Aurelia Butler

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    Jimmy Buffett, ‘Margaritaville’ Singer, Is Dead at 76

    With songs like “Margaritaville” and “Fins,” he became a folk hero to fans known as Parrot Heads. He also became a millionaire hundreds of times over.Jimmy Buffett, the singer, songwriter, author, sailor and entrepreneur whose roguish brand of island escapism on hits like “Margaritaville” and “Fins” made him something of a latter-day folk hero, especially among his devoted following of so-called Parrot Heads, died on Friday. He was 76. His death was announced in a statement on his website. The statement did not say where he died or specify a cause. Peopled with pirates, smugglers, beach bums and barflies, Mr. Buffett’s genial, self-deprecating songs conjured a world of sun, saltwater and nonstop parties animated by the calypso country-rock of his limber Coral Reefer Band. His live shows abounded with singalong anthems and festive tropical iconography, making him a perennial draw on the summer concert circuit, where he built an ardent fan base akin to the Grateful Dead’s Dead Heads.Mr. Buffett found success primarily with albums. He enjoyed only a few years on the pop singles chart, with “Margaritaville,” his 1977 breakthrough hit and only single to reach the pop Top 10.“I blew out my flip-flop/Stepped on a pop-top/Cut my heel, had to cruise on back home,” he sang woozily to the song’s lilting Caribbean rhythms. “But there’s booze in the blender/And soon it will render/That frozen concoction that helps me hang on.”Mr. Buffett’s music was often described as “Gulf and western,” a nod to his fusion of laid-back twang and island-themed lyrics, as well as a play on the conglomerate name Gulf and Western, the former parent of Paramount Pictures, among other companies.His songs tended to be of two main types: wistful ballads like “Come Monday” and “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and clever up-tempo numbers like “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” Some were both, like “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” a 1978 homage to Mr. Buffett’s seafaring grandfather, written with the producer Norbert Putnam.“I’m just a son of a son, son of a son/Son of a son of a sailor,” he sang. “The sea’s in my veins, my tradition remains/I’m just glad I don’t live in a trailer.”The Caribbean and the Gulf Coast were Mr. Buffett’s muses, and nowhere more so than Key West in Florida. He first visited the island at the urging of Jerry Jeff Walker, his sometime songwriting and drinking partner, after a gig fell through in Miami in the early ’70s.“When I found Key West and the Caribbean, I wasn’t really successful yet,” Mr. Buffett said in a 1989 interview with The Washington Post. “But I found a lifestyle, and I knew that whatever I did would have to work around my lifestyle.”Mr. Buffett had an affinity for sailing, and his songwriting was greatly influenced by his laid-back life in Key West.Gems/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe locales provided Mr. Buffett with more than just a breezy, sailing life and grist for his songwriting. They were also the impetus for the creation of a tropical-themed business empire that included a restaurant franchise, a hotel chain and boutique tequila, T-shirt and footwear lines, all of which made him a millionaire hundreds of times over.“I’ve done a bit of smugglin’, and I’ve run my share of grass,” Mr. Buffett sang of his early days trafficking marijuana in the Florida Keys in “A Pirate Looks at Forty.”“I made enough money to buy Miami,” he went on, alluding to his subsequent entrepreneurial pursuits. “But I pissed it away so fast/Never meant to last/Never meant to last.”His claim to squandering his wealth notwithstanding, Mr. Buffett proved to be a shrewd manager of his considerable fortune; in 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth at $1 billion.“If Mr. Buffett is a pirate, to borrow one of his favorite images, it is hardly because of his days palling around with dope smugglers in the Caribbean,” the critic Anthony DeCurtis wrote in a 1999 essay for The New York Times. “He is a pirate in the way that Bill Gates and Donald Trump have styled themselves, as plundering rebels, visionary artists of the deal, not bound by the societal restrictions meant for smaller, more careful men.”(The comparison to Mr. Trump here is strictly economic; Mr. Buffett was a Democrat.)Mr. Buffett was also an accomplished author, one of only six writers, along with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and William Styron, to top both The Times’s fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists. By the time he wrote “Tales from Margaritaville” (1989), the first of his three No. 1 best sellers, he had abandoned the hedonistic lifestyle he had previously embraced.“I could wind up like a lot of my friends did, burned out or dead, or redirect the energy,” he told The Washington Post in 1989. “I’m not old, but I’m getting older. That period of my life is over. It was fun — all that hard drinking, hard drugging. No apologies.”