Aurelia Butler

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    The Campy Masculine Pleasures of Gerard Butler and ‘Kandahar’

    The action-flick Everyman limps nobly on in “Kandahar.”Midway through Gerard Butler’s new movie, “Kandahar,” is maybe the coolest sequence I have ever seen in a Gerard Butler movie. It’s the middle of the night in the middle of a desert, and Butler’s C.I.A.-operative character is racing with his Afghan translator to a distant extraction point. Because they are trying to avoid Pakistani, Iranian and Taliban bad guys who are pursuing them, their lights are off, and Butler’s character is wearing a pair of very stupid-looking infrared goggles. Suddenly there is a sound, one we only learn is a helicopter when those loopy goggles alight on it. The lengthy firefight that ensues is mostly just flashes in the darkness with occasional infrared — a beautiful tableau, like a Vija Celmins painting, that feels weird to enjoy only if you look too closely.Butler’s movies are best when you don’t look too closely. This is already the second one gifted to us this year. I say “gifted” because it truly is a gift, in 2023, to receive such films — throwbacks not only to late-1980s action movies but to their stars, actors like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. In a market saturated by superheroes, Butler has been making nostalgic, midbudget action films so steadily, for so long, that he has perfected his own formula. A middle-aged Everyman (made of “bourbon and poor choices,” per his character in one series), often with military training, goes rogue against a system that is failing to protect his family or his translator or the president. These movies may be, like much of their genre, unseasonably macho, riddled with casual brutality and kind of misogynistic; they have also been accused of varying degrees of racism, jingoism and xenophobia. But their appeal is broader than you might think. Butler’s main concern is not necessarily ideological. He’s interested in nobility, loyalty, courage and strength — qualities that, in Hollywood, often manifest in martial form. And it’s through this faithful portrayal of a rumpled-but-honorable masculinity, in rotating all-American settings, that a Scottish dude has become a kind of heartland hero.His breakthrough was “300,” Zack Snyder’s live-action adaptation of Frank Miller’s own graphic retelling of the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, in which a meager Greek army fought to the death against a Persian onslaught. This 2006 movie birthed not only the archetypal Butler action hero, his Spartan King Leonidas, but also the type of film that would contain him. “300” had the velveteen look of a Caravaggio, but all the depth of a soup can. It leaned into religious and mythic iconography — Leonidas succumbs, at the end, surrounded by his soldiers, riddled with arrows like some mash-up of St. Sebastian and the Sistine Chapel’s “The Last Judgment.” Butler, in baby bangs and sprayed-on abs and a brogue reminiscent of Tony Curtis in “Spartacus,” sold the display like a pro. No matter how savage he got, there was always some puckish humanity flickering across his face — like the scene in “Point Break” in which Keanu Reeves catches a glimpse of Patrick Swayze’s gentle eyes behind his mask and doesn’t shoot.Butler has been making nostalgic, midbudget action films so steadily, for so long, that he has perfected his own formula.Images and themes from “300” recur across Butler’s films. There’s loyalty to the homeland and its defenders, the passing of “respect and honor” from father to son, soft homophobia toward “philosophers and boy-lovers” by half-naked alpha males, stoicism, nurturing women, “no mercy” conflicts with foreigners, heroic sacrifice, David-and-Goliath battles. “I’m just a law-abiding citizen — I’m just a regular guy,” Butler says in “Law-Abiding Citizen,” which came out three years after “300.” In that one, an engineer named Clyde Shelton sees his wife and daughter killed in front of him, but the biggest wound comes from the justice system, via a prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx. Clyde responds with a bit of a killing spree, pledging to bring the whole “diseased corrupt temple” down on the lawyer’s head — “It’s gonna be biblical.”It’s the trilogy of “Olympus Has Fallen,” “London Has Fallen” and “Angel Has Fallen,” with their combined box office of $522 million, that consolidated Butler’s brand as the kind of modest action star who has largely gone missing from theaters. In these movies, the Secret Service agent Mike Banning, growing increasingly broken down over time, protects the president from various disposable terrorists. He runs on steaks, and later on painkillers, and always ends up battered, emerging into the light propping up a commander in chief who says something like: “They came to desecrate our way of life. To foul our beliefs. Trample our freedom. And in this, not only did they fail, they granted us the greatest gift — a chance at our rebirth.”If this sounds as if it springs from a conservative imagination, well, the franchise’s multicultural goons and deep-state conspiracies would certainly be familiar to that audience. But while Butler is the kind of guy who gets invited to the Pentagon to promote a thriller about Navy SEALs, his stance on these films is more rough and ready. Facing criticism for “London Has Fallen,” he argued at the premiere that “It’s about us winning” and “It’s based on heroism and the good guys kicking ass.” This generalized machismo maintains its appeal even when his films veer more mainstream — dropping the jingoism for “Angel Has Fallen” or, in 2017’s “Geostorm,” taking a cuckoo disaster-movie ride. In 2018’s “Den of Thieves,” where the masculinity is just dense enough to dilute the toxicity, he plays a leather-clad cop who swigs Pepto like whiskey and works to bring down some ex-Marines who aim to rob the Federal Reserve. In “Greenland,” he’s another engineer in another disaster, racing to get his family to a bunker (and refusing, in individualist American fashion, to help his neighbors). This January’s “Plane” was positively communist by comparison, with the tagline “survive together or die alone.” In that one, he’s a commercial pilot with an Air Force background whose jet crashes on a Filipino island held by separatists. There remain the obvious conservative themes — untrustworthy superiors, renegade saviors, barbaric foreigners — but it’s perfect all-audiences Butler, a propulsive popcorn flick with a righteous core.Maybe it’s inevitable that the same guy who keeps revolting onscreen would do the same off it. Butler hasn’t appeared on a mainstream magazine cover since 2018. He seems to have smarted a little when, in a January interview, Inverse called him “the King of the B-movie” to his face. He knows he has a large audience, but I wonder if he knows quite how much good will he has accumulated. In “Kandahar,” he plays an undercover operative exposed by a leak “bigger than Snowden and WikiLeaks combined,” in a script packed with “free world” jokes and aphorisms like “you have to return home to know what you are fighting for.” But I genuinely felt chills at the ending, a lachrymose montage in which the blue-eyed soul of Tom Rhodes’s “Low Tide” plays over shots of Butler and his translator, finally safe, intercut with sentimental scenes of their loved ones. It’s cheap, but there’s a good heart in there, and that’s hard to come by these days.Source photographs: Open Road Films; Focus Features; Lionsgate; FilmDistrict. More

