Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 100 Shares139 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Between Two Worlds’ Review: Juliette Binoche Goes Undercover

    In this social-justice drama, the French actress plays an investigative journalist who poses as a cleaner to expose worker exploitation.In “Between Two Worlds,” Juliette Binoche plays Marianne Winckler, a woman struggling to make ends meet in the Normandy region of France. When she arrives at an unemployment center at the start of the film, she’s sheepish and bewildered, selling herself as a “team player” to secure a minimum wage gig.In a voice-over, the details of her quest for steady work are articulated in a matter-of-fact tone. Subtly, the director Emmanuel Carrère reveals this social-justice drama’s real stakes: Marianne, an investigative journalist, has gone undercover. Her mission? To reveal the ways in which low-income workers are exploited — specifically women working graveyard shifts while under contract to private sanitation companies.The film is a loose adaptation of “The Night Cleaner” (2010), the nonfiction best seller by Florence Aubenas, a French journalist who went underground and lived a double life as a cleaner for an English Channel ferry.“Between Two Worlds,” written by Carrère and Hélène Devynck, departs from its source material with a fictional arc: Marianne, a savior figure driven to expose the system’s injustices, is also guilt-ridden about keeping her true identity a secret from her co-workers like Christèle (Hélène Lambert), an edgy single mother. This rift is echoed in the casting, with the usually glamorous Binoche acting alongside nonprofessional actors.Carrère — known primarily in Europe as a writer of nonfiction books with a literary twist — applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries. At her worst job, for instance, she’s forced to prepare over 100 beds in less than two hours. Less compelling is the sentimental crisis that plays out because of Marianne’s deception. It does little else beyond remind us that advocacy work is too often in a tango with a bad case of main-character syndrome.Between Two WorldsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 50 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Aporia’ Review: Killing Time

    Strong acting helps stabilize this dopey sci-fi/family drama.Even the most casual consumer of science fiction can tell you that tinkering with the past, however commendable the reason, is a fool’s game. This may be news to the three adults at the center of Jared Moshé’s film “Aporia,” a deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.Ever since Sophie (Judy Greer) lost her husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi), to a drunken driver eight months earlier, she and her preteen daughter (Faithe Herman) have been struggling. Enter Mal’s best friend, Jabir (Payman Maadi), a physicist and refugee from a dictatorship that killed his entire family. Obsessed with past wrongs, Jabir has been quietly building a time machine, a contraption that looks like a janky iron lung. The machine doesn’t actually go anywhere, but (and don’t quote me on this) can send particles back in time to murder your chosen victim. Someone like, say, the driver who killed Mal.But softhearted Sophie, unable to enjoy a successful assassination, can’t resist befriending the erstwhile driver’s widow and daughter, only to unearth a second villain. Every erasure, of course, demands several minutes of soul-searching and causes unexpected, increasingly troubling repercussions; maybe just one more murder will set everything right?Filled with idiotic behavior and logical ellipses (and a beyond-infuriating ending), “Aporia,” which means an expression of doubt or uncertainty, more than justifies its title. The film’s most beguiling idea, though, is its insistence on the significance of shared memories: When time resets, only Sophie and Jabir remember the original timeline, leaving them excluded from an alternate past — even their own.AporiaRated R for forgivable language and unforgivable behavior. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Movies

    ‘The Eternal Memory’ Review: A Love That Lasts When Recollections Fade

    This documentary from Maite Alberdi looks at how a couple faces one partner’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.The word “Alzheimer’s” isn’t spoken until well into “The Eternal Memory.” While that may be because this documentary’s subjects rarely mention it themselves, withholding the diagnosis also seems like a deliberate choice by the director, Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”).An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, “The Eternal Memory” doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands. Like Paulina Urrutia, whose husband, Augusto Góngora, is the one with Alzheimer’s, the viewer must continually reassess Góngora’s lucidity, which for long stretches is hardly in doubt. Part of Urrutia’s strategy is to gently quiz him about their lives. Does he remember their first date? Was it at one of their homes? (The correct answer is no: Neither can cook.)Góngora — who died in May, after the film was completed and first shown — was a TV journalist in Chile who participated in underground newscasts during the Pinochet dictatorship. Urrutia is an actress who served as culture minister during the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s first term. Their occupations add another layer of reflexivity: In different ways, both were involved in telling other people’s stories and preserving the national memory.Urrutia, who is shown taking over the shooting of the documentary once the pandemic necessitated isolation, is almost surreally unflappable; she is rarely seen losing patience with Góngora, although there is a heart-rending scene in which she informs him that he has gone a whole morning without recognizing her. Could any film completely capture such a private dynamic? Surely not, but at moments, “The Eternal Memory” appears to come close.The Eternal MemoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 63 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    How Hip-Hop Conquered the World

