordi flirted their way through the press tour, fanning the internet’s flames. You could even buy a Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater candle. (To borrow internet slang, IYKYK.)Keoghan in that notorious tub. The film has given rise to products like a Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater candle.Amazon StudiosPeople keep talking about it, so I keep thinking about why I enjoy it so much, even though many of the criticisms leveled at it (as in my colleague Wesley Morris’s review) are not, strictly speaking, 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

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Movies

    Young Filmmaker Lives His ‘Fairy Tale’ at Sundance

    “I feel like I’m in a fairy tale,” Sean Wang said to the sold-out crowd gathered at the Ray Theater in Park City, Utah, last month for his Sundance Film Festival debut.Mr. Wang, a 29-year-old filmmaker, was dressed in a black suit and white Vans (a nod to his skateboarding roots). He grabbed his chest in a show of how fast his heart was beating as he introduced his film, “Didi.” It is a coming-of-age story about an angsty, insecure 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy trying to find his place in the world.“I’m just going to take a few seconds to take this all in,” he said before snapping a photograph of the audience. The warm crowd included Mr. Wang’s family and friends, the film’s cast and crew, and a handful of potential buyers who have the power to transform his station in life from aspiring filmmaker to bona fide Hollywood director.It has happened before. Luminaries like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Damien Chazelle, Ava DuVernay and Lulu Wang all went from hopeful dreamers to actual filmmakers in part thanks to the Sundance Film Festival, which just concluded its 40th year.Mr. Wang made a series of short films while working on and off for Google Creative Labs.Mr. Wang has mined aspects of his childhood in much of his work.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

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Adele Springsteen, Bruce Springsteen’s Mother, Dies at 98

    Bruce Springsteen has long said that his mother was among his greatest influences and credited her with encouraging his musical ambitions.Adele Springsteen, who nurtured the budding musical talent of her son, the pioneering rock star Bruce Springsteen, died on Wednesday. She was 98.Mr. Springsteen announced his mother’s death in an Instagram post on Thursday. No cause was given, but Ms. Springsteen had struggled for more than a decade with Alzheimer’s disease.Her son has been outspoken about his relationship with his mother and her influence on him.Ms. Springsteen rented him his first guitar when he was 7, he said in 2021 during his Broadway show, “Springsteen on Broadway,” which ran for more than two months that year as the city began to emerge from pandemic-related closures. The show had wide-ranging reflections, including thoughts about his mother.It was also Ms. Springsteen, he told the brimming Broadway audiences, at the St. James Theater, who danced to 1940s swing music and impressed in him the joys of bop-inspiring tunes, according to the NBC program “Today.”He also spoke of his mother’s ability to persist in her vivacious spirit even as aging and a punishing disease took their toll.“She’s 10 years into Alzheimer’s,” he said. “She’s 95. But the need to dance, that need to dance is something that hasn’t left her. She can’t speak. She can’t stand. But when she sees me, there’s a smile.”Ms. Springsteen was born Adele Zerilli on May 4, 1925, in Brooklyn. She married Douglas Springsteen, with whom she had her son in 1949 and later two daughters, Virginia and Pamela.She worked as a legal secretary and raised a young working-class family in Freehold, N.J., while her husband often struggled to find steady work and grappled with mental illness. He died in 1998.“She willed we would be a family and we were,” Mr. Springsteen wrote in “Born To Run,” his memoir. “She willed we would not disintegrate and we did not.”Ms. Springsteen’s high-spirited ethos, ever-present, seemed to be the through line in her life, and one that buoyed the lives of the people around her.“My mother is the great energy — she’s the energy of the show,” Mr. Springsteen told The Miami Herald in 1987. “The consistency, the steadiness, day after day — that’s her.” He added that “it was she who created the sense of stability in the family, so that we never felt threatened through all the hard times.”In the Instagram post on Thursday announcing his mother’s death, Mr. Springsteen shared a video of his mother, in old age, dancing to “In the Mood” by Glenn Miller, captioned with an excerpt from his own 1998 song about her, “The Wish.”“I’m older but you’ll know me in a glance,” it read. “We’ll find us a little rock ’n’ roll bar and we’ll go out and dance.”Aimee Ortiz More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    How Adele Springsteen Gave Bruce His Rock ’n’ Roll Spirit