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    Linda Lewis, British Singer Whose Voice Knew Few Limits, Dies at 72

    Inspired by Motown early in her career, she became an acclaimed singer-songwriter and backed the likes of David Bowie, Rod Stewart and Cat Stevens.Linda Lewis, a critically acclaimed soul singer and songwriter whose pyrotechnic voice propelled four Top 10 singles as a solo artist in her native Britain and led to work as a backup vocalist on acclaimed albums by stars like David Bowie, Cat Stevens and Rod Stewart, died on May 3 at her home in Waltham Abbey, outside London. She was 72.Her sister Dee Lewis Clay confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Ms. Lewis drew raves for her soaring five-octave vocal range and impressed listeners with her genre-hopping instincts, drawing from folk, R&B, rock, reggae, pop and — with more than a nudge from label executives — disco.She grew up studying Motown hits note by note, and her first single, “You Turned My Bitter Into Sweet” (1967), was a joyous up-tempo number that sounded straight out of Berry Gordy’s recording studio on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit.After that she joined the Ferris Wheel, a rock and soul band that was popular on Britain’s club circuit, before moving on to a solo career as a guitar-strumming singer-songwriter and signing with Reprise Records in 1971.“That was a great time,” she said in a 2007 interview with Record Collector magazine. “I was living in a sort of commune, and loads of people were popping in and out. Cat Stevens turned up a lot, as did Marc Bolan and Elton John. There was a lot of jamming going on there, some very creative vibes.”She ended up touring the world with Mr. Stevens (who later took the name Yusuf after converting to Islam), as well as lending her voice to albums like David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane” (1973) and Rod Stewart’s “Blondes Have More Fun” (1978).Ms. Lewis in concert in 1981. Her record company chose to package her as a disco diva in the late 1970s, but she saw herself differently.Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesHer first solo album, “Say No More,” released in 1971, failed to make a splash commercially. The next year she released “Lark,” an album marked by a California breeziness that received strong reviews and included the song “Old Smokey,” which the rapper Common sampled in his 2005 song “Go!” An American tour in 1973 helped create buzz.But still, she needed a hit.She found one that same year, with the buoyant, racy single “Rock a Doodle Doo,” which hit No. 15 in Britain (although it failed to chart in the United States). It showed off her range with vocals that swung from husky lows to shimmering highs, to the point that the song could be mistaken for a duet.In the mid-1970s, she signed with Arista Records, whose founder, Clive Davis, chose to package her as a disco diva like Gloria Gaynor. That decision paid dividends, at least commercially. Her 1975 single “It’s in His Kiss,” a Studio 54-ready spin on Betty Everett’s 1964 hit “The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss),” reached No. 6 in Britain, although it, too, barely made a splash in the United States.But Ms. Lewis bristled at the forced career turn. “I didn’t really stick to my guns, I’m afraid,” she later said. “I saw myself as a singer-songwriter; they didn’t.”Even so, the album with the single, “Not a Little Girl Anymore,” hit No. 40 in Britain, with Rolling Stone noting that it brought “this multi-styled English artist into the mainstream of contemporary R&B.”By the 2000s, her music had crossed over to a new generation, as she sang on albums by Oasis, Basement Jaxx and Jamiroquai.Ms. Lewis at a festival in Chichester, England, in 2010. By the 2000s, her music had crossed over to a new generation.Chris Jackson/Getty ImagesLinda Ann Fredericks was born on Sept. 27, 1950, in Custom House, an area in the docklands of East London. She was one of six children of Eddie Fredericks, a musician, and Lily Fredericks, who worked as a bus conductor and managed pubs. (It is unclear why the singer chose Lewis as her stage surname.)Her mother had great ambitions for her as a performer and enrolled her in stage school, an experience on which Ms. Lewis did not look back fondly.Her compass was set toward music. She got her first taste of the limelight in her early teens, when her mother took her to see John Lee Hooker perform at a club and pushed her to the stage to belt out, with the blues titan’s permission, a rendition of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.”In addition to Ms. Lewis Clay, she is survived by two other sisters, Shirley Lewis and Patsy Wildman; her brothers, Keith and Paul Fredericks; and her son, Jesse. Her three marriages ended in divorce.While Ms. Lewis angled to escape stage school at the earliest possible opportunity, her flirtation with acting was not a complete waste. She made a brief appearance in the Tony Richardson film “A Taste of Honey” (1961). She also popped up as a screaming fan in the Beatles movie “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964).She was not the only future musical notable in the crowd of hysterical Beatlemaniacs. Phil Collins, in his schoolboy jacket and tie, was also on set as an extra. “Many years later, I bumped into him and said, ‘Hey, we made a film together,’” Ms. Lewis told Record Collector. “He gave me a very funny look. I think he thought I was a nutter.” More