    How Hip-HopConqueredthe World A crowd in Harlem watching Doug E. Fresh, 1995.David Corio The Great Read How Hip-Hop Conquered the World Fifty years ago, a party in the Bronx jumpstarted an essential American artform. For decades the genre has thrived by explaining the country to itself. Aug. 10, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET We’ve gathered here […] More

  • 63 Shares179 Views

    in Music

    Robbie Robertson’s 12 Essential Songs

    The Band’s arrangements evoked bygone eras but weren’t limited by them. Hear some of the best tracks led by the songwriter and guitarist, who died this week at 80, alongside standout solo material.In Robbie Robertson’s music, earthiness and mystery were never far apart.Robertson, who died on Wednesday at 80, wrote songs that were firmly and widely rooted. Although he was Canadian, his music was steeped in Americana: in blues, country, ragtime, Cajun music, parlor songs, Appalachian ballads, gospel, circus bands, vaudeville and his Indigenous heritage. The way he deployed his guitar was twangy, sly and rigorously pithy, allowing no wasted motion. The lyrics he wrote could be cryptic or narrative, character studies or tall tales or riddles, and they were informed by history, myth and paradox.Particularly in the luminous years of the Band’s recording career — from 1968 to 1976, but forged by a full decade of playing together before that — Robertson shaped an ensemble sound that was down-home and communal but laced with thoughtful details. In a late-1960s pop moment of florid psychedelia and sprawling, be-here-now jams, the Band was a counterweight: measured, grown-up and fully aware of a long past.The Band’s arrangements evoked bygone eras but weren’t limited by them. Robert’s pointed guitar licks teased against Garth Hudson’s ornate keyboards; vocal harmonies tumbled in from odd directions, and little musical nooks and crannies hinted at secrets just out of reach. With Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel all in the Band, Robertson didn’t need to be a lead singer.After the Band’s decisive farewell in 1976, Robertson depended on his own limited voice — often bolstered by guest singers — and he worked with studio groups that hadn’t built the road-tested reflexes of the Band. But he continued to write songs steeped in American lore, very much including his own embrace of his Native American ancestry. Earnestness had fully replaced the Band’s jovial camaraderie, but Robertson’s ambitions were undiminished.Here are 16 essential Robertson recordings:Bob Dylan and the Hawks, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1966)Some of Bob Dylan’s British fans were still outraged that he’d gone electric when he toured in 1966; he was backed by the Hawks, a precursor of the Band. Their response to folky resistance was to dig in and turn up the volume, in performances that still ring with jubilant defiance. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” from “Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert,” was actually recorded in Manchester at a show that was bootlegged and mislabeled for years. The tempo is louche and unhurried, and Robertson and Hudson use the spaces between Dylan’s taunting lines to carry on a merry country-vs.-calliope wrangle.The Band, “Yazoo Street Scandal” (1967)“Yazoo Street Scandal” appears on the 1975 collection “The Basement Tapes”: songs recorded in 1967 in Woodstock and Saugerties, N.Y., by Dylan and the Band while he was in seclusion after his 1966 motorcycle accident. “Yazoo Street Scandal” is the Band on its own, with a wiry, stop-time riff and Helm yowling lyrics that juggle bawdiness and biblical allusions.The Band, “The Weight” (1968)A fable of callous indifference. A series of setups and punchlines. Some scattered biblical allusions. A stolid march and a potential hymn. “The Weight” is all of those, droll and haggard at the same time, paced by Helm’s laconic drum thumps. Helm and Danko trade verses, and group harmonies stack up in a rising, hopeful chorus before the narrator realizes, once again, “They put the load right on me.”The Band, “Chest Fever” (1968)Robertson’s cackling guitar counters the pomp of Garth Hudson’s organ intro and the hefty chords in the verses. Richard Manuel sings about a tantalizing, bewildering woman. In the chorus, as “my mind unweaves/I feel the freeze down in my knees,” organ, piano and guitar capture the vertigo in woozy stereo syncopation, topped by groaning lead guitar licks that insist on comedy.The Band, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (1969)Robertson wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” based