Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Stomps Into ‘Oppenheimer’ Territory

    Those movies, along with “The Boy and the Heron,” are essentially in conversation about the moral weight of American and Japanese actions in World War II.I wasn’t expecting to cry as much as I did at “Godzilla Minus One.” The strong word-of-mouth made it sound like an awesome spectacle with cool action courtesy of the scaly title creature. And while there were awe-inducing showdowns with the monster, the Toho International production, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is largely a meditation on sorrow and survival in the wake of World War II.The specter of trauma has long hung over Godzilla, a creature unearthed from slumber by H-bomb testing in the 1954 original. But “Godzilla Minus One” (a black-and-white version is reaching theaters on Friday) further literalizes that as it tells the story of Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who shirks his duties, surviving both the war and an initial encounter with the beast, only to return to the ruins of Tokyo haunted by what he witnessed. Godzilla poses a threat, but one that lives mostly in the background. Instead, this is a story about finding community in the wake of destruction and learning to value yourself in a society that deems you worthless.As I watched, I couldn’t help but think about how “Godzilla Minus One” exists in conversation with two other recent releases: Hayao Miyazaki’s otherworldly exploration of grief, “The Boy and the Heron,” and Christopher Nolan’s biographical drama, “Oppenheimer.” Both “Godzilla Minus One” and “The Boy and the Heron” at least partly answer the question that some audiences had after the release of “Oppenheimer,” which documents the invention of the atomic bomb. Namely, where was the Japanese perspective in this story about the man whose invention caused so much pain for them?Neither “Godzilla Minus One” nor “The Boy and the Heron” is explicitly about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They both deal with life in Japan during and after World War II, using the fantastical to portray a people grappling with the lasting effects of a devastating conflict and their anger at those in power who were responsible. Together, the films also prove that literalism isn’t always required in stories that impart messy truths about humanity.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?  More

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    The Worst Masterpiece: ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ at 100

    The work is a guaranteed success. After it is over, audience members leap out of their seats for a standing ovation.Such has been the response to “Rhapsody in Blue” ever since its premiere 100 years ago, on Feb. 12, 1924. George Gershwin had been asked by the conductor Paul Whiteman to supply a “jazz concerto” for the event An Experiment in Modern Music at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan, and the landscape of American music hasn’t been the same since.Thanks to the centennial, you’re likely to come across a lot of “Rhapsody” performances this year — not that the anniversary makes much difference, because that’s always the case. Indeed, “Rhapsody” is one of the most frequently programmed pieces in the symphonic repertoire by an American composer.Beyond the concert stage, the work’s themes are heard in movies and television, and are piped into the cabins of United Airlines flights. It has even functioned as propaganda: At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, during the height of the Cold War, the American contingent brought out 84 pianists to perform excerpts from the “Rhapsody,” accompanied by a battalion of dancers.As with many other classical hits, casual listeners might be surprised to learn that the familiar melodies are part of a much longer composition. First, George Gershwin wrote a substantial two-piano score. The composer Ferde Grofé orchestrated the premiere for Whiteman’s idiosyncratic jazz band, including banjo. Later on, Grofé did two more orchestrations, in 1926 and 1942; the last one was for full symphonic forces and is the version most often heard today. Gershwin himself never fussed with making an authoritative edition, going so far as to suggest four possible cuts in the score.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?  More

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    Fake Explicit Taylor Swift Images Swamp Social Media