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    Foo Fighters Introduce Josh Freese as Their New Drummer

    Freese, a veteran musician, appeared with the rock band ahead of its upcoming tour and album release, the first since its drummer, Taylor Hawkins, died last year.The Foo Fighters introduced a new drummer, Josh Freese, just before the release of their album next month and their first tour since the death last year of the rock band’s previous drummer, Taylor Hawkins, which devastated the group and its fans.Freese, 50, was featured Sunday in an hourlong streamed rehearsal, “Preparing Music for Concerts,” which featured a mix of jokes, surprise cameos by other drummers and a couple of poodles.It started with the group’s lead singer, Dave Grohl, and other members of the band standing around with their instruments in a darkened studio, bantering about whether any of them ever punched someone onstage.Suddenly there is a knock on the door. There are greetings of “hey!” as Chad Smith, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, enters. He gestures with his drumsticks. “There’s a white Mercedes blocking me,” he says, and then leaves.Then Mötley Crüe’s drummer, Tommy Lee, bursts in, carrying bags of P.F. Chang’s Chinese takeout. Cheers all around. “Put it in the kitchen for us,” Grohl says.Danny Carey, from Tool, is the next to come through the door, twirling his drumsticks in one hand and in the other, clutching a leash tethering a pair of large poodles that he says he has just groomed. He then leaves.This, apparently, was a buildup to the appearance of Freese. The poodles are part of his family, according to his Instagram posts. He has also posted about his excitement over P.F. Chang’s.A frustrated voice suddenly calls out from the darkness, from someone who had seemingly had enough of the intrusions: “Excuse me!”The camera swings in his direction. It was Freese, seated behind an array of drums. “Guys could we just like, I don’t know, play a song? Or two? Something?”And they did.The successive appearances of one top rock drummer followed by another were a way to tease the big news after, as Variety reported, the band went to “great lengths” not to reveal the identity of its new drummer.Freese is a veteran drummer who has performed with the Offspring, Sting, Weezer, Nine Inch Nails and others.The Foo Fighters were devastated after Hawkins died in a hotel in northern Bogotá, in Colombia, where the band had been scheduled to play. A beloved member of the group, Hawkins joined the band for its “There Is Nothing Left to Lose” album, which was released in 1999, and played on its next seven albums.The streamed event on Sunday included “Rescued,” the band’s first new song since Hawkins’s death, which appears to reflect their lingering grief.Last September in London, Hawkins’s teenage son, Shane, performed “My Hero” with the band in a tribute concert to his father. At that concert, Freese, on drums, said he wanted to play on Hawkins’s set. More

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    Review: ‘Stranger Love’ Premieres at the Los Angeles Philharmonic