on the Southern memories of Helm, the only American in a band with four Canadians. The song captures wounded pride, multigenerational loyalties and lingering bitterness in a mournful processional. Helm’s swelling, extended drum rolls hint at military funerals, and after each chorus, there’s a solemn pause, as if facing the next verse is almost too much to bear.The Band, “Up on Cripple Creek” (1969)A happy trucker narrates “Up on Cripple Creek,” praising Bessie, his free-spirited hookup in Lake Charles, La. “If I spring a leak, she mends me/I don’t have to speak, she defends me,” Helm exults. A ratchety groove grows out of Robertson’s opening guitar licks, and before the end, Helm is yodeling with glee.The Band, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” (1969)In “King Harvest,” a farmer faces calamities — drought, fire, a horse gone mad — and finds his last hope in joining a union, as sharecroppers did during the Depression. His rising desperation comes through as Manuel sings the verses, and in the subdued choruses, his love of the land endures.The Band, “The Shape I’m In” (1970)The beat is peppy, almost eager, and Hudson’s note-bending organ interludes and outro are downright jaunty. But Manuel sings about a mounting collection of woes: loneliness, jail, homelessness. Robertson’s guitar provides brief hints of the blues, but this narrator is just going to have to muddle through.The Band, “Stage Fright” (1970)Performing in the spotlight is “Just one more nightmare you can stand” in “Stage Fright,” a reflection on trauma and fame that may have been autobiographical. “For the price that the poor boy has paid/He gets to sing just like a bird,” Danko sang with a quaver, leaping into falsetto for a few notes after “bird.” The music pushes the fearful singer onstage and the song understands the compulsion to perform despite it all: “When he gets to the end, he wants to start all over again.”The Band, “Life Is a Carnival” (1971)Robertson worked at carnivals as a young man, and he remained fascinated by a traveling carnival’s perpetual mix of fun and sleaze; after the Band broke up, he co-wrote and acted in a 1980 movie, “Carny.” He and the Band came up with a staggered, prismatic funk for “Life Is a Carnival.” Amid cheerfully cynical lyrics — “Hey buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap?” — and a syncopated horn arrangement by Allen Toussaint, Robertson lets loose some of his most aggressive lead guitar.The Band, “Acadian Driftwood” (1975)Robertson turned to Canadian history in “Acadian Driftwood,” writing about the British deportation of Acadians from eastern Canada in the mid-18th century; some ended up in Louisiana, where Acadians became Cajuns, although the narrator sings, “I got winter in my blood.” Between verses, Cajun fiddle trades off with what sounds like British fife (actually Hudson on piccolo), nodding to history.The Band, “It Makes No Difference” (1976)The heartache is palpable in “The Last Waltz” version of “It Makes No Difference,” a straightforward soul ballad that brought out a riveting Danko vocal: quivering, aching, almost sobbing, as he sings about a sunless world of unbearable hurt and sorrow after a breakup. But he has his pride: “It’s all I can do just to keep myself from telling you/I never felt so alone before,” he confesses.Robbie Robertson, “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” (1987)Robertson narrates the verses with a knowing growl in the noirish “Somewhere Down the Crazy River.” He piles up archetypes — “a jukebox coming from up the levee,” “Madame X,” “a ’59 Chevy,” “a blue train” — over sleek, echoey 1980s funk.Robbie Robertson & the Red Road Ensemble, “Ghost Dance” (1994)Robertson provided soundtrack music for a 1994 mini-series, “The Native Americans,” striving to mesh contemporary pop with Native American tradition. “Ghost Dance” mixes Native American-style drums, flutes and chanting with a stoic march of remembrance and perseverance: “They outlawed the ghost dance/But we shall live again,” he vows.Robbie Robertson, “Unbound” (1998)Robertson embraced electronica on his 1998 album, “Contact From the Underworld of Redboy.” In “Unbound,” he’s enveloped by sustained synthesizer chords and looping percussion as he sings about irresistible desire. The wordless vocals of Caroline McKendrick draw him like a siren song.Robbie Robertson, “Once Were Brothers” (2019)In “Once Were Brothers,” a stately march with touches of harmonica, Robertson mourns the estrangement of comrades: “We lost a connection after the war,” he sings. “There’ll be no revival/There’ll be no encore.” Could he have been thinking of bandmates? More