    Fans of the star and lawmakers condemned the images, probably generated by artificial intelligence, after they were shared with millions of social media users.Fake, sexually explicit images of Taylor Swift likely generated by artificial intelligence spread rapidly across social media platforms this week, disturbing fans who saw them and reigniting calls from lawmakers to protect women and crack down on the platforms and technology that spread such images.One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday. X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies’ efforts to remove them.While X said it was working to remove the images, fans of the pop superstar flooded the platform in protest. They posted related keywords, along with the sentence “Protect Taylor Swift,” in an effort to drown out the explicit images and make them more difficult to find.Reality Defender, a cybersecurity company focused on detecting A.I., determined with 90 percent confidence that the images were created using a diffusion model, an A.I.-driven technology accessible through more than 100,000 apps and publicly available models, said Ben Colman, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.As the A.I. industry has boomed, companies have raced to release tools that enable users to create images, videos, text and audio recordings with simple prompts. The A.I. tools are wildly popular but have made it easier and cheaper than ever to create so-called deepfakes, which portray people doing or saying things they have never done.Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates. Artificial intelligence was used to create fake robocalls of President Biden during the New Hampshire primary, and Ms. Swift was featured this month in deepfake ads hawking cookware.“It’s always been a dark undercurrent of the internet, nonconsensual pornography of various sorts,” said Oren Etzioni, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who works on deepfake detection. “Now it’s a new strain of it that’s particularly noxious.”“We are going to see a tsunami of these A.I.-generated explicit images. The people who generated this see this as a success,” Mr. Etzioni said.X said it had a zero-tolerance policy toward the content. “Our teams are actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” a representative said in a statement. “We’re closely monitoring the situation to ensure that any further violations are immediately addressed, and the content is removed.”X has seen an increase in problematic content including harassment, disinformation and hate speech since Elon Musk bought the service in 2022. He has loosened the website’s content rules and fired, laid off or accepted the resignations of staff members who worked to remove such content. The platform also reinstated accounts that had been previously banned for violating rules.Although many of the companies that produce generative A.I. tools ban their users from creating explicit imagery, people find ways to break the rules. “It’s an arms race, and it seems that whenever somebody comes up with a guardrail, someone else figures out how to jailbreak,” Mr. Etzioni said.The images originated in a channel on the messaging app Telegram that is dedicated to producing such images, according to 404 Media, a technology news site. But the deepfakes garnered broad attention after being posted on X and other social media services, where they spread rapidly.Some states have restricted pornographic and political deepfakes. But the restrictions have not had a strong impact, and there are no federal regulations of such deepfakes, Mr. Colman said. Platforms have tried to address deepfakes by asking users to report them, but that method has not worked, he added. By the time they are flagged, millions of users have already seen them.“The toothpaste is already out of the tube,” he said.Ms. Swift’s publicist, Tree Paine, did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Thursday.The deepfakes of Ms. Swift prompted renewed calls for action from lawmakers. Representative Joe Morelle, a Democrat from New York who introduced a bill last year that would make sharing such images a federal crime, said on X that the spread of the images was “appalling,” adding: “It’s happening to women everywhere, every day.”“I’ve repeatedly warned that AI could be used to generate non-consensual intimate imagery,” Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of the images on X. “This is a deplorable situation.”Representative Yvette D. Clarke, a Democrat from New York, said that advancements in artificial intelligence had made creating deepfakes easier and cheaper.“What’s happened to Taylor Swift is nothing new,” she said. More

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    Met Opera Taps Its Endowment Again to Weather Downturn