    The premiere of Dylan Mattingly and Thomas Bartscherer’s six-hour opera was presented by the orchestra — an institution at an inflection point.The composer Dylan Mattingly’s cheeks turned red, and he held a hand up to his eyes, as he began to cry late Saturday night during the bows for the world premiere of his opera “Stranger Love.”It was an understandably emotional moment. “Stranger Love,” created with Thomas Bartscherer, had been in development for over a decade and performed piecemeal, but was now being presented in its entirety at Walt Disney Concert Hall, by the perhaps the only orchestra that could do it: the Los Angeles Philharmonic.That’s because “Stranger Love” is a six-hour, durational opera, an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small. It requires the kind of pipe-dream planning that many institutions shy away from, but that has been characteristic of the Philharmonic.Characteristic in large part thanks to the work of Chad Smith, the orchestra’s chief executive and one of its longtime administrators, who said last week that he would leave Los Angeles for the Boston Symphony Orchestra this fall. That news followed another recent blow: the announcement that the Philharmonic’s superstar maestro, Gustavo Dudamel, would depart for New York in 2026.The Los Angeles Philharmonic is now at an inflection point. At stake is the preservation of an ethos that has made this orchestra the kind that can throw its ambition, and deep pockets, into projects like John Cage’s outrageous “Europeras” at Sony Studios; regular commissions at the length of symphonies and full evenings; and “Stranger Love,” whose first act alone is as long as Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” (also programmed there this season), but which doesn’t have a fraction of its marketability.So, as Mattingly cried onstage, his triumph felt bittersweet, with a tinge of fear about the Philharmonic’s next phase. “Omnia mutantur,” someone says in the opera, nodding to Ovid: Everything changes. Yet it’s also natural to want more from the Smith-Dudamel era — to “tarry a while” and “linger in this moment,” to pull another line from the show.No matter what happens, “Stranger Love” deserves life beyond its one-night-only run at Disney Hall, which was hosted by the Philharmonic and performed by Mattingly’s ensemble, Contemporaneous. The most natural fit in New York, where epically avant-garde opera has all but vanished from earlier bastions like the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center, would be the Park Avenue Armory, the city’s most generous promoter of large-scale work.If anything, the Armory would be a more appropriate space than Disney Hall, its vastness able to accommodate Mattingly’s musical and emotional sprawl — the way his score does nothing but linger, luxuriating in the good and the bad, the spiritual and the doubtful, and above all the ecstatic.The largely abstract opera follows a pair of lovers: Tasha, sung by Molly Netter, and Andrew, sung by Isaiah Robinson.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingLike most works of extreme ambition and magnitude, “Stranger Love” isn’t perfect. When it name-checks the likes of Anne Carson and Octavio Paz, it behaves more like creative nonfiction than opera and yanks its audience from an experience of pure feeling. Some stretches of the score are more trying than transporting, and the second act seems destined to torment any director.That 80-minute act — in which singers exist more as instrumentalists than traditional characters — certainly appears to have stumped Lileana Blain-Cruz, an imaginative, effective director who wasn’t in full control of the material here, or much of elsewhere. There were references, in her modest staging, to the work’s lineage of opera and durational art. In Matt Saunders’s scenic design, a tall backdrop (made of threads that formed a canvas for Hanna Wasileski’s projections) was at one point illuminated with Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s celestial, forced-perspective set for “The Magic Flute.” As if playing off an “Einstein on the Beach” reference in the line “These are the days my friends,” Blain-Cruz has two people carry and sit in chairs that could have been used in Robert Wilson’s original “Einstein” production.That’s far from the only tip of the hat in “Stranger Love,” but it may be the most explicit. Mattingly has internalized a wealth of musical styles: the gamelan-influenced, West Coast sounds of Lou Harrison; the propulsive cadences of John Adams; the vocal technique and poetic dramaturgy of Meredith Monk. Three female voices — Holly Sedillos, Catherine Brookman and Eliza Bagg, often employing woodwind-like vocalise — could have been pulled from a Minimalist ensemble.But Mattingly doesn’t quote. Instead, his influences surface subtly, abstracted in, say, a rhythmic gesture. In the end, the language is entirely his own. Although his score often instructs singers to “sound as beautiful as possible,” his writing calls for the directness of pop rather than an operatic color. His 28-piece orchestra includes restless percussion and three pianos: one with standard tuning, one roughly half a tone lower, the other in between. The microtonal effect, in Mattingly’s polyrhythms, can be that of a gently melodic choir of wind chimes.The plot is narrated by an otherworldly character named Uriel, played by Julyana Soelistyo.Craig T. Mathew/Mathew ImagingIn each scene, Mattingly prolongs a musical idea with mantra-like focus, relishing and delicately transforming it. Bartscherer’s poetic and slim story follows a couple, Tasha and Andre, through the seasons, a vague timeline guided more by mood than chronology: fresh, promising spring; pleasantly lethargic summer; suddenly shifting autumn; suffocatingly glacial winter. This general arc is narrated by Uriel — a charismatic Julyana Soelistyo, whose otherworldliness is emphasized in Kaye Voyce’s costume design — and accompanied by two allegorical figures, Threat from Without (temptation) and Threat from Within (doubt).David Bloom conducted Mattingly’s pitfall-ridden score with a sure hand. Occasionally, his hips betrayed an urge to groove, but even then he remained unflappably precise. As Andre, the tenor Isaiah Robinson had a bright purity that served the score with an egoless instrumental timbre similar to the soprano Molly Netter’s Tasha. As the Threat from Without, Jane Sheldon sang with birdlike leaps redolent of Monk’s “Atlas”; Luc Kleiner, as the Threat from Within, was gloomier and darkly seductive.Blain-Cruz’s production featured six dancers, who during the first act are made to behave with unpredictably fast and slow stylized movement that snaps into focus only when Tasha and Andre spot each other and sustain eye contact from across the stage. But in the second act, the dancers merely retell the lovers’ story through Chris Emile’s tiresomely obvious choreography.Most impressive were the members of Contemporaneous, which Mattingly founded with Bloom while students at Bard College. These are players well versed in Mattingly’s idiom, and well suited to take on such an immense, difficult score for one night: exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing, as full of personality as any singer.They are the stars of the purely instrumental third act, repeating versions of earworm phrases for about 20 minutes. As the score ritualistically stretches a kind of communal love to the cosmos, one melody begins to spread out as well, until, in the final seconds, it unfurls slowly, ending before it reaches its last note.And why should it? When something is this special, you can’t help but want to tarry a while and linger in the moment.Stranger LovePerformed on Saturday at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles. More

