Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Review: Creepypizza

    This adaptation of a video game franchise is more interested in unpacking childhood trauma than packing in jump scares.A workweek’s worth of graveyard shifts should offer ample time to convert an overwrought trauma plot into a congenial camp scare-fest. But although “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” based on a popular video game franchise, reaches for horror-comedy flair, this dreary, mild adaptation never achieves the hybrid pleasures of a movie like “M3gan.” You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.Directed by Emma Tammi, “Five Nights” follows the morose Mike (Josh Hutcherson), whose trouble keeping employment has put him in danger of losing custody of his younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). Desperate, Mike accepts a mysterious gig as the sole security guard at the defunct and ramshackle Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a onetime playhouse showcasing animatronic animals.One might expect that the movie’s built-in timeline amid these creepy machines would translate to a series of set pieces escalating in violence or alarm. Instead, the story takes more of a mystery route. On top of his immediate burdens, Mike is fixated on solving the long-ago kidnapping of his younger brother, and hopes that inducing REM sleep (even while on the job) will replay the memory in his dreams and turn up repressed details.It’s a distressing back story, and Mike’s lingering pain sucks a lot of life out of what could have been an enjoyably eerie affair. The jump scares — hinging on fast cuts to close-ups — are often ineffective, and genre tropes abound: creepy, gawking children; a local policewoman (Elizabeth Lail) dispensing oblique warnings. Come to think of it, the cop’s apparently unlimited time to hang out at Freddy’s while on duty is a little frightening.Five Nights at Freddy’sRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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    Hipgnosis Made Mega Deals for Song Catalogs. Its Future Is Unclear.

    The company’s shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining its current structure.The future of Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the British company that helped kick off the music industry’s trend of top-dollar deals for artists’ song catalogs, is in question after its shareholders on Thursday rejected a $440 million divestment plan and voted against maintaining the company’s current structure.Hipgnosis, founded by Merck Mercuriadis, a former manager of stars like Beyoncé and Elton John, was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 and pitched investors on music rights as a special kind of financial asset that is “more valuable than gold or oil.” Since then Hipgnosis, along with a sister fund backed by the private equity giant Blackstone, have spent more than $2 billion to acquire music catalogs from Neil Young, Shakira, Justin Bieber, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blondie and other artists and songwriters.But in recent months Hipgnosis has come under increasing pressure from dissatisfied investors who have seen the company’s share price drop in comparison to its so-called net asset value, an estimate of its catalogs’ worth prepared by an independent firm. Its share price closed at 74.20 pounds on Thursday, down about 43 percent from a high of 129.20 in November 2021. Its market capitalization is about $1.2 billion.The company also shocked investors last week by suspending its quarterly dividend, after saying that Citrin Cooperman, the independent firm that values its assets, had reduced the amount the company was expected to receive as a result of an industrywide royalty rate adjustment in the United States. Citrin Cooperman, the company said, had calculated that Hipgnosis would receive $21.7 million in retroactive payments, but recently reduced that to $9.9 million, and Hipgnosis said it had suspended the dividend payment — which had been announced at 1.3125 pence, or about 1.6 cents, per ordinary share — to remain compliant with its debt covenants.The global rise in interest rates has altered the calculus of many top-dollar catalog deals, but the investors in Hipgnosis have also grown concerned about the company’s management.“No investor ever knew that the fund was being managed so close to the edge that they were very close to tripping the debt covenant,” Sachin Saggar, a research analyst at Stifel, said in an interview.Hipgnosis recently proposed selling 29 catalogs for $440 million to the Blackstone-backed fund, which is managed by a company led by Mercuriadis. The proceeds were to help pay off Hipgnosis’ debt and buy back shares. But many investors balked, calling the price too low.At the company’s general meeting on Thursday, shareholders rejected the catalog sale and voted against maintaining the company’s structure as an investment trust, a decision that must be renewed every five years. According to an announcement by Hipgnosis, the company’s board now has six months to introduce proposals for future plans, which “may or may not involve winding-up the company or liquidating all or part of the company’s existing portfolio of investments.”The chairman, Andrew Sutch, and two other directors will leave the board.One possibility is that the assets could be sold to Hipgnosis Song Management, the advisory firm led by Mercuriadis, who has that right through an agreement known as a call option.In a statement on Thursday, Mercuriadis said: “Our conversations with shareholders have revealed a consensus that they are enthusiastic about the quality of the company’s iconic portfolio of songs, however it is also clear that they are asking for change and we respect that feedback.” More

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    Taylor Swift’s Rerecording of ’1989’ May Be Her Biggest Yet. Here’s Why.