“I still have a very happy life,” he went on. “I just don’t do the things I used to do.”Mr. Buffett in 1991. “Margaritaville,” his blockbuster hit, rocketed him to fame in 1977.Tim Mosenfelder/ImageDirect, via Getty ImagesJames William Buffett was born on Dec. 25, 1946, in Pascagoula, Miss., one of three children of Mary Loraine (Peets) and James Delaney Buffett Jr. Both of his parents were longtime employees of the Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company. His father was a manager of government contracts, and his mother, known simply as Peets, was an assistant director of industrial relations.Jimmy was raised Roman Catholic in Mobile, Ala., where he took up the trombone in elementary school, at St. Ignatius Catholic School. He went to high school at another Catholic institution in Mobile, the McGill Institute.In 1964 he enrolled in classes at Auburn University. He flunked out and later attended the University of Southern Mississippi and began performing in local nightclubs. He graduated with a degree in history in 1969, before moving to the French Quarter of New Orleans and playing in a cover band on Bourbon Street.In 1970 he moved to Nashville, hoping to make it as a country singer while working as a journalist for Billboard. (Mr. Buffett was credited with having broken the story about the disbanding of the pioneering bluegrass duo Flatt and Scruggs.) “Down to Earth,” his debut album, was released on Andy Williams’s Barnaby label that year. It sold 324 copies.Mr. Buffett’s second album for Barnaby, “High Cumberland Jubilee,” went unreleased until 1976, long after he had signed with ABC-Dunhill and recorded “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,” released in 1973 and featuring the debauched party anthem “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”Mr. Buffett had a fondness for puns, as witnessed by “A White Sport Coat,” an album title inspired by the song “A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation),” a 1957 pop-crossover hit for the country singer Marty Robbins. Another album was called “Last Mango in Paris.”The “Margaritaville” restaurant and hotel chains are part of the tropical-themed business empire that Mr. Buffett built.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesMr. Buffett’s 1974 release “Living and Dying in ¾ Time” included a version of the comedian Lord Buckley’s “God’s Own Drunk.” “Come Monday,” a lovelorn track from the record, became his first Top 40 hit.“A1A” (also from 1974) was named for the oceanfront highway that runs along Florida’s Atlantic coastline. The album was Mr. Buffett’s first to contain references to Key West and maritime life, but it was 1977’s platinum-selling “Changes in Attitudes, Changes in Latitudes,” with the blockbuster hit “Margaritaville,” that finally catapulted him to stardom. “Fins,” another major single, was released in 1979.A series of popular releases followed, culminating in 1985 with “Songs You Know By Heart,” a compilation of Mr. Buffett’s most beloved songs to date. The record became the best-selling album of his career.Mr. Buffett also opened the first of his many “Margaritaville” stores in 1985. That was the year that the former Eagles bassist Timothy B. Schmit, then a member of the Coral Reefer Band, coined the term Parrot Heads to describe Mr. Buffett’s staunch legion of fans, the bulk of whom were baby boomers.A supporter of conservationist causes, Mr. Buffett moved away from the Keys in the late ’70s because of the area’s increasing commercialization. He initially relocated to Aspen, Colo., before making his home on St. Barts in the Caribbean. He also had houses in Palm Beach, Fla., and Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island.In addition to touring and recording, activities he pursued into the 2020s, Mr. Buffett wrote music for movies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Urban Cowboy.” He also appeared in movies and television shows, including “Rancho Deluxe,” “Jurassic World” and the “Hawaii Five-O” revival in the 2010s, where he starred as the helicopter pilot Frank Bama, a character from his best-selling 1992 novel, “Where Is Joe Merchant?”Mr. Buffett favored wordplay in the names of his songs and albums, like “Last Mango in Paris” and “Jamaica Mistaica,” a sendup song about an incident that involved Jamaican authorities mistakenly shooting at one of his planes.Aaron Richter for The New York Times An avid pilot, Mr. Buffett owned several aircraft and often flew himself to his shows. In 1994 he crashed one of his airplanes in waters near Nantucket, Mass., while taking off. He survived the accident, after swimming to safety, with only minor injuries.In 1996 another of Mr. Buffett’s planes, Hemisphere Dancer, was shot at by the Jamaican police, who suspected the craft was being used to smuggle marijuana. On board the airplane, which sustained little damage, were U2’s Bono; Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records; and Mr. Buffett’s wife and two daughters. The Jamaican authorities later admitted the incident was a case of mistaken identity, inspiring Mr. Buffett to write “Jamaica Mistaica,” a droll sendup of the affair.Mr. Buffett is survived by his wife, Jane (Slagsvol) Buffett; two daughters, Savanah Jane Buffett and Sarah Buffett; a son, Cameron; two grandsons; and two sisters, Lucy and Laurie Buffett.In a 1979 interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Buffett was asked about a previous remark in which he somewhat incongruously cited the wholesome choral director Mitch Miller and the marauding Gulf Coast pirate Jean Lafitte as two of his greatest inspirations.“Mitch Miller, for sure,” Mr. Buffett said, doubtless in acknowledgment of the way his own fans sang along with him at concerts. “In the old days: “Sing Along with Mitch?” Who didn’t?”“But Jean Lafitte was my hero as a romantic character,” he continued. “I’m not sure he was a musical influence. His lifestyle influenced me, most definitely, ’cause I’m the very opposite of Mitch Miller.”Aaron Boxerman More

