Aurelia Butler

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    J.B. Moore, Producer of Seminal Hip-Hop Records, Dies at 81

    He was a magazine ad salesman when he and a colleague, Robert Ford, teamed with Kurtis Blow and helped break rap music into the mainstream.J.B. Moore, an advertising man from suburban Long Island who wrote the lyrics to one of rap’s first hits — Kurtis Blow’s 1979 novelty song, “Christmas Rappin’” — and with a partner, Robert Ford, produced that rapper’s albums as he became a breakout star in the early 1980s, died on March 13 in Manhattan. He was 81.His friend Seth Glassman said the cause of his death, in a nursing home, was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford, known as Rocky, were unlikely music impresarios. They met at Billboard magazine in the 1970s, where Mr. Moore was an advertising salesman who wrote occasional jazz reviews, and where Mr. Ford was a reporter and critic and one of the first journalists at a mainstream publication to expose the musical fusion created by DJs and MCs that was then emerging from New York City block parties and Black discos.Mr. Ford “was a Black guy from the middle of Hollis, Queens,” Mr. Moore recalled in a 2001 oral history for the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle. “I was a white guy from the North Shore of Long Island.” Still, he said, “our record collections were virtually identical.”The two friends’ careers took a turn in the late summer of 1979, when Mr. Ford, who had a child on the way, told Mr. Moore of his idea to try to scrape up money with a Christmas song. He was inspired by a Billboard colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.Mr. Moore and Mr. Ford came up with the idea for “Christmas Rappin’” in 1979, inspired by a colleague who had written a holiday tune for Perry Como decades earlier and was still getting paid for it.Mercury RecordsMr. Moore liked the idea. “Christmas records are perennials, and therefore you get royalties ad infinitum on them,” he said in the oral history.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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    For Cleveland Orchestra, It’s Beethoven (and Freedom) to the Rescue

    When the star singer Asmik Grigorian dropped out of the orchestra’s performance at Carnegie Hall, Beethoven’s Fifth and his “Leonore” Overture No. 3 subbed in.The Cleveland Orchestra showed up at Carnegie Hall this week without a star. When the music director Franz Welser-Möst planned the ensemble’s two-night visit to New York, the opening concert, on Tuesday, was to be headlined by the soprano Asmik Grigorian. A volcanic presence on European stages who rarely makes it to the United States, Grigorian would have been a major box-office draw. Then came news that she was pulling out for unspecified personal reasons.Time to break out the emergency rations of Beethoven.The remaining rump of the Clevelanders’ program for Tuesday, the Suite from Janacek’s “From the House of the Dead,” based on Dostoyevsky’s account of life in a Russian prison colony, was joined by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and, for good measure, his “Leonore” Overture No. 3.A crowd-pleasing solution to a marketing headache? A repertory staple musicians can shine in without too much rehearsal? Not at all. The new program was “a chance to say something important about our world today,” Welser-Möst wrote in a program statement that referred, smartly but vaguely, to people’s “fight for freedom everywhere.”Without naming specifics, Welser-Möst explained that the Janacek was a testament to “human dignity” in “desolate circumstances.” Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 traced a progression “from darkness to light,” he added, while the overture, written for Beethoven’s political prison break opera “Fidelio,” represented the “greatest music about freedom ever written.” Far from being a stop gap, the new program created what Welser-Möst called “a profound statement” that was sure to “resonate deeply” with New Yorkers. (No similar claims were made for Wednesday’s program, which consisted of Stravinsky’s “Pétrouchka” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.)The resulting concert on Tuesday was invigorating and full of ravishing playing, as was the performance the next night. But if there was any profound truth to be gleaned from the double helping of Beethoven served alongside Janacek’s dazzling suite, it was only that the Fifth and the “Leonore” overture provide ready-made templates for struggle narratives ending in triumph. Just whose struggle and what is being overcome — I’m guessing that Gaza, Ukraine and the state of American democracy are among them — remain open to interpretation.In fairness, the Cleveland Orchestra has never relied on provocative or politically minded programming to earn its devoted fan base and superlative-studded reviews. In his 23 years at the helm, Welser-Möst has fine-tuned this storied ensemble into an elegant, cohesive and keenly responsive engine. Other American orchestras have struggled to define their role in society as they fret over accusations that their branch of the arts is reactionary and socially irrelevant. The Cleveland Orchestra’s image may be conservative — a guardian of a particular European tradition — but it’s a well-defined luxury brand that delivers outstanding value.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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    ‘Misericordia’ Review: Danger Always Hides in the Bushes