    The company has withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional funds from its endowment to cover expenses, but sees signs it may be emerging from its post-pandemic woes.The Metropolitan Opera, still reeling from the disruption brought by the pandemic, said on Thursday that it had withdrawn nearly $40 million in additional emergency funds from its endowment as it works to survive one of the most trying periods in its 141-year history.The move came after the Met took $30 million from its endowment fund last season to help cover operating expenses amid weak ticket sales and a cash shortfall. Nonprofits usually try to avoid drawing down their endowments, which are meant to grow over time while producing investment income. The Met’s endowment fund is now worth about $255 million, down from $309 million in July.“For most people the pandemic is over. For arts institutions, we’re still in it,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “But we see a way out. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”The company pointed to several signs that it may be turning the corner.Paid attendance has risen to about 73 percent so far this season from roughly 63 percent at the same point last season, and is nearly back to what it was just before the pandemic hit. The Met’s Live in HD cinema broadcasts — which contributed more than $15 million to the company’s bottom line before the pandemic, but are currently only breaking even — are beginning to draw larger crowds. And as the Met presents more contemporary opera, it is attracting younger audiences: The average age of single-ticket buyers for in-person performances has fallen to 44 from 50 before the pandemic.The Met expects cash gifts of more than $100 million to help replenish the endowment over the next few years. The company is also working to land a “transformative” gift, Gelb said. He declined to provide details, saying only that he hoped it would come “sooner rather than later.”Gelb said that the Met “obviously can’t make a habit” of dipping into its endowment, but that the withdrawal would help the company while ticket revenues recover and as it waits for expected donations.Victor Ryan Robertson, left, and Will Liverman, right, in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” a contemporary opera that attracted an audience this season. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Under the extraordinary financial challenges and circumstances that we’re facing we believed it was the prudent thing to do,” he said. “The alternative would be not to perform.”The Met is hardly the only performing arts organization still struggling to emerge from the pandemic. Across the United States, regional theaters are staging fewer shows, giving fewer performances, laying off staff and, in some cases, shutting down. Orchestras and dance and opera companies have in recent months slashed budgets, sold real estate and trimmed their seasons to try to stay afloat.But the Met faces acute challenges. Mounting live opera is expensive, requiring lavish sets, star singers and a much larger orchestra and chorus than the biggest Broadway shows can boast. Inflation has added to the opera company’s burden, with the costs of shipping and materials increasing sharply. And ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and movie-theater broadcasts were down by about $25 million from before the pandemic.In addition to tapping its endowment, the Met said it would institute measures to cut costs and increase revenues that were suggested by Boston Consulting Group, which conducted a study of the company’s operations on a pro bono basis.The Met has already begun giving fewer performances: 194 this season, down from 215 last season. It plans to change its scheduling over the next few years so that each opera has a more condensed run; they currently can have two or three short runs that may be spread out in the fall, winter and spring. Doing so will allow the company, which sometimes presents as many as four different operas in the course of a week, to have fewer operas in rotation at any given moment. And the plans call for scheduling more of the Met’s most popular titles, like Puccini’s “La Bohème,” on weekends, when they tend to bring in substantially more revenue than less familiar works. These changes, along with other cost-cutting measures and more targeted marketing efforts, are expected to net the company about $25 million to $40 million each year.Even before the pandemic, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, with an annual budget of about $312 million, faced existential questions, as the old model in which subscribers would buy tickets to many productions each year faded.The pandemic, which forced the company to shut down for more than a year and a half, exacerbated those troubles. Many of