    The pop superstar’s new version of her 2014 blockbuster is due Friday, following a summer of media saturation and her 10th No. 1 hit.Taylor Swift’s “1989” has been a fixture in the Top 20 of Billboard’s album chart for months. Stuffed with some of the singer’s biggest pop hits, like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space,” the LP was a gargantuan hit when it was released in 2014, and this year Swift has been performing its songs on her record-breaking Eras Tour.But “1989” is about to make an all-but-certain plunge down the chart.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.That’s because on Friday, Swift will release “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” the latest installment in her ambitious and wildly successful project to rerecord her first six studio albums. What began a few years ago as an attempt to reclaim her music — and, perhaps, have a taste of revenge — after the sale of her former record label has become a blockbuster enterprise all its own, with punishing consequences for the original recordings.“1989” will be the fourth of Swift’s remakes, and each one so far has opened at No. 1 with successively bigger numbers. In early 2021, “Fearless” started with the equivalent of 291,000 sales in the United States. “Red,” anchored by a smoldering, 10-minute extended version of the song “All Too Well,” had 605,000 later that year. “Speak Now” came out in July and started with 716,000 sales, including a remarkable 268,500 copies sold on vinyl LP.Each one has arrived with deluxe packaging, a rainbow of colored vinyl variants and a thick appendix of “vault” bonus tracks that have given fans abundant material to discuss and decode — not to mention well-timed batches of themed merchandise. Among the items Swift is selling at her online store are a sweater decorated with sea gulls (à la the new album cover), for $74.89, and a device like an old-fashioned View-Master, for $19.89.How big “1989” could be is anyone’s guess, and her label, Republic Records, declined to offer any projections. But given the trajectory of the previous remakes, the enduring popularity of the songs on the original album and Swift’s near-total saturation of popular culture this year — in just the past few weeks, she released a hit concert film, reached No. 1 with a four-year-old song and has nearly upstaged the N.F.L. through her relationship with Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — the music industry is bracing for a monster debut, even in a year that has had major albums by Morgan Wallen, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo and Travis Scott.Swift has been stoking demand for “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” since announcing it in August, partnering with Google for an online puzzle to reveal clues about the album’s “vault” tracks; naturally, it crashed within hours.When Swift first spoke about her intention to rerecord her albums, in summer 2019 — shortly after the music manager Scooter Braun bought Big Machine, Swift’s original label, for a bit over $300 million — the music world scratched its collective head; most previous attempts at rerecordings had had little success. But when the new version of “Fearless” came out — by which time Braun had sold Swift’s recording rights to the investment firm Shamrock Capital — it became another lesson in Swift’s mastery in rallying her fan base.“When the rerecord process started with her, it was this curiosity, where no one really knew what it could do,” said Keith Caulfield, Billboard’s managing director of charts and data operations. “But they have turned into a phenomenon unto themselves.”Swift’s world tour, which has played to packed stadiums since March and is in line to sell well over $1 billion in tickets by the time it ends next year, has generally lifted her entire catalog. At various times this year, at least 10 of her albums, including the originals, have been in the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship albums chart.But each time Swift has released a rerecorded album, its corresponding original version has suffered. In the year after she released “Fearless (Taylor’s Version),” sales of the original fell 20 percent in the United States, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data for Billboard’s charts; the original “Red” dropped by about 45 percent. Neither has been on the Billboard 200 since 2021.Jaime Marconette, Luminate’s senior director of music insights and industry relations, noted how stark that impact can be on a week-to-week basis. In May, Swift said she would release a new “Speak Now” in eight weeks. “That announcement,” Marconette said, “immediately drove a 75.7 percent increase in total consumption for the original version.” But as soon as “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” came out, the original sank. Comparing a window of 14 weeks before and after the new version, the original fell 59 percent.On the latest chart, the new “Speak Now” is No. 18. The old version, which was most recently No. 191, had fallen off the chart entirely.Statistics like that call into question the value of Shamrock’s investment, which has been estimated at more than $300 million. In the short term, at least, there is no doubt that Swift’s rerecordings have severely dimmed the originals. But it may take years before it is clear whether there is a lasting impact. A spokeswoman for Shamrock said that no one at the firm was available to discuss the matter.Swift also stands to earn more money from her new recordings than her old ones, thanks to a deal she negotiated with Universal Music, Republic’s parent company, that gave her ownership rights to her recordings.As Swift’s new “1989” nears release, the singer has been promoting it steadily on social media, this week sharing an image of handwritten lyrics that fans have interpreted as being from an unreleased track. And truckloads of vinyl and CD copies of the new album have been making their way to brick-and-mortar stores.Even indie record shops are primed to do huge business with the new “1989,” as they have with all of Swift’s recent releases. Carl Mello of Newbury Comics, a music and collectibles chain that has 30 stores throughout the Northeast, said that for some of Swift’s previous albums, problems in the supply chain have meant that stores did not always have her records on release day. But those issues have been resolved, and the chain expects to have about 1,600 copies ready for sale on Friday.“I’ve been at Newbury Comics for just over 30 years, and I’ve never seen somebody who has occupied so many spots in our Top 40 vinyl records list at the same time, consistently for months and months,” Mello said.“It wouldn’t surprise me if Taylor Swift is 15 percent of our vinyl sales,” he added. “It’s extraordinary.”Audio produced by More