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    Morgan Wallen Joins an Elite Club With 11 Weeks at No. 1

    The country star’s chart run with “One Thing at a Time” puts him in a league with Whitney Houston, Stevie Wonder and the “Titanic” soundtrack.There was snow on the ground when Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” arrived at No. 1 in early March. Now, in balmy late spring, the country superstar’s latest LP is racking up its 11th consecutive week on the chart — a feat that puts Wallen in the company of Whitney Houston and Stevie Wonder.The 36-track “One Thing at a Time” has been a streaming blockbuster since it came out, and its numbers have cooled only modestly since then. Week after week, it has fended off competition from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Metallica and two members of BTS to remain music’s most popular album. In its latest week, “One Thing” had the equivalent of 134,500 sales in the United States, including 165 million streams and 8,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to the tracking service Luminate.Long runs on the Billboard 200, the magazine’s flagship album chart, are not unheard-of. Bad Bunny, Drake and the “Frozen” soundtrack have all notched a total of 13 weeks; Taylor Swift has gotten 11 twice before. But none of those were for consecutive streaks, which are far more rare.According to Billboard, the last album to hold No. 1 for at least 11 weeks in a row was the “Titanic” soundtrack, which reigned for 16 back in 1998. But the last to spend its first 11 weeks at the top — to open at No. 1 and hold there 10 more times — came in 1987 with Houston’s “Whitney,” which featured hits like “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “So Emotional.” Before that, Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” logged its first 13 weeks at No. 1 back in 1976 and 1977.Wallen’s accomplishment surpasses even his own record, after the singer’s “Dangerous: The Double Album” topped the chart for its initial 10 weeks in early 2021. That run came amid an industrywide rebuke after Wallen was caught on video using a racial slur, resulting in his temporary disappearance from radio and streaming playlists.Also this week, the Jonas Brothers open at No. 3 with “The Album,” while the hyper-prolific Louisiana rapper YoungBoy Never Broke Again comes in at No. 4 with “Richest Opp,” his third release to reach the Top 10 this year alone — the last time just three weeks ago.Swift, whose triumphant stadium tour comes to MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., for three shows this weekend, is No. 2 with her latest, “Midnights,” and SZA’s “SOS” is No. 5. More

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    Helmut Berger, Actor Known for His Work With Visconti, Dies at 78