the Met’s patrons, who are older, stopped attending live performances and cinema broadcasts as frequently, leaving the company looking for new audiences.This season, the Met accelerated its embrace of contemporary works, which have made up a greater share of the repertory in recent seasons.Modern operas have proved over the past few years to be more of a box-office draw on average than the classics. In December, Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” ended an eight-performance run with 78 percent attendance — outselling “La Bohème,” which had 74 percent attendance. Others fared less well: Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” which was promoted heavily and given the coveted spot to open the 2023-24 season, ended its nine-performance run in October with 62 percent attendance.Later this season the Met will bring back Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” hoping to replicate their success in earlier seasons, when they drew sellout crowds.Next season, the Met will present four contemporary operas, down from six this season. “Grounded,” about the toll of drone warfare by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, will open the season in September. John Adams will conduct the Met premiere of his latest opera, “Antony and Cleopatra.” And Heggie’s “Moby Dick” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” will also be on the agenda.Gelb said he was confident that the Met’s bet on contemporary opera would pay off, adding that ticket sales could surpass prepandemic levels next season. “We’re demonstrating that accessible, new work that is emotionally impactful can be as successful or more successful than revivals of classics,” he said.While works like “La Bohème” and Bizet’s “Carmen” continue to draw crowds, and a holiday version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” had 87 percent attendance over 13 performances in December, there has been less interest in other staples of the repertory. A nine-performance revival of Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” ended in November with 56 percent attendance; an eight-performance run of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” with a starry international cast, finished with 64 percent attendance.Gelb said that the company would continue to present an array of classics and revivals: Richard Strauss’s fairy tale opera “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” for one, will be staged in the 2024-25 season.The recent withdrawals have undone some of the Met’s halting attempts to rebuild its endowment, which has long been seen as too small for an institution of its size, and meant that the smaller fund did not benefit as much from the recent stock market rally. The Met, which has been authorized to draw an additional $40 million from the endowment, has withdrawn $36 million so far.Asked if he was concerned about the dwindling endowment, Gelb said: “It’s what keeps me up at night.” He said the latest withdrawals were necessary because the company was “fighting for our survival.”“The endowment is there certainly not to be raided,” he said, “but to be used in a time of crisis rather than going out of business.”Across the country, opera companies of all sizes are still grappling with the effects of the pandemic as they face smaller audiences because of shifting habits and lifestyles, rising costs and the loss of government aid that kept many alive during the pandemic.Opera Philadelphia eliminated five staff positions this season and slashed its budget by about 15 percent. Seattle Opera, seeing a steep drop in subscriptions, has significantly reduced its slate of performances, and Portland Opera recently said it would sell its headquarters to help pay off debt and replenish its endowment. Tulsa Opera scaled back its season, moving some performances to smaller venues. And Syracuse Opera, facing ticket sales that were still more than 40 percent below prepandemic levels and difficulties securing sponsors, announced in November that it was canceling the rest of its season and furloughing staff.“We’re competing with traveling Broadway shows and popular concerts,” said Camille Tisdel, the chair of Syracuse Opera’s board. “Families have only so much money to spend, and during the pandemic, people really got used to being at home.”The Met has so far avoided serious disruptions to its operations. But there are still fears that without a significant infusion of cash in the near future, there could be more turbulence.“I believe ultimately we are going to find a winning path,” Gelb said. “We have very loyal audiences and very loyal new audiences who believe the Met is a thrilling and exciting cultural institution. And ultimately that is how we’re going to fight our way out of this difficult hole that the pandemic has helped put us in.” More