  • 113 Shares189 Views

    in Music

    Rodriguez, Singer Whose Career Was Resurrected, Dies at 81

    Two albums in the early 1970s went largely unnoticed in the United States, but not overseas. Then came the 2012 documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.”Rodriguez, a Detroit musician whose songs, full of protest and stark imagery from the urban streets, failed to find an American audience in the early 1970s but resonated in Australia and especially South Africa, leading to a late-career resurgence captured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” in 2012, died on Tuesday. He was 81.A posting on his official website announced his death but did not say where he died or provide a cause.Rodriguez’s story was, as The New York Times put it in 2012, “a real-life tale of talent disregarded, bad luck and missed opportunities, with an improbable stop in the Hamptons and a Hollywood conclusion.”Rodriguez — who performed under just his surname but whose full name was Sixto Diaz Rodriguez — was playing bars in Detroit in the late 1960s, his folk-rock reminding those who heard it of Bob Dylan, when the producer Harry Balk signed him. In the documentary, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, who would go on to produce his first album, “Cold Fact” (1970), told of hearing Rodriguez at a particularly smoky establishment called the Sewer on the Detroit River, where he was playing, as he often did, with his back to the audience.“Maybe it forced you to listen to the lyrics, because you couldn’t see the guy’s face,” Mr. Coffey said.A single released under the name “Rod Riguez” went nowhere. “Cold Fact,” released on the Sussex label, drew a smattering of favorable notices; its first track, “Sugar Man,” gave the documentary its title.“Rodriguez is a singing poet/journalist, telling stories of today,” Jim Knippenberg wrote in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “He does it with a voice much like Dylan’s, very Dylanesque imagery and a musical backing dominated almost entirely by a guitar. But he’s not a Dylan carbon. Rodriguez is much more explicit.”Mostly, though, the album went unnoticed in America, as did its follow-up a year later, “Coming From Reality.”“Getting the records cut was easy,” Rodriguez told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1979. “Getting them played was a lot harder.”Rodriguez performing in Paris in 2013. He found a fan base overseas and went on tour after the documentary was released to rave reviews.Pierre Andrieu/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper that year because, while he had settled into a life as a laborer and office worker in Detroit (though still playing bars and even running unsuccessfully for various political offices), he had — unknown to him — been developing fans overseas. Australia was one place where his music had found an audience, and in 1979 he was invited to tour there. He returned in 1981 for a few shows with the band Midnight Oil and released a live album in Australia.Rodriguez’s music had found an even bigger following in South Africa, which was still under apartheid and cut off from the rest of the world in many respects. He seemed to have no idea how popular he was there, especially among white South Africans uncomfortable with apartheid and the country’s rigidly conservative culture.“To many of us South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,” Stephen Segerman, owner of a Cape Town record store, said in the documentary. “In the mid-’70s, if you walked into a random white, liberal, middle-class household that had a turntable and a pile of pop records, and if you flipped through the records, you would always see ‘Abbey Road’ by the Beatles, you’d always see ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel, and you would always see ‘Cold Fact’ by Rodriguez. To us, it was one of the most famous records of all time. The message it had was ‘Be anti-establishment.’”In the mid-1990s Mr. Segerman began trying to find out more about the mysterious artist known as Rodriguez and how he had died; rumors were rampant that he had killed himself onstage, died of an overdose, and so on. He joined forces with Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a journalist who was also searching for Rodriguez, and eventually they found the singer, still living in Detroit. A 1998 tour of South Africa followed, with Rodriguez playing six sold-out shows at 5,000-seat arenas.“It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 2009.After the South Africa tour he played shows in England, Sweden and other countries. In the United States, the label Light in the Attic rereleased “Cold Fact” in 2008 and “Coming From Reality” in 2009.“Searching for Sugar Man,” which focused on two men and their search for Rodriguez, won the Oscar for best documentary feature.Sony Pictures Classics/courtesy Everett Collection
    And there was another round of rediscovery ahead. In 2012 Malik Bendjelloul released “Searching for Sugar Man,” his first and only documentary (he died in 2014), to rave reviews. The film, which won the Oscar for best documentary feature, concentrated on the search by Mr. Segerman and Mr. Bartholomew-Strydom and included an interview with Rodriguez, who in the aftermath found himself at the Hamptons International Film Festival and embarking on a fresh round of touring.Matt Sullivan founded Light in the Attic Records, which reissued Rodriguez’s albums.“His words and music were brutally honest and raw to the core,” he said by email. “It instantly struck a chord the second we heard it, and still does, nearly 20 years later.”Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born on July 10, 1942, in Detroit. His mother, Maria, died when he was a boy. His father, Ramon, was a laborer who became a foreman at a steel plant.He said that he started playing the guitar at 16.“Of course I’ve been into Dylan forever,” he told The Times in 2012, “and also Barry McGuire, the whole ‘Eve of Destruction’ thing.”During his period of relative anonymity after the release of his albums, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.The “Coming From Reality” album includes a song called “Cause,” a lament about hard times and life’s disappointments.“They told me everybody’s got to pay their dues,” Rodriguez sings. “And I explained that I had overpaid them.”But in the 2009 interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he was more serene about his unusual career path.“My story isn’t a rags to riches story,” he said. “It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.” More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Music