    He first made his mark in “The Damned” as a character one critic said personified “the outright perversion” of Nazism. He went on to have a long career, mostly in Europe.Helmut Berger, a handsome Austrian movie star who was best known for appearing in three feature films by the Italian neorealist director Luchino Visconti, his lover for a dozen years, died on Thursday at his home in Salzburg. He was 78.His death was announced by his agent, Helmut Werner, who did not give a cause.“Many years ago,” Mr. Werner said in a statement, “Helmut Berger told me, ‘I have lived three lives. And in four languages! Je ne regrette rien.’”Mr. Berger was studying Italian in Perugia in 1964 when a friend introduced him to Mr. Visconti, who was on location directing a film that starred Claudia Cardinale.“I was there watching, I was fascinated,” he told the website Europe of Cultures in 1988. “I wanted to see how they shot a film.”They began a relationship soon after that, personal as well as professional. Mr. Visconti cast Mr. Berger in “The Damned” (1969), the story of a German steel family, inspired by the Krupps, in the early years of the Third Reich. As Martin, the grandson of the family’s patriarch, Mr. Berger imitates Marlene Dietrich in full costume during a party for his grandfather, which ends with word of a fire at the Reichstag. Martin later molests younger relatives and rapes his mother (Ingrid Thulin).Ann Guarino, reviewing the movie for The Daily News of New York, said Mr. Berger personified the “outright perversion” of Nazism. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Berger “gives, I think, the performance of the year.” He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for most promising male newcomer.Mr. Berger said that working with Mr. Visconti was like being onstage.“You don’t do 10-minute, five-minute takes but whole scenes, sometimes 20 minutes long,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “He uses three cameras so you never know which one is on you. You get really into it, the whole atmosphere. He doesn’t limit you, he wants you to be free.”Mr. Berger appeared in two more feature films directed by Mr. Visconti: “Ludwig” (1973), in which he played the mad 19th-century king of Bavaria, for which he won a David di Donatello Award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar; and “Conversation Piece” (1974), which starred Burt Lancaster as an art historian living quietly in Rome whose life is changed by several people, including a pushy marchesa and her gigolo lover, played by Mr. Berger.Mr. Canby had a radically different assessment of Mr. Berger’s work this time, calling him “a lightweight” who “can function no more than as an ideogram for decadence.”By then, Mr. Berger and Mr. Visconti had been living together for some time.“During the 12 years with Luchino Visconti, I was faithful,” he told Gala magazine in 2012.“But were you dating model Marisa Berenson at the time?” the magazine’s interviewer asked.“Of course, I’m bisexual,” he said. “This is not a problem.”Mr. Berger fell into a deep depression after Mr. Visconti’s death in 1976.“At first I drank a lot, gluckgluckgluck, and then the pills came,” he told Gala. “My housekeeper wasn’t supposed to come until 5 p.m. but happened to drop by at 10 a.m. and saved me.”Mr. Berger on the set of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969).Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHelmut Berger was born Helmut Steinberger on May 29, 1944, in Bad Ischl, Austria. His parents, Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, ran a hotel.Fleeing his father, who he said was brutal to him, Helmut moved first to England and then to Italy, where he made his film debut in “The Witches” (1967), an anthology movie consisting of five stories, each made by a different director. He played a hotel page in the segment directed by Mr. Visconti.After a few other films, including “The Damned,” Mr. Berger was cast in the title role of Massimo Dallamano’s “Dorian Gray” (1970), which billed itself as a “modern allegory” based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” set in sexy present-day London. He was one of a reported 500 actors who auditioned.Mr. Berger “gives a trance-like performance, looking simply beautiful — if you like the type,” Ms. Guarino wrote.He continued to work, mostly in Europe, until a few years ago. He notably played the sickly son of a rich Jewish family facing Fascism in Italy in Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, and the playboy who seduces Elizabeth Taylor’s character after she undergoes cosmetic surgery in “Ash Wednesday” (1973).He also portrayed the millionaire boyfriend of Fallon Carrington (Pamela Sue Martin) on “Dynasty,” the prime-time soap, in a story arc from 1983 to 1984, and the Vatican’s chief accountant, who tries to swindle Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather III” (1990).Information about survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Berger was known for his jet-setting lifestyle, for being photographed by Andy Warhol, for being linked to women like Bianca Jagger, and for being called “the most beautiful man in the world” in the German media.But when Gala interviewed him after the publication of the book “Helmut Berger: A Life in Pictures,” he said he was no longer seeking his earlier life’s social hustle and bustle.“I’ve experienced everything,” he said. “I don’t feel like Helmut Berger, either; I’m not him. It’s a stage name. My name is Helmut Steinberger. And that’s what I’ll be until I’m dead.” More

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    Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Joel Edgerton on Paul Schrader Films