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    Bill Hayes, Longtime Star of ‘Days of Our Lives,’ Dies at 98

    He logged more than 2,000 episodes on the enduring soap opera. He also rode the Davy Crockett craze to a hit single in 1955.Bill Hayes, an actor and singer whose 2,141 episodes of “Days of Our Lives” over five and a half decades constituted the daytime drama version of an ultramarathon, and whose top-selling 1955 single, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” remains seared into the memories of the baby boom generation, died on Jan. 12 at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 98.His wife and longtime co-star, Susan Seaforth Hayes, confirmed his death.To soap opera fans, Mr. Hayes was a staple of weekday afternoons from the days of rabbit-ear antennas into the streaming era.He began his tenure on the long-running NBC show in 1970. His character, Doug Williams, was a suave and slippery con artist who, after leaving prison, found himself padding through the maze of the plot twists, double-crosses and big reveals that day after day drew viewers back to the fictional Midwestern town of Salem.In 1976, two years after Mr. Hayes married Susan Seaforth in real life, their characters wed on “Days of Our Lives” in an episode that drew 16 million viewers.NBC, via 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?  More

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    As Changes Come to Boston Symphony, Conductor’s Contract Is Extended

    The music director, Andris Nelsons, was moved to an evergreen contract, with an expanded role at Tanglewood. And Carlos Simon was named to a new composer post.The tenure of Chad Smith, the innovative arts leader who last year left the Los Angeles Philharmonic to run the comparatively old-fashioned Boston Symphony Orchestra, is beginning to take shape.In an announcement on Thursday, the Boston Symphony said that Andris Nelsons, its music director, would move to a rolling, evergreen contract rather than one with a fixed expiration date, and that he would take on a new, educational role as the head of conducting at Tanglewood.Additionally, the orchestra appointed Carlos Simon to a newly created post of composer chair; and announced that it would establish the Boston Symphony Orchestra Humanities Institute, an initiative with the goal of expanding the ensemble’s relationship with Boston outside its storied concert hall.“I came to the Boston Symphony with the idea that this is an extraordinary institution with a remarkable history,” Smith said in an interview. “But the opportunities of what we can do in the future were most compelling.”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?  More

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    ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Review: Layers of Love and Memory

    The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho draws on fact and fiction in this image-rich documentary that moves fast and far, but always returns home.Early in “Pictures of Ghosts,” an exhilarating documentary about specters onscreen and off, the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, pulls out a VHS tape. It’s of a 1981 TV interview with his mother, Joselice, a historian who died at age 54. In close-up, she discusses gathering information left out of history, an approach that her son has embraced here. After the tape abruptly cuts off, he says in voice-over, “it may seem like I’m discussing methodology” — as if speaking now both for his mother and for himself — “but I’m talking about love.”Love suffuses “Pictures of Ghosts,” a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home. Divided into three fluidly edited sections that build into a cohesive whole, the movie draws from both original and archival material, including photographs, newsreels, home movies, amateur films and images sampled from Mendonça Filho’s features. The results unfold at the crossroads of fiction and documentary, a space that Mendonça Filho knows well. “Fiction films are the best documentaries,” as a character in a movie says here.A film critic turned filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is best known for his own fictional movies, most notably “Aquarius” (2016). A nuanced, idiosyncratic drama set in his hometown, Recife, a northeastern port city on the Atlantic coast, it centers on a music critic (Sônia Braga), her circle of intimates, the enviably ocean-facing apartment in which she lives and the gentrification that she resists. It’s about stasis and change, memory and loss, art and commerce as well as a struggle for sovereignty. The building’s owners are trying to force her out, which means that it’s also about money and power — all themes that haunt “Pictures of Ghosts.”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?  More

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    ‘Miller’s Girl’ Review: Teacher’s Dirty Looks

    Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega fight pheromones and cliché in this eye-rolling duel between a teacher and his student.You can almost smell the arousal wafting from the screen as “Miller’s Girl” wends its overheated way through lubricious conversations and a comically on-the-mark soundtrack. Even the camera turns dreamy whenever the improbably named Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) — a microskirted tease and the film’s linchpin — activates her pout, especially if she’s chewing or smoking. It should be said that either is preferable to her talking.And oh, how she talks, her pretentious narration as grating as her precocious reading habits. A trust-fund teenager with absent parents and a Southern mansion at her disposal, Cairo arrives for her initial high-school writing class having already inhaled everything on the syllabus. Her professor, Jonathan Miller (an uncomfortably miscast Martin Freeman, who may have lost his professional bearings along with his English accent), is understandably turned on: A languishing writer who lacks both literary inspiration and behavioral boundaries, Jonathan is easy prey for Cairo’s jailbait shtick.A work of glaring artifice, “Miller’s Girl,” written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate. Bugs crawl on windowsills and a lighted cigarette drifts lazily to the floor in a movie that traps gifted actors in a fog of pheromones and cliché. Jonathan’s disappointed wife (Dagmara Dominczyk) slinks around in various states of undress and sobriety, like one of Tennessee Williams’s ruined heroines; Cairo’s best friend (Gideon Adlon, a standout) lusts after a baseball coach (a jovial Bashir Salahuddin), who lusts right back. Of course Cairo’s favorite author is Henry Miller.“This is inappropriate,” a chastened Jonathan finally admonishes Cairo, having climaxed while reading her term paper. She may be a minx, but he’s the real monster.Miller’s GirlRated R for smutty language and puerile poetry. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More