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    ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Will Return to Broadway This Spring

    An acclaimed revival of the musical plans to open in March at the Nederlander Theater.“Tommy” is returning to Broadway.A Chicago-born revival of the classic rock opera, which got strong reviews and sold well at Goodman Theater over the summer, will open at the Nederlander Theater in March.Set in and around London over a number of years starting during World War II, the show is about a boy who stops communicating after several early traumas, embraces and excels at pinball, and begins to have messianic delusions. The story is considered an expression of generational anger.The musical, whose full title is “The Who’s Tommy,” began as a concept album in 1969, and the original stage production opened on Broadway in 1993. It won five Tony Awards, including for its score by Pete Townshend of the Who. Townshend not only wrote the music and lyrics, but is also credited with writing the book with Des McAnuff, who directed the original and is now directing the revival.Writing in The Chicago Tribune, the critic Chris Jones called the revival “truly a ready-for-prime-time stunner” and said “Broadway has nothing else like this wizardry going on.”The revival’s lead producers are Stephen Gabriel and Ira Pittelman. Gabriel said he had loved the show since his high school band played the songs at a school dance, and jumped at producing the project when McAnuff said he wanted to revisit the material.“What we saw in Chicago reaffirmed my original thought that the piece was ahead of its time,” Gabriel said. “I always knew the music would resonate again, but I think the story, with its themes of trauma and bullying, goes toward conversations we have today — that’s discussed more freely and thoughtfully now, and when the show presents those themes, the audience leans in.”The revival is scheduled to begin previews March 8 and to open March 28; casting has not yet been announced. The show is being capitalized for up to $17 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; Gabriel said he expected the actual budget to be closer to $15.5 million.“Tommy” is at least the fifth musical revival announced for this season, joining “Merrily We Roll Along,” “Spamalot,” “The Wiz” and “Cabaret.” More

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    Beatles’ ‘Now and Then,’ Billed as ‘Last Song,’ Due Nov. 2

    “Now and Then,” an unfinished composition from the late 1970s, was completed using technology that separated John Lennon’s vocal from a piano track.“Now and Then,” a recently finished recording from the late 1970s that is being billed as the “last song” by the Beatles, will be released on Nov. 2, more than half a century after the group broke up, thanks to advancements in audio technology, the band’s remaining members announced Thursday.The track — along with two other songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” that were released in the mid-1990s — was initially recorded by John Lennon as a demo with piano and vocals at his home in Manhattan’s Dakota building not long before he was killed in 1980.After receiving those recordings from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in 1994, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr worked on the tracks, but found that the home recording of “Now and Then” could not be properly mixed with the tools of the time.Last year, according to the announcement, McCartney and Starr worked to complete the song, using the same audio technology — WingNut Films’ MAL — that the director Peter Jackson used to isolate instruments, vocals and chatter for his 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back.”“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said of “Now and Then” in a statement on Thursday. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”Starr added: “It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”McCartney previously caused confusion and consternation among purist Beatles fans earlier this year when he said that they had used “A.I.” technology to finish a final Lennon track. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I., so then we could mix the record, as you would normally do,” he said at the time.But rather than any artificially created sounds meant to reproduce Lennon’s voice or playing, the official announcement makes clear, the technology was used to preserve “the clarity and integrity of his original vocal performance by separating it from the piano.” The same technology was used for last year’s rerelease of the 1966 album “Revolver,” which included a new mix sourced directly from the four-track master tape recordings.“Now and Then,” which will be preceded by a 12-minute making-of documentary the day before its release and a music video the day after, includes “electric and acoustic guitar recorded in 1995 by George, Ringo’s new drum part, and bass, guitar and piano from Paul, which matches John’s original playing,” according to the announcement. McCartney also added a slide guitar solo inspired by Harrison, as well as backing vocals with Starr in the chorus.The track will also feature a string arrangement by Giles Martin, the son of the former Beatles producer George Martin, who died in 2016, along with McCartney and the composer Ben Foster, plus backing vocals from three other Beatles songs — “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Because” — as a nod to the Beatles’ stage show and album, “Love.”The release of “Now and Then” will be paired with the Beatles’ 1962 debut single “Love Me Do” as a double A-side single with an original cover by the artist Ed Ruscha. The song will also be included in the expanded reissue of the Beatles’ greatest hits collections, “1962-1966” (known as “The Red Album”) and “1967-1970” (“The Blue Album”), due out Nov. 10. More