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    Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

    Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.” More

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    Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78

    She won Emmy and Peabody Awards for “The Loving Story,” about a Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage.Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.The cause had not yet been determined, her sister and only immediate survivor, Judith Cohen, said.After founding the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and directing it for a decade, Ms. Buirski (pronounced BURR-skee) made her own first documentary, “The Loving Story,” in 2011.The film explored the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, who faced imprisonment because their interracial marriage in 1958 was illegal in Virginia. (She was part-Black and part-Native American, and he was white.)Their challenge to the law resulted in a landmark civil rights ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 that voided state anti-miscegenation laws.The documentary, directed by Ms. Buirski, won an Emmy for outstanding historical programming, long form, and a Peabody Award. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and made its television debut on HBO during Black History Month in 2012.“Drawing from a wealth of stunning archival footage,” Dave Itzkoff wrote in The New York Times. “‘The Loving Story’ recreates a seminal moment in history in uncommon style, anchoring a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.”Richard and Mildred Loving in “The Loving Story,” Ms. Buirski’s documentary about that Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage during the Civil Rights era.Grey Villet, via Barbara Villet/Icarus FilmsMs. Buirski went on to seek more stories to tell, drawing on a wide range of voices and experiences.“Nancy was a completely original thinker and a visionary,” her frequent collaborator and producer, Susan Margolin, said in an email. “With every film she pushed the limits of the art form with her kaleidoscopic, unique approach to storytelling.”Ms. Buirski directed, co-produced and wrote “Afternoon of a Faun” (2013), about the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio while on tour in 1956; and “By Sidney Lumet” (2015), about the acclaimed filmmaker, both of which were broadcast by PBS on “American Masters.”She also directed, co-produced and wrote “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (2017), about the 1944 kidnapping of a Black woman by seven white men. Despite their confessions, they were never charged, although in 2011 the Alabama Legislature apologized for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.The critic Roger Ebert called the film “a stiffing, infuriating marvel,” and it was awarded a human rights prize at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.Ms. Buirski went on to direct, co-produce and write “A Crime on the Bayou” (2021) about a 1966 altercation sparked by school integration, and “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” (2023), which explores John Schlesinger’s 1969 film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.She was also a special adviser to “Summer of Soul” (2021), Questlove’s Academy Award-winning concert-film documentary, based on rediscovered footage, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Years earlier, as a picture editor on the international desk at The New York Times, Ms. Buirski was credited with choosing the image that won the newspaper its first Pulitzer Prize for photography, in 1994.After seeking a photograph to accompany an article on war and famine in southern Sudan, she choose one by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, of an emaciated toddler collapsing on the way to a United Nations feeding center as a covetous vulture lurked in the background.Ms. Buirski commended the photo to Nancy Lee, The Times’ picture editor at the time. She then proposed it, strongly, for the front page, because, she recalled telling another editor, “This is going to win the paper’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize for photography.”The photograph ended up appearing on an inside page in the issue of March 26, 1993, but the reaction from readers, concerned about the child’s fate, was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors’ note afterward explaining that the child had continued to the feeding center after Mr. Carter chased away the vulture.The picture won the Pulitzer in the feature photography category. (Mr. Carter died by suicide a few months later at 33.)Ms. Buirski was born Nancy Florence Cohen on June 24, 1945, in Manhattan to Daniel and Helen (Hochstein) Cohen. Her father was a paper manufacturer.After graduating from New Rochelle High School in Westchester County, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., in 1967.She worked as an editor for the Magnum photo agency before joining The Times.As a photographer she produced a book of 150 images titled “Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America” (1994), which vividly captured the children of migrant farmworkers at work during the day and attending school at night and dramatized the hazards they faced from poor housing, harsh working conditions and exposure to pesticides.Her marriages to Peter Buirski and Kenneth Friedlein ended in divorce. More

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    Reeling From Heartbreak, and Then ‘Penelope’ Showed Up

    Alex Bechtel’s new musical, sort of “a pandemic parable,” gives voice to a mythical character in “The Odyssey.”The composer and lyricist Alex Bechtel didn’t go looking for Penelope, the mythical character in “The Odyssey” famed for her clever weaving and steadfast endurance of long abandonment.At a low moment in Bechtel’s romantic life, Penelope came to him, inspiring music that developed into a concept album. A breakup album, really, begun in 2020 during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Bechtel was at home in Philadelphia, far from his partner in Boston, as their relationship fell apart — and as he wondered, with the nation’s stages shuttered, whether he would ever be able to work in theater again.The music, then, was also fed by what he called his “terror and confusion and grief and longing for this thing that I have chosen to do with my life.”“I started writing songs from the point of view of Penelope,” he said. “I never sat down to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to do an adaptation of “The Odyssey” from her point of view?’ It’s just, I was going through this large experience, and that character was within arm’s reach.”For the next couple of weeks, on a sandy-floored stage in Garrison, N.Y., she will blossom into three dimensions. “Penelope,” the delicate, contemporary, unconventional musical that evolved from Bechtel’s aching album of the same name, has a preview on Saturday and opens Sunday at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. With five musicians — pianist, percussionist and strings — who function at times as a chorus in the ancient Greek sense, the show has a cast of one, Tatiana Wechsler, who plays Penelope.“It’s kind of like if she were putting on her own cabaret act,” Wechsler said, “but then she gets stuck in the imaginings.”Directed in its world premiere by Eva Steinmetz, “Penelope” has a size well suited to the American theater’s lately straitened economics.That’s coincidental, though. While Bechtel joked that it’s lucky he “didn’t come out of the pandemic with a 45-person musical,” a solo piece simply seemed right for expressing Penelope’s isolation and loneliness as she waits for her adventuring husband, Odysseus, to return.“It needed to just be her,” Bechtel said on a cool and rainy August afternoon, fresh from playing the keyboard at a rehearsal down the road from the festival’s tented stage.Wechsler and Bechtel at a rehearsal for the musical, which grew out of an album project that was released digitally on Bandcamp.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times‘Sort of dream time’When Bechtel and Steinmetz talk about the project’s origins, a slight but unmistakable haze of nostalgia sometimes softens their recollections.“He and I were having what we called weekly office hours,” Steinmetz said, “which was sitting on my porch drinking wine and eating pizza and talking about life and love and politics and art and grief. It was really sweet.”“Part of that for me,” he said, “processing this thing I was moving through, was asking her opinion on this music that I was trying to construct into an album that had a narrative and a shape and was theatrical in its sort of construct. A lot of the ways that that album moves are because of things she was whispering in my ear.”“As it grew,” she said, “and we realized that there really was a character here and this really was a story, then office hours became the sort of dream time when we imagined what it would be like to live in a world where we could do live theater again, and where we could turn it into a show, but kind of couldn’t imagine what that world would look like.”The phrase that Bechtel uses to describe music appearing unbidden in his mind is “showing up,” which is how the album project had begun. What surprised him, after he had sent the tracks into the world, releasing them digitally on Bandcamp, was that new “Penelope” music kept showing up.“Partly,” he said, “that was the cyclical, unpredicted and nonlinear nature of healing. Like, you can’t just decide you’re done healing from a heartbreak. That’s not how the heart works.”But hope was also in the mix. As the reopening of theaters started to seem possible, Bechtel had reason to keep writing. He and Steinmetz started shaping the songs into a musical.To workshop the show, they asked the actor and writer Grace McLean — of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” and more recently of “Bad Cinderella” — to play Penelope.McLean was already a fan of “The Appointment,” the critically embraced Off Broadway abortion musical that Steinmetz and Bechtel made with Alice Yorke and the company Lightning Rod Special. But that show, which juxtaposes the lurid absurdism of imaginary fetuses singing for their lives with the stark realism of pregnant women seeking abortions, would seem to have little overlap with “Penelope.”Yet Steinmetz sees a common thread in each musical’s effort to “take a wild and often monstrous myth and expose the everyday humanity at the center of it. In both stories, there’s a person on the periphery, enduring consequences of the myth.”With “Penelope,” running through Sept. 17 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Bechtel said he wanted his character to say “the stuff that she didn’t get to say in that poem.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesPenelope’s voiceBechtel’s long-ago first exposure to “The Odyssey” was an episode of “Wishbone,” the 1990s PBS children’s series where, he explained helpfully, “a dog becomes the lead character of classic tales of literature.” Penelope, however, “was a human woman, as I recall.”An inauspicious introduction? Maybe. Now, though, he has a long list of volumes that he considers the “works consulted” in the making of “Penelope.” Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” is on it, as well as Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” Mary Oliver’s “Devotions: Collected Poems,” and Annie-B Parson’s “The Choreography of Everyday Life,” a pandemic meditation that considers “The Odyssey.”The book that spoke powerfully to McLean was Madeline Miller’s novel “Circe,” in which Penelope and her loom figure vividly. McLean borrowed Bechtel’s copy — “He tends to carry all of his little source material books around,” she said by phone — and in it she “saw the influence of this strong, witchy woman that they wanted to invoke in their Penelope.”If the character was Bechtel and Steinmetz’s when they brought her on, the three of them tailored it to fit McLean, who ultimately wrote the musical’s book with them. Through improvisation, they found what she called “the connective tissue” between the songs. Then professional and personal scheduling conflicts kept her from taking on the role at Hudson Valley Shakespeare.“But what I’m hearing from Alex and Eva,” McLean said, “is that it’s not necessarily just bespoke to Grace McLean — that it’s translating to Tatiana as well. That makes me feel like we hopefully tapped into something that sounds like Penelope’s voice, not just Grace’s or Alex’s or Eva’s.”The sound of Penelope’s voice, of course, is open to invention. “The Odyssey,” for one, isn’t much interested in her.Bechtel, though, was drawn to that empty space where her voice might have been: “The stuff that she didn’t get to say in that poem, and the stuff that she didn’t get to experience in that poem.”This “Penelope” is all her story — and what he calls “a pandemic parable,” too. She is a woman trapped at home, suffused with longing, and taking the same nature walk too many times a day.Remember that? More