    Adele Springsteen bought her son, Bruce, his first electric guitar and encouraged him to get up and dance. She died on Wednesday at 98.Joy and despair, vitality and darkness course through Bruce Springsteen’s songs. The joy, he told the world, came from his mother, Adele Springsteen, who died on Wednesday at 98.When he accepted the Ellis Island Family Heritage award in 2010, Springsteen brought his mother onstage with her sisters, Dora and Eda, and declared, “They put the rock ’n’ roll in me.”Adele, born Adele Zerilli in 1925, was constantly listening to Top 40 radio when Springsteen was growing up, getting her son on his feet to dance with her. She scrimped to buy him his first electric guitar and she encouraged him to be a musician.She worked for decades as a legal secretary, an example that taught her son the dignity and camaraderie of holding a job. “It’s a sight that I’ve never forgotten, my mother walking home from work,” he said during “Springsteen on Broadway,” his autobiographical stage show. “My mom was truthfulness, consistency, good humor, professionalism, grace, kindness, optimism, civility, fairness, pride in yourself, responsibility, love, faith in your family, commitment, joy in your work and a never-say-die thirst for living — for living and for life. And most importantly, for dancing.”She also protected him from his father, who had a lifelong struggle with depression — and whose grimmer view of humanity is the counterweight that runs through Springsteen’s songs. “She was a parent,” he wrote in his memoir, “Born to Run,” and that’s what I needed as my world was about to explode.”As his career took off, she kept detailed scrapbooks of every small milestone. And she danced in the spotlight at her son’s concerts when she was well into her 90s, even when her Alzheimer’s disease had taken its toll and music was an instinctive consolation.“Through my mother’s spirit, love and affection, she imparted to me an enthusiasm for life’s complexities, an insistence on joy and good times, and the perseverance to see the hard times through,” the musician wrote in his memoir. That’s the measured, grown-up Springsteen, striking his balance. But a key moment in “Springsteen on Broadway” was “The Wish,” a song to his mother that glows with pure fondness.In it, he looks back to getting a guitar as a Christmas present, and he reminisces about “me in my Beatle boots, you in pink curlers and matador pants/Pullin’ me up on the couch to do the Twist for my uncles and aunts.” He also considers “all the things that guitar brought us” and offers to play his mother a request, but with one proviso: “If you’re looking for a sad song, well I ain’t gonna play it.”Art is never just autobiography, and children grow up to be far more than the sum of their parents. But anyone who’s ever shouted along on a chorus with an arena full of Springsteen fans — those choruses that often break through the darker thoughts in the verses — clearly owes Adele Springsteen some thanks. More

  • 175 Shares159 Views

    in Movies

    Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in February: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ ‘Shogun,’ More

    “Genius:MLK/X,” a “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” series, a remake of “Shogun” and “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” are among the new arrivals.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 2Based on the 2005 blockbuster film of the same name, the spy thriller series “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” stars Donald Glover (who also cocreated the show with Francesca Sloane) as a spy code-named John who gets paired with a spy code-named Jane (Maya Erskine) in an operation that has them posing as a married couple. While trying to get a handle on their assignment, the fake spouses also have to get to know each other, and to figure out whether it’s helpful or detrimental to their mission to have actual romantic chemistry. Though there are chase scenes and explosions sprinkled throughout, this take on the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” premise is more grounded. It’s about two attractive single people in New York City, balancing a relationship and a very, very strange job.Also arriving:Feb. 8“The Silent Service”Feb. 9“Upgraded”Feb. 13“Five Blind Dates”Feb. 16“This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”Feb. 19“Giannis: The Marvelous Journey”Feb. 23“Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional”“Poacher”“The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy” Season 1Feb. 29“Red Queen”Dario Argento in the documentary “Dario Argento Panico.”ShudderNew to AMC+‘Dario Argento Panico’Starts streaming: Feb. 2The Italian filmmaker Dario Argento has been a favorite of genre fans and cinephiles since the 1970s, when his stylish, blood-soaked thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Suspiria” introduced a unique cinematic language, halfway between Hitchcockian suspense and Grand Guignol theater. In the Shudder documentary “Dario Argento Panico,” Argento and some of his collaborators and admirers (including the directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn) look back across his long career, discussing his unique vision as well as the controversies surrounding the violence in his movies and the intensity of his working methods. The film is a comprehensive introduction to an artist whose work and personality can come off as aloof and demanding, but who has long appealed to people who don’t mind a challenge.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 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    Looking to Watch Movies and Make Friends? Join the Club.

    Around New York City, there’s a robust circle of film enthusiasts showing offbeat movies in bars and shops, where lingering afterward is welcomed.At Heart of Gold, a cozy bar in Queens, a mad scientist recently brought to life a corpse that went on a blood-drenched rampage. But the people nursing their beers there didn’t call the authorities. They cheered.That’s because the undead were marauding on a screen, set up at the front of the bar, that was illuminated by “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror-science fiction splatterfest. The occasion was a Monday night gathering of the Astoria Horror Club, which meets regularly to watch scary movies over hot dogs, mulled wine and other anything-but-popcorn concessions.Before the film, Tom Herrmann and Madeleine Koestner, the club’s co-founders, introduced “Re-Animator” with a trigger warning about a sexual assault scene and a reminder to generously tip the staff. About 35 people watched the movie seated, but others stood, complementing the onscreen mayhem with shrieking, gasping and, as a decapitated head got tossed around, an explosion of applause.The Astoria Horror Club is just one of many film clubs that, while not new in concept, are quietly thriving in and around New York City. At many of these events, movies are shown not in traditional theaters but in bars, shops and other makeshift spaces, for small groups of people, many of whom arrive early for good seats and stay afterward to gush and vent.The screenings are open to the public, but mostly it’s Gen Zers and millennials who are joining strangers to watch movies that, in many cases, are for niche tastes and were made before streaming was a thing.These kinds of films are programmed regularly at the city’s revival houses, like Film Forum and Metrograph. But what these film clubs offer is ample space and time, where debate and friendships can blossom without leaving your seat. For cheap, too: At chain theaters, tickets can be more than $20 apiece, not including food and drinks. Many of these film clubs are free to attend, although patrons are asked to pony up for beer or bites.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