    Joel Edgerton, Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke explain how they worked with the writer-director, known for solitary characters grappling with sin and redemption.The writer-director Paul Schrader has a metaphor he likes to use with his leading men.In his view, actors tend to think of themselves as trees in the wind fighting to stay upright when they perform. But Schrader tells his stars, “Get that image out of your head and replace it with the image of a cliff on a seacoast. And you’re there and the waves are pounding against you. They are going to come and they are going to hit you and then they are going to go away.” In this metaphor the waves can be day players sharing a scene or plot points in a narrative. But no matter what crashes against them, these men must remain stoic, hardened against the world.Joel Edgerton heard a version of this from Schrader in their first conversation about “Master Gardener,” which opened Friday. The drama is the final installment in Schrader’s recent and lauded “Man in a Room” trilogy, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke, and includes “The Card Counter” (2021), starring Oscar Isaac.“I think I probably got the same speech that Ethan got and the same speech that Oscar got,” Edgerton said, explaining, “It wasn’t the place for an actor to explore their bag of tricks and create flourish within character but rather reduce themselves to sort of a conduit of stillness to everything moving and swirling around them.”And, indeed, Isaac and Hawke both have their own descriptions of similar dialogues with Schrader. In interviews, the actors who played these proverbial men in rooms explained what it was like to inhabit tortured but oddly serene personas in works that grapple with typical Shrader questions of sin and redemption.“Master Gardener” casts Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who harbors a disturbing secret: He’s a former white nationalist in witness protection. Underneath his turtleneck and overalls, his body is covered in racist tattoos. In “The Card Counter,” Isaac is William Tell, a proficient gambler who was once an Abu Ghraib torturer. And in “First Reformed,” Hawke is the Rev. Ernst Toller, a holy man filled with despair over climate change.Oscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.” Though Schrader specializes in bleak tales, “he’s not a nihilist,” the actor said. Courtesy Of Focus Features/Focus Features, via Associated PressAll three write in journals, and their entries, offering windows into their preoccupations, are delivered in voice-over narration. These beats are part of the language of a Schrader movie. “It’s like his version of a sonnet,” Isaac said. “He has his forms that he likes to use to explore different things.”In these films Schrader echoes both the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, with deliberate references to “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” and himself. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) scribbled in one of these notebooks in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), which Schrader wrote. So did Willem Dafoe’s drug dealer in “Light Sleeper” (1992), which Schrader wrote and directed.“Even when you’re shooting it, you’re aware there’s a meta thing happening where you realize like, right, this is like Travis Bickle, this is like Willem,” Hawke said. “You feel like, right, I’m part of this lineage of this human being’s work.”It’s work that Hawke is happy Schrader, now 76, is continuing. “I had the feeling that when we finished ‘First Reformed’ — he never said this to me, it was just a feeling — that he might not make another movie,” Hawke said.When Hawke saw “The Card Counter,” he said, he was proud of Schrader for “going back to war.”Schrader didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and only after someone suggested it as such did he acknowledge that’s what he was doing. All three movies concern troubled men reaching for forgiveness and transcendence, and all three trade in metaphors. “‘First Reformed’ really is not about global warming and ‘Card Counter’ is not about gambling and this one really isn’t about racism or gardening,” he said over coffee at the senior-living apartment complex in Hudson Yards where he now lives. “It’s about evolution of the soul of these people who are locked off in their rooms and can’t reach out and touch anyone.”These dramas not only ask their stars to wrestle with the misdeeds and troubles of their characters, but also require them to operate within Schrader’s precise style. He said he cast performers both on instinct and on a sense of whether they can “hold the mystery.”“There were several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding, a willingness to ask the audience to work with us, to not tap dance and try to entertain them, to not reveal too much, to invite mystery,” Hawke said, explaining that there is a freedom in that direction.Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor in “First Reformed.” The actor said he and Schrader had “several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding.”A24At the same time, there is difficulty in achieving the stillness that Schrader asks. “In some ways it was like being asked to go to work with a straitjacket on,” Edgerton said. “But I didn’t feel like that was too daunting a proposition. My feeling always is that the director is captain, and if you go to work with someone, you put yourself in their capable hands.”Recognizing the internality Schrader was asking him to portray, Isaac recruited one of his teachers from Juilliard, Moni Yakim, and did mask work. “I was like, well, my face is going to literally be a mask, so how can I tell the story just through the body and through energy,” Isaac said.And then there’s the writing. Schrader asked each actor to copy out his character’s journal in his own hand. Isaac believed that William would write in cursive, so he took a penmanship course. For Edgerton the task was in line with his usual approach: “I always want my own handwriting to be my own handwriting” onscreen, he said, even before “Master Gardener.” All described the process as meditative, in a way.“You know in Acting 101 they tell you to write your character’s biography, try to write a journal in character,” Hawke said. “Those are very challenging exercises to do that help find the voice of the character and help integrate yourself with the person. For me it was literally delivered to me in a box with an assignment of what to do, so I loved it.”Isaac noted that Schrader, for all of his hard edges and tough themes, has a soft side as well. While “Master Gardener” ends in a different way, a number of Schrader’s films, including “The Card Counter” and “Light Sleeper,” conclude with the hero in prison reaching out to a woman he loves. “He believes in the truth and purity of what love is and what love can do,” Isaac said. “So no matter how dark and grueling things can get, he has that spark in him, too. He’s not a nihilist.”Edgerton has not yet had the opportunity to discuss his time in Schraderland with Hawke or Isaac, but the latter two have swapped stories. Schrader pulled out his phone to show me a photo he received of them alongside another one of his actors, Dafoe, huddled together with middle fingers raised. He suggested it should accompany this article.Hawke and Isaac worked together on a Marvel Cinematic Universe television show, “Moon Knight,” but Isaac, in conversation, thought of another potential franchise. “It’s an incredible badge of honor to be part of Paul Schrader’s extended universe, the PCU,” he said, laughing. “It’d be one hell of a convention of all those characters coming together. We could do a team movie. I’m going to pitch him on that.” More