    The French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest film, a bent kind of murder mystery, presents life at its basest and gamiest.In “Misericordia,” a rakish youngish guy named Jérémie drives back to a French village for the funeral of his old boss, a baker, who has kicked the bucket at 62. And the instant the widow lets Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) into the living room, he and the baker’s adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a mushroom forager, share the sort of charged eye contact that tells you “Yup, these two definitely did it.” We don’t know when or how far things went. Something happened, though. But because “Misericordia” (Latin for “mercy”) has wafted from the cauldron of the writer and director Alain Guiraudie, it’s possible I’m wrong.Ambiguity? Mixed motives? Casual lawlessness? These are his considerable strengths. “Misericordia” culminates in kink, killing and some gloriously literal deus ex machina. So maybe what I’m experiencing as an erotic charge is caution. But again: it’s Guiraudie, the man who brought us the 2014 murder-at-the-gay-nude-beach sensation “Stranger by the Lake” and a bedroom farce (“Nobody’s Hero,” 2023) whose component parts included racism, terrorism, sex work, domestic violence, paranoia, jogging and vaping. The caution is erotic.His movies, meanwhile, prove absorbingly absurdist, this new one especially. It’s got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn’t mocking the way we’ve been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he’s at least disrupting the usual patterns. Retraining us to see anew, to suspend expectation and abandon comfort, the way that John Waters and Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley and the other oddball live-action cartoonists have. It’s risky, but something thrilling and often true usually comes of it.Guiraudie presents life at its basest and gamiest. So I trust my instincts about Jérémie and Vincent. I know hunger when I see it. And “Misericordia” is dotted with hungry eyes. Jérémie stays the night at the widow’s. The room she offers is the one Vincent grew up in, maybe the room where It Happened. Jérémie and Vincent even make the bed together. But rekindling’s not on the program. Regression, maybe. The bed all made, Vincent — who’s pushing 40, is bald, and has a lisp and a cleft lip — suggests playing some Yahtzee, like they used to. Jérémie declines.From there, reunion curdles into disunion. And the homecoming movie you might have been wanting becomes the funkier tale of a sociopath who opts to overstay his welcome. Jérémie doesn’t get up to much: the occasional drive around town, a walk in the forest, some horseplay with Vincent on the forest floor where he should be foraging for mushrooms. What does he want? The late baker’s clothes, for one thing; his shoes, too. The widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), seems super OK with that. She doesn’t even appear to mind the probability that Jérémie’s list of infatuations likely included her husband. They flip through a photo album together and admire how good the dead man looked in a Speedo. (They’re not 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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    Robert E. Ginna Jr., Whose Article Bolstered U.F.O. Claims, Dies at 99

    A founding editor of People, he also served as editor in chief of Little, Brown and produced films. But his public image was defined by a 1952 story for Life.Robert E. Ginna Jr., a founding editor of People magazine, a book editor and a film producer whose 1952 Life magazine article provoked a frenzy by validating the idea that flying saucers might exist and could have visited Earth from outer space, died on March 4 at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y.His death was confirmed by his son, Peter St. John Ginna. He was 99.Mr. Ginna (pronounced gun-NAY) enjoyed a wide-ranging, eight-decade career. As the editor in chief of Little, Brown, he persuaded the acclaimed novelist James Salter to shift from screenplays to books and discovered Dr. Robin Cook as an author of thrillers. He also produced movies and was part of the team that started People as a highbrow showcase for profiles of cultural figures like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, but quit when the magazine descended into what he viewed as celebrity fluff.To the general public, though, he was perhaps best known for an article he wrote with H.B. Darrach Jr. for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine. The cover featured an alluring photograph of Marilyn Monroe under the headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”The April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine featured a seductive photo of Marilyn Monroe juxtaposed with the now-infamous headline “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers.”Philippe Halsman/Life Magazine, via Magnum PhotosTo Mr. Ginna’s eternal dismay, the article made him a target for U.F.O. buffs and kooks. Headlined “Have We Visitors From Space?,” it examined 10 reports of unidentified flying object sightings, followed by an unequivocal assessment from the German rocket expert Walther Riedel: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis.”While reports of U.F.O.s in the late 1940s were often trivialized, Phillip J. Hutchison and Herbert J. Strentz wrote in American Journalism in 2019: “By the early 1950s, however, more substantial human-interest features embraced the idea that U.F.O. reports might correspond to extraterrestrial Earth visitors. A widely cited April 7, 1952, Life magazine feature titled ‘Have We Visitors From Space?’ represents one of the most influential examples of the latter trend.”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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    ‘O’Dessa’ Review: One Song to Save Them All

    Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) rules this postapocalyptic musical with a guitar and an attitude.The director Geremy Jasper begins his new musical in such a bombastic manner, complete with a mock-spaghetti western score, that it’s hard not to be at least intrigued. What is this cinematic U.F.O.?We are, we quickly learn, in a postapocalyptic future in which a certain Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, from “The White Lotus”) rules the airwaves and people’s minds with a reality competition beamed from his Onederworld lair in Satylite City — think “America’s Got Talent” at Thunderdome.Despite the goofy names, these are scary times. A fresh-faced farm girl named O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things”) is informed that “It ain’t safe for a 19-year-old gal with stars in her eyes.” It’s actually even less safe for her parents, who are both summarily dispatched from the story within a few minutes. O’Dessa’s daddy (the singer Pokey LaFarge) was a rambler, so off she goes rambling as well, armed with his guitar. She ends up, naturally, in Satylite City, where she falls for the sweet Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a sex worker and cabaret singer whose funky-cool abode has a heart-shaped tub.As he did for his previous film, “Patti Cake$” (2017), which was about an aspiring rapper in New Jersey, Jasper wrote the score with Jason Binnick. Their songs tend to be either emo Americana or power ballads; sometimes the first style builds into the second, as in “Yer Tha One.” And because O’Dessa has a mysterious prophecy to fulfill, she gets one song to rule them all, simply titled “The Song (Love Is All).” It’s worth noting that everyone sings well, sometimes surprisingly so. Sink, in particular, has an unforced elegance that carries even the by-the-numbers numbers.While you might assume Plutonovich is the antagonist, he is overshadowed by the enforcer and pimp Neon Dion (Regina Hall, having a ball), whose severe bangs, dramatic outfits and even more dramatic expressions position her as a villain retrofitted from a 1980s music video.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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    ‘Locked’ Review: Cramped Quarters