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    The Grueling Process of Making the Horror Movie ‘Beaten to Death’

    The director Sam Curtain and the actor Thomas Roach discuss making a new ultraviolent horror movie so grueling that it left its lead hospitalized at the end of the shoot.From “Slumber Party Massacre” to “It Follows,” some of the most memorable horror movie titles double as pint-size plot summaries. That’s the case for Sam Curtain’s “Beaten to Death,” a mercilessly violent new movie that has critics dog-earing their thesauruses for superlatives to describe its savagery. So far, there’s “gauntlet of extreme horror” and “non-stop nightmare.”Now in theaters, “Beaten to Death” is high on depravity and low on plot. It’s about a man, Jack (Thomas Roach), who travels to a desolate stretch of Tasmania and encounters deranged locals who kick, punch, slice and, in the film’s most horrific scene, blind him and leave him to roam the landscape alone. In an interview, Roach said the role’s physical demands were “very challenging”; near the end of the 30-day shoot, he was hospitalized overnight for an inflamed kidney.Roach said he would consider it a badge of honor if there were walkouts at American theaters. “Hopefully we’re going to make a few people squeamish,” he said.Curtain and Roach recently spoke over Zoom from Tasmania about their love of gross-out horror and what’s so Australian about extreme cinema. (The film is a nonunion Australian project, and not impacted by the SAG-AFTRA strike.) The interview has been edited and condensed.Sam, why did you make this film?SAM CURTAIN Horror’s just fun. Even if it’s the most disturbing thing, it’s still enjoyable.Would you describe this film as enjoyable?CURTAIN [Laughs] No. Even though it’s shockingly violent, there’s a bit of playfulness to it. This onslaught that Jack receives, it’s like oh no, not again. Oh no, not again. Because it’s our friend, Tom, playing the role, it’s like, what could we do to Tom?That blinding scene is tough to watch.CURTAIN It was a lot of fun. What excited us was what we referred to as “the black” — after Jack has had his eyes gouged out, you get his blinded point of view, and what you hear can be creepier than what you see. In a cinema, that’s the one I’ve been waiting for, to see how people respond to that couple of minutes of pure black on the screen with just sound design. The sound you hear in that scene is Thomas vomiting. Our poor sound guy listening to [makes a retching sound] is hard to forget.Roach in a scene from “Beaten to Death.”Welcome Villain FilmsWhy make it so violent?CURTAIN We thought it was an opportunity to create a scene that’s really quite shocking. We were being strategic as well. If we can create a scene that gets people talking, that can only help the movie.Was there a film that inspired you?CURTAIN The “Hills Have Eyes” remake. That’s a really nasty little movie, but also it’s quite beautifully shot. It’s out in the desert and the gore is really good and there’s action to it. Besides that, it was classics like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” — what I think they call hicksploitation.Thomas, why did you take this role?THOMAS ROACH Sam and I were out having drinks when he pitched me the idea. As soon as he said “lead,” he had me. [Laughs] I was concerned with the extreme nature of the role and what it would take to get it done. I probably did underestimate that, because it was quite demanding in the end, physically and emotionally.It was as grueling as it looks?ROACH Yeah. I spent a large portion of the shoot with these big, heavy appliances over my eyes and I couldn’t see at all. That was quite isolating. Between takes you’re just sitting in darkness and you don’t know what’s going on around you. It’s strange how quickly you withdraw into yourself. I found myself not really contributing to conversations around me because I didn’t know where anyone was. I just sat there. I had to be taken like a toddler to the toilet.I wanted to spend the movie acting like I was in a state of shock. I was shivering and tensed up and hyperventilating for a lot of it. Before we’d start rolling, to the chagrin of everyone on set, I’d go into a coughing fit and get to the edge of where I would vomit and then be like, ready to roll. You end the day sore all over.Is there something uniquely Australian about the film?CURTAIN The Australian characters, these big burly blokey-blokes with thick Aussie accents.ROACH The whole “Crocodile Dundee” bloke — maybe outside of Australia they think everybody’s like that. We wanted to turn that on its head. The archetypal characters we have in our movie are quite toxic. The landscape is also a character. The real antagonists are the elements, specifically Tasmanian.Thomas, would you be in a movie like this again?ROACH Would I do it tomorrow? No. I’m either a glutton for punishment or an idiot, but I would do it again. More