    Popcast (Deluxe): Lizzo, Travis Scott and the Limits of Persona

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:How a star’s public persona, varnished or unvarnished, can dictate what they can get away with in the eye of their followers. Lizzo, who for years has emphasized personal kindness as her brand, has seen her career derailed by allegations that she mistreated her backup dancers. Cardi B threw a microphone at an audience member in reaction to getting splashed with water, but has emerged unscathedTravis Scott’s No. 1 album “Utopia,” its many guest appearances and its oxygen-swallowing hugenessThe resilience of Playboi Carti, who has built a growing cultlike career while releasing no new musicRemembering the life and work of Sinead O’Connor and Angus CloudNew songs from Cowgirl Clue and B-Lovee featuring Luh TylerSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at [email protected]. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

  • 163 Shares179 Views

    in Movies

    Justin H. Min, Travel Writer? The Path Not Taken for a Rising Star

    Success came relatively easy — until he tried acting. For a moment, journalism seemed more viable. But now he’s the lead in “Shortcomings.”Five years after Justin H. Min began pursuing acting by Googling “how to pursue acting,” he thought he was getting the hang of it. He had made a viral commercial, and he was in contention for three major roles.He landed none of them.“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” Min recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”It was in this less-than-healthy head space that Min decided to pivot to a different unstable profession: travel writing. He had caught on with a British magazine and it seemed he might cobble together full-time work as a freelance writer if he got on a plane to London.So Min told his manager he was moving. But rather than beg him to stay (as Min had secretly hoped), the manager gave his full blessing. Before Min could head for the airport, though, a fellow actor urged him to reconsider — timely encouragement that set Min, now 34, on the path to “a star-making performance,” as a critic for The Times put it, in the new comedy “Shortcomings,” as well as fan-favorite turns in the Netflix series “Beef” and “The Umbrella Academy.”“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really ever struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min said in a prestrike interview. “So I will absolutely savor this.”INDEED, EVERYTHING IN the first 20-ish years of Min’s life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this only very sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how fortunate he feels.In Cerritos, Calif., the predominantly Asian suburb where he grew up, Min felt little sense of difference. He found that most success was attainable through application. Min was class president all four years of high school and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he won thousands of dollars in prize money that helped pay for a Cornell education. Given his gifts, he thought he might become a lawyer — or maybe a politician.But on the day Min was to graduate from college, he woke up to nine missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the occasion, had died that morning. And so Min’s commencement walk ended in a teary embrace with his family.The death of Min’s grandfather pushed him to reflect during a solo, cross-country road trip back home to Cerritos.“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician just didn’t feel right anymore. He liked public speaking, writing and storytelling. And back under his parents’ roof, he was near Los Angeles anyway. He decided to give acting a shot.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” said his fellow actor Amy Okuda.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesHe soon discovered, however, how hard the business of acting really was and that applying himself would not be enough.When he ran into college friends and they asked about his acting career, “I remember feeling so shattered and so lost in terms of what to say or how to present myself because I no longer could stand on accomplishments,” he said. “I didn’t have that anymore.”IT WAS SLOW going at first. Min dove into Reddit threads, took classes, searched for agents and discovered Wong Fu Productions, a content company run by young Asian Americans that would become a popular part of Asian American media as YouTube blossomed in the 2010s. The guys running it asked Min to audition for what he said they called a “narrative thing, but like branded content.”The “narrative thing” was essentially an eight-minute advertisement for a Simplehuman trash can. But it was built around an exploration of adulting, and the video received tens of millions of views.That work didn’t pay much, and Min began to dabble in journalism as a side hustle. He was a good writer and his photography, like most things in his life, had drawn praise.He traveled to Mexico City to interview the chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol; and to Chicago to pick the brain of Grant Achatz at Alinea. What was not to like about work trips to two of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants?Which helps explain why Min was willing to give writing a full go when he got those back-to-back-to-back acting rejections. But as he pondered his next move, Min had dinner with a friend, the actress Amy Okuda. She tapped the brakes on his travel plans.