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    ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Premieres at Cannes

    Martin Scorsese directed this harrowing and deeply American true-crime drama set in the 1920s. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star. On Saturday, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s harrowing epic about one of America’s favorite pastimes — mass murder — had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, screening out of competition. It’s Scorsese’s first movie at the event since his nightmarish screwball “After Hours” was presented in 1986, winning him best director. For this edition, he walked the red carpet with the two stars who have defined the contrasting halves of his career: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction best seller of the same title — the screenplay was written by Scorsese and Eric Roth — the movie recounts the murders of multiple oil-rich members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma during the 1920s. Grann’s book is subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” while the movie primarily focuses on what was happening on the ground in Oklahoma. The name of the young bureau chief, J. Edgar Hoover, comes up but largely evokes the agency’s future, its authority, scandals and that time DiCaprio played a closeted leader in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” (2011).“Killers of the Flower Moon” is shocking, at times crushingly sorrowful, a true-crime mystery that in its bone-chilling details can make it feel closer to a horror movie. And while it focuses on a series of murders committed in the 1920s, Scorsese is, emphatically, also telling a larger story about power, Native Americans and the United States. A crucial part of that story took place in the 1870s, when the American government forced the Osage to leave Kansas and relocate in the Southwest. Another chapter was written several decades later when oil was discovered on Osage land in present-day Oklahoma.When DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart arrives by train at the Osage boomtown of Fairfax, oil derricks crowd the bright green plains as far as the eye can see. Still wearing his dun-colored doughboy uniform from the recently ended war, Ernest has come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert DeNiro), along with a clutch of other relatives, including his brother (Scott Shepherd). A cattleman with owlish glasses and a pinched smile, the real Hale had nurtured such close relations with the local Native American population that he was revered, Grann writes, “as King of the Osage Hills.”With crisp efficiency, soaring cameras and just enough history to ground the narrative, Scorsese plunges you right into the region’s tumult, which is abuzz with new money that some are spending and others are trying to steal. The Osage owned the mineral rights to their land, which had some of the largest oil deposits in the country, and they leased it to prospectors. In the early 20th century, Grann writes, every person on the tribal roll began receiving payouts. The Osage became fantastically wealthy, and in 1923, he adds, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.”“Killers of the Flower Moon” is organized around Ernest’s relationship with both Hale and a young Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whom he meets while taxiing townspeople around. Much like Fairfax, where luxury autos race down the dirt main road amid shrieking people and terrified horses, Ernest is soon hopped up, frenetic, all wild smiles and gushing enthusiasm. He keeps on jumping — it’s as if he’s gotten a contact high from the wealth — though his energy changes after he meets Mollie. They marry and have children, finding refuge with each other as the dead Osage start to pile up.Gladstone and DiCaprio fit persuasively even if their characters have contrasting vibes, temperaments and physicalities. When she’s out and about, this pacific, reserved woman turns her face into an impassive mask and wraps a long traditional blanket around her, effectively cocooning her body with it. With her beauty, stillness and sly Mona Lisa smile, Mollie exerts a great gravitational force on Ernest and the viewer alike; you’re both quickly smitten. DiCaprio will earn most of the attention, but without Gladstone, the movie wouldn’t have the same slow-building, soul-heavy emotional impact. Ernest is a fascinating, thorny character, especially in the age of Marvel Manichaeism, and he’s rived by contradictions that he scarcely seems aware of. DiCaprio’s performance is initially characterized by Ernest’s eagerness to please Hale — there’s comedy and pathos in his mugging and flop sweat — but grows quieter, more interior and delicately complex as the mystery deepens. It’s instructive that Ernest is frowning the first time you see him, an expression that takes on greater significance when you realize that DiCaprio is mirroring De Niro’s famed grimace, a choice that draws a visual line between the characters and the men who have been Scorsese’s twin cinematic lodestars.I’ll have more to say about “Killers of the Flower Moon” when it opens in American theaters on October. More