    in Music

    Toni Stern, Who Wrote Songs With Carole King, Dies at 79

    A sunny California poet, she provided the words to songs on “Tapestry” and other albums, including the enduring hit “It’s Too Late.”Toni Stern, a breezy young Californian who became a trusted lyricist for Carole King, providing the words for the enduring standard “It’s Too Late” and many other songs during Ms. King’s flowering as a chart-topping solo artist, died on Jan. 17 at her home in Santa Ynez, Calif., near Santa Barbara. She was 79.Her husband and only immediate survivor, Jerry Rounds, confirmed the death. He did not specify the cause.Ms. Stern, a Los Angeles native, was an aspiring painter and poet living in Laurel Canyon, an enclave popular with the Los Angeles rock elite, in the late 1960s. It was there that she met Ms. King, who had moved west from New Jersey after a painful breakup with her husband and songwriting partner, Gerry Goffin, with whom she had formed one of the decade’s powerhouse hit-making duos.The two hit it off immediately. “When I moved to California in 1968, she was the epitome of a free-spirited Laurel Canyon woman,” Ms. King wrote in a Facebook post after Ms. Stern’s death. “She lived in a hillside house with her dog, Arf, surrounded by books, record albums, plants and macramé.”The two would soon share songwriting credits. When Ms. King stepped into the limelight as a solo performer, Ms. Stern provided lyrics to the songs “What Have You Got to Lose” and “Raspberry Jam” on her first solo album, “Writer,” released in 1970.Their partnership continued on the follow-up, “Tapestry” (1971), a pop music colossus that topped the Billboard 200 for 15 weeks and went on to become one of the best-selling albums of all time. Ms. Stern provided the words for “It’s Too Late,” which was No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart for five weeks, and “Where You Lead.”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 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    ‘The Promised Land’ Review: Coaxing Crops From a Wild Land

    Mads Mikkelsen stars as a soldier with little money but big ideas who gets royal approval to try to conquer a vast shrubby expanse.The Danish drama “The Promised Land” takes its old-fashioned remit with enjoyable seriousness. Set in the mid-18th century, it is a classic tale of haves and have-nots filled with gristle and grit, limitless horizons, scenes of suffering, reversals of fortune and cathartic recognition. It has sweep, romance, violence and spectacle, but what makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen.Mikkelsen stars as Capt. Ludvig Kahlen, a war veteran with little more than a frayed uniform and a well-polished medal on his chest, who sets out to cultivate the heath in Jutland, the peninsula that makes up most of Denmark. There, on a vast shrubby expanse thought untamable yet beloved by the Danish monarch, Kahlen hopes to work the land and establish a settlement for king, country and himself. Over time, as seasons change and visitors come and go, he does just that, building a new world and cultivating the ground in a laborious, engrossing process that the director Nikolaj Arcel charts with ease and gripping drama.Written by Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen, the well-paced story briskly takes Kahlen from the poorhouse to the royal palace minutes after opening, establishing the reach of his ambition. (The movie is based on the novel “The Captain and Ann Barbara” from the Danish writer Ida Jessen.) There, he seeks permission to build on the heath from the king’s advisers, a collection of imperial rotters in wigs and satin breeches who agree to his request only after he pledges to pay for the endeavor with his military pension. In return, Kahlen wants a title, a manor and servants; effectively, he wants to become one of them.Mikkelsen is excellent, and inexorably watchable. He almost always is, whether he’s infusing life into a cardboard Hollywood villain (“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) or having a palpably rollicking time playing a rampaging hero (as in the entertaining action romp “Riders of Justice,” written and directed by Jensen). Mikkelsen’s severe good looks are a crucial part of his appeal, as is the sense of menace and intrigue that certain beauty brings with it. Mikkelsen knows how to complicate his looks and he’s particularly adept at amplifying its menace by withholding readable emotion, a technique that turns his face into a mask you anxiously wait for him to drop.Kahlen soon reaches Jutland alone on horseback, and the story begins to take flight, as does the camera. With boundless aerial views that establish a sense of place both geographic and emotional, Arcel at once conveys the land’s immensity (and harsh grandeur) and emphasizes the titanic effort of Kahlen’s enterprise (and its loneliness). In both sun and rain, he repeatedly bores into the ground with a hand-held auger to gauge the quality of the soil, feeling, smelling and all but tasting the dirt. With every twist of the auger, he steadily underscores his will. By the time he finds what he needs it’s as if the heath had finally surrendered to him.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