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    The Ultimate Tammy Wynette Primer

    Hear her biggest hits, deeper cuts and tributes from disciples.Tammy Wynette onstage in Central Park in 1977.Associated PressDear listeners,For years, I’ve been waiting for the right moment to write about one of my favorite country singers, the great, oft-misunderstood Tammy Wynette.Throughout this year, Wynette has been materializing in pop culture in all sorts of unexpected ways. First, Jessica Chastain played her — garnering an Emmy nomination — in the Showtime limited series “George & Tammy.” In May, the critic Steacy Easton published a rousing little book called “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” arguing that Wynette deserves — but has not received — as much modern recognition as her peers Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. And earlier this month, Lana Del Rey made headlines when she performed a slyly reverent cover of “Stand by Your Man” at an Arkansas concert.At last! I thought, cracking my knuckles. It’s time.Del Rey’s cover was truly the connection I’d been waiting for. I’ve been thinking for a while about the shared sensibility between Wynette and the millennial-era obsession with “sad girl music,” a sometimes glorified, sometimes bemoaned label affixed to art that finds a deep pathos in the performance of femininity. As I wrote in a piece published earlier on Friday, perhaps this is a newly illuminating context in which to consider Wynette — and an opportunity to take her more seriously.The first time I can remember hearing Wynette’s name was in the media brouhaha that resulted from Hillary Clinton denigrating her in a 1992 interview, responding to rumors of the soon-to-be-president’s infidelity: “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she said. Wynette was rightly offended, and Clinton apologized, but the damage had been done. As a young girl not really understanding all of this but internalizing it anyway, I developed a dim idea that Wynette was controversial.When I got older and started listening to her music, though, I found that she was something so much richer and more complex. I came to hear in her voice an unapologetic sense of anguish, disappointment and sometimes even defiance in the face of heartbreak. I heard a performer with a keen sense of tonal calibration and intuitive emotional intelligence — a great storyteller, and a much needed chronicler of often dismissed tales of feminized pain.Today’s playlist is a celebration of Wynette in all her multifaceted glory. It works well as a companion piece to my article, but it can also be a stand-alone introduction (or reintroduction) to her music. It features a lot of her own biggest hits, but also some tributes from disciples like Reba McEntire, Kellie Pickler and even Del Rey herself. I decided not to include any of Wynette’s many duets with her ex-husband George Jones, not because I don’t love most of them (I do), but because Wynette is so often reduced to her relationship with Jones and I wanted to give her music a chance to stand on its own. It does, however, feature a collaboration with her artistic equals and fellow Honky Tonk Angels, Parton and Lynn. May this playlist inspire singalongs, cry-alongs and good girls to go bad.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Tammy Wynette: “Womanhood”This later hit from the 1978 album “Womanhood” is one of Wynette’s strangest singles and — perhaps not coincidentally — one of my favorites. Here, Wynette embodies a character who has been led into temptation: “I am a Christian, Lord, but I’m a woman too,” she sings amid blustery guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a late ’70s Fleetwood Mac record. “If you are listening, Lord, please show me what to do.” “Womanhood” was penned by the prolific Nashville songwriter Bobby Braddock, and in his memoir he described the song as being “about a girl having a tearful talk with God about losing her virginity.” That Wynette was a woman of 36 embarking upon her fifth marriage when she recorded the song — which would become her final Top 5 hit on the country charts — adds another layer of complexity, pathos and even kitsch. (Listen on YouTube)2. Tammy Wynette: “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”Long before Rihanna went bad, there was Tammy. As with many of Wynette’s signature tunes, there is a sense of resignation and even self-abnegation at work here: “I’ll change if it takes that to make you happy,” she tells a whiskey-swilling, bar-dwelling husband as she offers to adopt a lifestyle more like his on this swinging, upbeat number from her 1967 debut. But I also hear a playful defiance in Wynette’s vocal here: She’s throwing a man’s questionable behavior back in his face and subtly pointing out a double standard in the expectations of how men and women are supposed to act. Plus, for once, it sounds like she’s having a blast. (Listen on YouTube)3. Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn: “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”In 1993, the pioneering country queens Parton and Lynn teamed up with Wynette for a spirited collaborative album called “Honky Tonk Angels,” named after Kitty Wells’s classic 1952 anthem. Since most of Wynette’s best-known collaborations find her working through heartache with Jones, it’s refreshing to hear her singing with this accomplished (and convincingly hell-raising) group of women. For the love of big hair and shoulder pads, stop what you’re doing and watch this video of them performing it live together. (Listen on YouTube)4. Kellie Pickler: “Where’s Tammy Wynette”“How ’bout a honky-tonk angel to tell me how this whole thing works,” Pickler sings on this saucy but sincerely sweet track from her 2011 album, “100 Proof,” bridging the gap between Wynette and another generation of female country stars. “Where’s Tammy Wynette when you need her?” (Listen on YouTube)5. Tammy Wynette: “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”Not only is this song — which hit No. 1 on the country charts in 1968 and earned Wynette her second Grammy nomination — a quintessential showcase of her ability to draw rich melancholy out of a lyric, it’s also a perfect example of Billy Sherrill’s signature, Wall-of-Sound-on-Music-Row style of production. C-L-A-S-S-I-C. (Listen on YouTube)6. Tammy Wynette: “Apartment #9”Wynette’s first proper Nashville recording, and her first of many collaborations with Sherrill, wasn’t a runaway hit when it was first released in 1966, but it’s since become one of her most beloved performances. “Just follow the stairway to this lonely world of mine,” she sings, as the atmosphere is heightened by a weeping pedal steel guitar. Easton, in “Why Tammy Wynette Matters,” calls this one “still the saddest country song ever sung.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Reba McEntire: “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain”“This is more than a little smile I’m having to fake,” Reba McEntire sings on this 2019 ballad, released a few years after her divorce from her husband of more than two decades. McEntire brings a grown woman’s grit and a lived-through-it wisdom to this song, which both talks back to Wynette’s music in its own words (“Standing by your man is a broken plan/When he breaks your heart and all your trust with his two cheating hands”) and calls upon her as a kind of patron saint of heartbreak. (Listen on YouTube)8. Tammy Wynette: “’Til I Can Make It on My Own”Wynette co-wrote this 1976 hit, one of her greatest torch songs, with Sherrill and her soon-to-be fifth husband, the country songwriter George Richey. Of all her hits, Wynette liked to say that this one — covered later by Kenny Rogers and Dottie West, and, much later, by Martina McBride — meant the most to her. (Listen on YouTube)9. Tammy Wynette: “I Don’t Wanna Play House”This heart-wrenching 1967 breakout hit — Wynette’s first country No. 1 as a solo artist, and the performance that earned her first Grammy — is about a mother watching her young daughter playing with a neighborhood boy and overhearing her say something devastating: “I’ve watched Mommy and Daddy, and if that’s the way it’s done/I don’t wanna play house, it makes my Mommy cry. ” The song hits on plenty of the themes that would soon become Wynette’s bread and butter (broken families; lonely women; divorce’s impact on children) and a sudden, thrilling shift into her higher vocal register in the middle of a verse when she sings, “And then the teardrops made my eyes go dim.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Lana Del Rey featuring Nikki Lane: “Breaking Up Slowly”Del Rey first hinted at her affinity for Wynette on this duet with the alt-country crooner Nikki Lane, from Del Rey’s 2021 album “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” “I don’t wanna live with a life of regret,” Lane sings in the second verse. “I don’t wanna end up like Tammy Wynette.” Del Rey, though, takes a more sympathetic view in her verses, on which she seems to be singing from Wynette’s own perspective: “George got arrested out on the lawn/We might be breaking up after this song.” (Listen on YouTube)11. Tammy Wynette: “Stand by Your Man”Often imitated but never duplicated, Wynette’s biggest pop hit and most infamous calling card has a stealthy power. Sherrill’s production here is top-notch, and Wynette’s undulating vocal — which seems to swing between private pain and public restraint — is a force of tragic but strangely regal beauty. As Easton writes, “‘Stand by Your Man’ is enough of a porous text that it leaks and stains everything it touches, but its messiness is one of the reasons it’s so important.” (Listen on YouTube)I’ll even learn to like the taste of whiskey,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Where’s Tammy Wynette When You Need Her?” track listTrack 1: Tammy Wynette, “Womanhood”Track 2: Tammy Wynette, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”Track 3: Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn, “Silver Threads and Golden Needles”Track 4: Kellie Pickler, “Where’s Tammy Wynette”Track 5: Tammy Wynette, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”Track 6: Tammy Wynette, “Apartment #9”Track 7: Reba McEntire, “Tammy Wynette Kind of Pain”Track 8: Tammy Wynette, “’Til I Can Make It on My Own”Track 9: Tammy Wynette, “I Don’t Wanna Play House”Track 10: Lana Del Rey featuring Nikki Lane, “Breaking Up Slowly”Track 11: Tammy Wynette, “Stand by Your Man”Bonus tracksOK, one more: Tammy’s bonkers 1991 collaboration with the KLF, “Justified & Ancient.” I will always stand by the jams.And if it’s new songs you’re looking for, we’ve got a whopping 13 to recommend on this week’s Playlist, including tracks from Nicki Minaj, Oneohtrix Point Never and a brash Doja Cat single that I am very much digging. Listen here. More