    This gimmicky thriller starring Bill Skarsgard and Anthony Hopkins sees a petty criminal fall victim to a vigilante’s trap.When we first meet Eddie (Bill Skarsgard), a recently divorced father, he’s begging a mechanic to give him a few more days to pay the bill. No catch. And no car. Desperate, Eddie, breaks into a snazzy sport utility vehicle hoping to pawn whatever valuables he finds.It’s here, inside the vehicle, that most of “Locked” takes place.Directed by David Yarovesky, this gimmicky thriller is an adaptation of the Argentine film “4×4,” set in a big American city where the class divide is stark and petty crimes are aplenty.The S.U.V. is quickly revealed as a trap staged by William (Anthony Hopkins), a deranged vigilante in the vein of the “Saw” franchise’s Jigsaw, who lashes out against those who he thinks have broken the social contract.Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter credentials — and William’s penchant for classical music — also give him a menacingly refined air that plays off Eddie’s rough exterior, underscoring the film’s clunky rich versus poor through-line.Hopkins spends most of the movie offscreen, speaking to his victim through the car’s speakers and zapping him remotely through devices in the seats. Struggling to find a way out, Eddie at one point shoots a gun at the bulletproof windows, causing a bullet to strike him in the leg. William gleefully observes the younger man deteriorate from the point of view of a surveillance camera, progressively ramping up the sadism.Still, the violent fun and games aren’t quite inventive enough to get past the single setting and its cramped leather seats. The performers hold their ground even if the script simply goes through the motions — the car-as-prison may at first come off like a new jam, and yet you’ve definitely seen it all before.LockedRated R. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Bob Trevino Likes It’ Review: From a Stranger to Found Family

    Barbie Ferreira shines as a young woman who befriends a stranger with her father’s name in this indie tear-jerker.There are two Bob Trevinos in “Bob Trevino Likes It.” One of them makes Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character in “Hard Truths” look like parent of the year. The other starts out as a stranger, and grows into found family.The movie, written and directed by Tracie Laymon and based on her own experiences, centers on Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), a lonely 20-something in Kentucky who friends Bob on Facebook. She was hoping to connect with her father (French Stewart), a deadbeat recently gone AWOL. Instead, she and Bob the introvert (John Leguizamo) develop a tender intergenerational bond.Setting aside the datedness of the technology — Lily often posts 2010s-era Facebook statuses littered with hashtags — “Bob Trevino Likes It” is a middling indie tear-jerker. It suffers from an overwritten script chock-full of tropes and artificial dialogue. “You don’t have any tools,” Bob exclaims to Lily at one point, meaning a literal toolbox, but also, you know, a metaphorical, emotional one.Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines. On a handful of occasions, Laymon has her protagonist gaze into the camera in shallow focus with a swirling effect around her head. The moments viscerally convey a feeling of belonging by making use of a considerable asset: Ferreira’s wide open face.Bob Trevino Likes ItRated PG-13 for family crises. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Alto Knights’ Review: A Double Helping of De Niro

    Robert De Niro plays the crime lords Vito Genovese and Frank Costello in this film about midcentury Mafia moves.“The Alto Knights,” a new mob movie starring Robert De Niro, carries a lot of weight from its very beginning. Not just historical weight about the Mafia — it concentrates on a stretch from the mid-1950s into the early 1970s — but cinematic weight as well.It’s the story of a gangster friendship that turns homicidally sour. The New York City crime lords Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, we’re told here by way of narration from Costello, became best friends in a Little Italy social club called Alto Knights.The criminals develop different styles. Vito stayed downtown, calling shots, literally and figuratively, from a crate-filled back room, while Frank cultivated such a high profile as a, ahem, “professional gambler” that he made the cover of Time magazine. Frank is enjoying his life so thoroughly that he doesn’t register Vito’s irritation until he survives a shooting by one of Vito’s foot soldiers, a hulking brute by the name of Vincent Gigante.Yes, it’s that Vincent Gigante, the one who eventually got the nickname “Chin” (and the actor playing him, Cosmo Jarvis, does his level best to put that facial feature forward in all his scenes). Debra Messing plays Costello’s wife, Bobbie, whose role in the marriage seems to be to smile reassuringly. Other names that will ring bells with Cosa Nostra connoisseurs include Albert Anastasia and the quaint upstate hamlet called Apalachin.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