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” Okuda said in a prestrike interview. So she sent a note about Min to her own manager, Joshua Pasch, who got in touch with him almost immediately; Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for “The Umbrella Academy” before the pair met.“The rest is history,” Pasch said. “He was on the show a month later.”MIN HAD LANDED THE ROLE of Ben Hargreeves on what would become a hit for Netflix. His part was modest at first — a dead brother in a superhuman sibling squad who occasionally shows up as a ghostlike figure that only the drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had very little screen time, and Min was not a series regular initially.Min, left, on “The Umbrella Academy.” He landed the role after a friend urged him to stick with acting.NetflixBut Ben became surprisingly popular in Min’s hands. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, came up with a way to expand the role and even bring Ben back to life as a different, meaner version of himself in later seasons.“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which “Umbrella Academy” is based, Blackman said. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more.’”“The Umbrella Academy,” which premiered in 2019, was an “I made it” moment for Min. But he would also earn acclaim two years later for his thoughtful, sincere portrayal of the titular robot in “After Yang,” a quiet sci-fi drama starring Colin Farrell.“He had such a rich life before he became an actor,” Kogonada, who directed “After Yang,” said of Min. “Like all the great actors, he is consumed with his craft. But I feel like I’m getting to know him better through the different roles that he plays.”Then came “Beef,” and the part of Edwin, an irritatingly perfect leader of a Korean church.Lee Sung Jin, the director of “Beef,” was best friends with Min’s brother, Jason, in college. Lee said in an interview that he had called Jason Min, an admired praise leader, into the writers’ room to help craft the character of Edwin. It was a role Lee said he had always intended for Justin to fill.Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason’s bachelor party and promising each other that they were going to make it in Hollywood, and that they would work together when they did.“Drunk confidence,” Lee said.NOW MIN IS PLAYING another Ben. This one, the main character in “Shortcomings,” is not a ghost but a very flawed would-be filmmaker who, in the words of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity.”Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance,” Ally Maki, who plays the girlfriend, Miko, said in a prestrike interview.Min recalled reading the script and saying to himself: “I understand this guy because I was this guy” and “parts of me are still this guy.”When he initially read the first scene — in which Ben complains about a “Crazy Rich Asians”-style movie that everyone else liked — Min said the words felt natural tumbling out of his mouth.Ben is dealing with the gap between his elevated tastes and his lack of career success, he said, “and that disparity is crippling. I remember when I started off in this business, I felt the same disparity. I felt such a chasm between the projects I was doing and the projects that I wanted to do.”“It results in a lot of dissatisfaction. It results in a lot of cynicism,” he continued, recalling how, at one point, “I sort of prided myself in being sort of this funny, cynical, dry kind of guy the way that Ben is. And then through many years of therapy, I realized that that was simply a defense mechanism for me to hide and shield myself from the actual pain of feeling like I had failed at this industry that I so wanted to succeed in.”Min holds onto one particular memory from the movie. Ben is sprinting through the West Village — that classic movie moment when the hero tries to salvage the relationship before it’s gone forever. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie,” he said. And he remembered how some of his favorite movies had iconic running shots. “I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running.” More