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    Doja Cat Goes Horror Rap on ‘Demons,’ and 12 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Peter Gabriel, Lauren Mayberry, Oneohtrix Point Never and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Doja Cat, ‘Demons’A brash, blown-speaker quality animates “Demons,” the latest single from Doja Cat’s upcoming album, “Scarlet.” “How my demons look now that my pockets full?” she shouts with a defiant rasp, before switching to a lighter and more viciously humorous register on the verses. (“Who are you, and what are those? You are gross!”) “Demons” also features a horror movie-inspired video, which stars Christina Ricci and features a very creepy Doja slithering around like a red-eyed monster. Other pop stars merely tune out their haters; Doja exorcises them. LINDSAY ZOLADZNicki Minaj, ‘Last Time I Saw You’Nicki Minaj doesn’t usually admit to any regrets or second thoughts. But she does in “Last Time I Saw You,” a song that seesaws between guitar-flecked ballad and rueful rapping. “I wish I remembered to say I’d do anything for you/Maybe I pushed you away because I thought that I’d bore you,” she sings, confessing that she was the one in the wrong. JON PARELESTeezo Touchdown featuring Janelle Monáe, ‘You Thought’Misjudgments pile up in “You Thought,” which transforms from percussive, triplet-driven rock to ballad with brisk hip-hop wordplay. Teezo Touchdown moves between rapping and singing; Monáe is melodic, singing, “I thought we were better.” The song details a breakup from both sides: missed opportunities, misunderstandings, unfulfilled needs, all compressed into pop. PARELESBlankfor.ms, Jason Moran and Marcus Gilmore, ‘Eighth Pose’Tyler Gilmore — the New York-based composer and musician known as Blankfor.ms — makes music using degraded tape loops, analog synthesizers and an old spinet piano. He was approached recently by the producer Sun Chung about doing an album with jazz improvisers, and his first call was to the pianist and composer Jason Moran, his former teacher at the New England Conservatory. His second was to the drummer Marcus Gilmore. Those two are among the finest improvisers alive: It is an impressive team for a first foray. On “Refract,” their new album, the trio works across medium and style, with composed elements and prepared loops by Blankfor.ms sparking improvisations from his collaborators. “Eighth Pose” turns on a twitchy, coiled synth phrase, like a keyed-up Aphex Twin track; Moran picks it up on the piano, toying with it, while Gilmore adds a nervy drumbeat, passed through compressed effects. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOKenya Grace, ‘Strangers’Speedy breakbeats equate with dating jitters in “Strangers,” Kenya Grace’s whispery complaint about how 21st-century romance too often ends in ghosting. She’s the singer, songwriter and producer on the track. “One random night when everything changes/you won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers.” Synthesizers hum as the percussion races ahead, while she sings about feeling like “Everyone’s disposable.” PARELESJeff Rosenstock, ‘Will U Still U’The Long Island-born punk lifer Jeff Rosenstock tests the limits of love on “Will U Still U,” the jet-propelled opening track off his new album “Hellmode.” “Will you still love me” after I’ve messed up, he asks (with an expletive) in a catchy, incongruously cheery melody, before unleashing a rapid-fire rundown of his relationship worries. In the song’s cathartic finale he’s joined by a chorus of voices shouting that refrain at the top of their lungs and fist-pumping in anxious solidarity. ZOLADZOneohtrix Point Never, ‘A Barely Lit Path’Oneohtrix Point Never is the composer and mastermind Daniel Lopatin, who has been the Weeknd’s producer and created the nervy soundtrack for “Uncut Gems,” along with making his own albums. “A Barely Lit Path” begins as a reverent, electronics-edged dirge with processed vocals imagining “a barely lit path from your house to mine.” Then it goes through a multiverse of wordless transformations: pulsing synthesizers, a stately quasi-Baroque string orchestra, a choir accompanied by synthesizer arpeggios and a gradual, virtual decrescendo. Absolutely anything can happen as long as it’s in the same key. PARELESPeter Gabriel, ‘Love Can Heal (Bright-Side Mix)’An expansive sound design — with bell-toned ostinatos, throaty cellos and multidirectional echoes — underlines Peter Gabriel’s troubled but determined optimism in “Love Can Heal,” a new track from his gradually accruing album “I/O.” His vocal sets aside his usual grizzled hoarseness for a modest tenor; a choir joins him, yet the song stays fragile. PARELESJason Hawk Harris, ‘Jordan and the Nile’There’s an Appalachian feeling to the melody of Jason Hawk Harris’s rootsy incantation “Jordan and the Nile,” a leisurely, mystical song about rivers and generations. An organ and a string section provide droning chords as he sings about determined optimism informed by biblical imagery: “I’m feeling heavy but I see the light/A world is dark but my abyss is bright,” he promises. PARELESLauren Mayberry, ‘Are You Awake?’The debut solo single from Lauren Mayberry — the lead singer of the Scottish electro-pop group Chvrches — is a sparse, plaintive piano ballad written with Tobias Jesso Jr., chronicling nocturnal anxieties and open-ended questions. “Are you awake? I feel a sadness in my skin,” Mayberry sings, her voice melancholy but chiming with the faintest hint of hope that her message will be answered. ZOLADZMaria BC, ‘Amber’ and ‘Watcher’Glimmering electronics, tolling guitars and hovering vocal harmonies gather in “Amber” and “Watcher,” two segued songs that meditate on closeness: “Your scent is on me now/Your senses draw me out,” Maria BC sings. “There is no place to hide and no wrong.” It’s blissfully enveloping and humbly awe-struck. PARELESKris Davis, ‘Dolores’ (Take 1)“Dolores” is easily one of the most infectious melodies Wayne Shorter wrote during his stint as musical director for the Miles Davis Quintet. But it’s not one of the (many) Shorter tunes you’re likely to hear called at a jam session or covered at a straight-ahead gig. Maybe there is something intimidating about the balled up, stop-and-start melody; the centerlessness of its structure; or how perfectly the quintet plays it on the classic 1966 recording. Well, none of this scares the pianist and composer Kris Davis. Strong-but-bendable rhythm, splintered melodic lines and rough-and-tumble interplay are par for the course for (this) Davis, especially with her Diatom Ribbons project. On a new album, recorded live at the Village Vanguard with a five-member version of that ensemble, the group takes its time getting to the theme: The bassist Trevor Dunn makes some references to it, the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington establishes a heavy groove, and finally Julian Lage’s guitar comes together with Davis’s piano to grapple with the melody. When Lage departs from it on his solo, he travels far — and the band comes with him. RUSSONELLO More