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    ‘After Death’ Review: Visions at the Brink From Those Who Returned

    A documentary about near-death experiences crescendos with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.The faith film “After Death” enters a crowded field of testimonials about near-death experiences, a staple of YouTube videos and bookstores. This documentary convenes a supergroup of writers and survivors: from early expounders like the author Raymond Moody (widely credited with coining the term “near-death experience”) and the cardiologist Michael Sabom, to such recent best-selling names as the pastor Don Piper (“90 Minutes in Heaven”) and a surgeon, Mary Neal (“To Heaven and Back”).The members of the group recount their forays into the hereafter, illustrated with murky re-enactments of what brought them there: a car accident, an abdominal rupture, a near-drowning, a plane crash. There’s the initial pretense of scientific objectivity, but it soon feels beside the point. These accounts crescendo naturally with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.In the documentary, written and directed by Stephen Gray and co-directed by Chris Radtke, not much deviates from the usual tropes: People drift out of their bodies and journey into light, love, and new awareness (with PBS “Nova”-style trippy imagery). That sounds transcendent, and reassuring, but the stories are rolled together in a hash of editing, and the speakers can be oddly low energy. One exception is Howard Storm, a professor-turned-minister who believes he was hustled not toward heaven but to the darkest reaches of hell.Released on more than 2,000 screens by the studio behind the recent child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” — at a time when a majority of Americans say near-death experiences are possible — this film also closes with a QR code to buy more tickets. But whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.After DeathRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club’ Review: Cinema Education

    This documentary is both a look at a small, obsessive film club that formed in the early ’90s in South Korea and an origin story of the director Bong Joon Ho, who was in the group.Every filmmaker, including the great ones, starts somewhere — even if that means making a low-rent stop-motion short called “Looking for Paradise” that’s about a stuffed gorilla searching for freedom while fighting a caterpillar that emerged from its fecal matter. That was how a young, student Bong Joon Ho made his debut, a saga detailed in “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club,” a charming documentary about a cohort of South Korean cinephiles formed in 1992.Before becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary auteurs (through movies including (“Parasite,” “Okja” and “Snowpiercer”), Bong found an education as part of this tiny, makeshift film academy made up of graduate students and other film lovers. The documentary, directed by Lee Hyuk-rae (who was part of the group), gathers the club members to reminisce about these early days, when they’d congregate in a yellow-painted office to watch and study bootleg VHS copies of art-house movies.Their interests were representative of what was then a larger, budding wave of South Korean cinephile culture that would produce major talent, including Bong and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, though most of the other members of this particular group went on to have careers outside of film.The documentary carries a couple of interesting insights into Bong’s own origins: There’s a surprisingly profound kernel of emotional acuteness in his amateur debut, along with an early instance of the motif of basements that shows up in many of his later films. But the doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film ClubNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Deep Rising’ Review: Who Gets to Mine the Ocean Floor?

    Matthieu Rytz’s documentary about the bounty at the bottom of the sea examines the fight over whether to reap these riches or preserve them.Documentaries on ecological crises often begin by scaring the bejesus out of viewers before adding a note of tempered optimism. For “Deep Rising,” a film about the race to mine the deep seabed (in particular, the floor beneath the Pacific’s vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone), the director Matthieu Rytz eschews shock for awe, and inflammatory rhetoric for measured persuasion.The director’s choice of his two chief characters proves richly dialectical. Gerard Barron is the hipster CEO of The Metals Company, a Canadian mining concern focused on harvesting polymetallic nodules containing nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper among other minerals that the so-called green economy craves. (“Please get nickel!,” Elon Musk can be heard saying in an audio clip.) Sandor Mulsow is a warm, serious-minded marine geologist and the former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the International Seabed Authority, the organization the U.N. has tasked with protecting the ocean floor.Rytz takes care not to lionize or demonize either man. Even so, the pitch Barron gives a roomful of high-net investors sounds too good — and low-impact — to be true.The composer Olafur Arnalds’s string-led score and the actor Jason Momoa’s sonorous narration add to the film’s argument that where the world’s biodiversity and the seafloor’s still mysterious environs are concerned, caution and care are paramount.The footage of iridescent creatures with billowing tentacles or translucent bodies mesmerizes but it also creates contemplative pauses amid the documentary’s facts, interviews and the damning history of the mining industry. The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.Deep RisingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More