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    Sci-fi Movies to Stream: ‘Shin Ultraman,’ ‘Dry Ground Burning’ and More

    This month’s picks include cute-robot charm and alien abduction angst.‘Shin Ultraman’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.From the start, it’s obvious that this is not a regular Kaiju movie. The genre, in which gigantic beasts à la Godzilla lay waste to cities and swaths of countryside, is not known for restraint, but “Shin Ultraman” is completely, unpredictably off the wall.Captain Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, from the radically different “Drive My Car”) leads a task force dedicated to fighting the big monsters that turn up with clockwork regularity. “For some reason, Kaiju only appear in Japan,” someone quips about the creatures’s absence elsewhere in the world. But even this elite squad is flabbergasted when a mysterious helmeted giant clad in a superhero-like red and silver bodysuit shows up. Called Ultraman (a popular character who has been the subject of many iterations since its introduction in 1966), the newcomer helps the overwhelmed team battle aliens like Mefilas (Koji Yamamoto).Both a reboot and a riff, “Shin Ultraman,” which was directed by Shinji Higuchi and written by Hideaki Anno (the pair also collaborated on “Shin Godzilla” in 2016), is a surreal trip. It’s hard to oversell the eye-popping invention and droll humor on display here, but it’s Higuchi’s mise en scène that stands out, packed with odd angles and seemingly arbitrary shots, as when a character opens a computer file and the movie cuts to her feet under her desk. Shiro Sagisu’s score is equally bonkers and disruptive, incorporating 1960s pop, thrash riffs, chamber suites and jazzy noodlings. It all amounts to pure joy.‘Tang and Me’Stream it on Amazon.Chances are you haven’t heard of Deborah Install’s “A Robot in the Garden” (2015), unless you live in Japan, where the novel has been adapted into a radio play, a stage musical and now this charming kid-friendly movie.Ken (Kazunari Ninomiya) has a terminal case of arrested development, whiling away his days playing elaborate virtual-reality games and avoiding any hint of household work. One day, a rusty, taped-up robot turns up in the garden, offering its name as Tang. Shortly thereafter, Ken’s fed-up wife, Emi (Hikari Mitsushima), kicks him out of their house. So he sets out for Atobit Systems, the company that manufactured Tang, to trade that old model for a brand-new one, which he will then give to Emi to get back in her graces.The latest from the prolific director Takahiro Miki (“The Door Into Summer”) does not revolutionize the cute-robot genre, but it is very effective. Naturally, Ken will change for the best, thanks to Tang — whose mysterious origin and initial purpose are at the heart of the story — but this utter predictability is a feature, not a bug, and is embraced as such by the film. Young viewers are likely to clamor for a toy version of the adorable bot, while their parents are more likely to be interested in the movie’s awfully believable near-future, in which delivery drones crisscross the sky and robots are absolutely everywhere in our daily life.‘Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.When the Levan family moves to a quaint Western town, the teenage Itsy (the excellent Emma Tremblay) is not especially pleased: She is now living in the middle of nowhere, plus being singled out as the new kid is never fun. Maybe that’s why she immediately connects with her new classmate Calvin (Jacob Buster, a charmer bound to resurface in bigger-budget projects), who is ostracized as the local weirdo. Calvin is a heartthrob in nerd clothing — more specifically in a spacesuit, which he is prone to wear to school — and is on a quest to find the parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) he hasn’t seen in 10 years. He is convinced they were taken by aliens one fateful night and has been searching the skies ever since. Itsy pretends to befriend him for a journalism project, though it’s clear she’s actually taken by Calvin’s quirky sincerity, and perhaps even by his far-fetched story about extraterrestrial creatures secretly visiting Earth whenever a certain comet gets close.Jake Van Wagoner’s film is a throwback to 1980s family-friendly fare, and it nicely captures the formula’s basic elements, down to the presence of a smart-aleck little boy (Itsy’s brother, Evan, played by Kenneth Cummins), an unironic embrace of the cutesy and the cheesy in equal proportions and, perhaps most important, a general good nature.‘Life Cycle’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Carl (Adam Weber) lives in his grandparents’ rec-room-like basement, seems to survive on power bars and takeout, and watches old black-and-white movies on an ancient-looking TV set. The only other living presence in that den is Vetro (voiced by Kory Karam), an animatronic head with enormous blue eyes sitting on Carl’s desk. A computer programmer, Carl is ambitious: “You are to become human,” he informs his creation. To that end, Vetro has been endowed with the ability to generate “new expansions.” In other words, he is sentient and can upgrade himself. One of his first moves is to give himself a new “multilayered emotional matrix,” and it doesn’t take long for Vetro to exhibit somewhat cunning traits — he can be both obsequious and creepy.The writer-director Christopher Morvant’s most distinctive spin on the thriving A.I. genre was to make Vetro a cartoonish animatronic/puppet character that looks goofy yet comes across as unsettling, especially since Morvant often shows him in startling close-ups. The movie is, admittedly, overlong, especially since it’s essentially a talkathon between Carl and Vetro, and the writing is not quite strong enough to sustain the more complex philosophical issues it raises. But “Life Cycle” does have a few surprises in store, and Morvant’s sui generis world nimbly juxtaposes technologies that feel pulled from completely different eras. Pretty good for a movie shot in a garage in a month.‘Dry Ground Burning’Rent or buy it on Amazon.Set in an impoverished Sol Nascente, in Brazil, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s film is tough to categorize. “Dry Ground Burning” follows the activities of a women’s gang, led by Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), that steals oil and resells it as gas to groups of bikers. Add to that mix the re-entry into society of Chitara’s half sister, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), who is newly released from prison. In conventional hands, these could be an action-packed thriller’s starting point. Pimenta and Queirós go down a completely different road, both in form and in content.We are in a dystopian pamphlet targeting the far-right policies of Brazil’s authoritarian former president Jair Bolsonaro, which were devastating for the poor, the minorities and the outcasts at the movie’s heart. All of this is put together with a documentarylike matter-of-factness, increased by the fact that the cast is made up of non- or semiprofessional actors. When scenes set during, say, a raucous bus trip or a religious ceremony hypnotically go on and on as if in real time, you might wonder if Frederick Wiseman had suddenly gone to Brazil. Tip: Go with the flow — you can’t rush life, politics or this film. More