Aurelia Butler

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    A Beginner’s Guide to Dungeons & Dragons

    The filmmakers behind “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” help explain the characters, monsters and spells that make up their new film.“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” a comedy-fantasy movie from the directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, is a loose adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, more commonly known among fans as D&D. A social game of chance, strategy and a kind of improvisational storytelling, D&D is hugely complex and deeply immersive, demanding of its players an almost scholarly commitment to learning its history, its rules and its mythology — all of it chronicled in a series of exhaustive, encyclopedic official rule books that are the foundation of the game.With so much advanced knowledge and folklore out there, it might seem daunting to approach this “Dungeons & Dragons” film (now in theaters) as a newcomer to D&D. But the movie has in fact been made with novices in mind.“The intention was for nothing in the film to have to be explained prior to seeing it,” said Daley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Goldstein and Michael Gilio, in a recent video interview. “We knew that was of the utmost importance, so that we’re not alienating an audience that doesn’t know D&D.” Although the film contains more than enough Easter eggs and references to satisfy die-hard fans, “none of that is a requirement,” said Goldstein. “You don’t have to know how to fly an F-18 to enjoy ‘Top Gun.’”To help answer any lingering D&D questions you might still have going into “Honor Among Thieves,” Daley and Goldstein explained some of the movie’s more arcane nods and allusions.Who are the good guys and the bad guys?Broadly speaking, the film features two competing factions: the Harpers and the Red Wizards of Thay. (For much of the running time, our heroes are caught in the battle between them.) The Harpers are “a benevolent faction of essentially spies, who work in conjunction with good-aligned characters and places to help root out evil entities,” Daley said. One of their primary adversaries is Szass Tam, the leader of the Red Wizards, who rules as a dictator of the nation of Thay.Daisy Head, left, as Sofina in the film.Paramount PicturesWhat’s a class, and what classes are our heroes?One of the first steps in a game of “Dungeons & Dragons” is the choosing of a character class: It defines your identity based upon set skills and abilities, and limits what you can and can’t do in the game. Standard classes include monks, fighters, wizards and warlocks.The characters in the film were written with these classes in mind. Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard. Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) is a barbarian. We also see sorcerers (Justice Smith’s Simon), paladins (Regé-Jean Page’s Xenk) and a rare tiefling druid (Sophia Lillis’s Doric). Goldstein said that they wanted there to be “a clear distinction between each of the classes that was immediately recognizable to people who were aware of the game,” but they didn’t want the characters actually describing their types out loud. “Nobody ever says, ‘I’m a barbarian, what do you want from me?’ or anything like that.”Who’s aligned with what?One of D&D’s most enduring contributions is the idea of alignment — a moral category determined along the axes of good versus evil and law versus chaos. (If you have ever heard of someone being described as lawful good or chaotic evil, that’s where it comes from.)It’s easy enough to determine the alignment of each of the characters in “Honor Among Thieves,” as D&D fans will no doubt be glad to do. But Daley said that the alignments were less expressly conceived for the film than “coincidentally obvious” based on the way all fictional characters tend to be written.What are all these monsters?“Honor Among Thieves” is rife with curious creatures — all of them taken from the original game. Some are considered beasts, which are animals that could exist in the real world, and others are monstrosities, which Goldstein described as more “fantastical.”There are Mimic Chests (huge carnivorous mouths disguised as treasure chests) and the fan-favorite Gelatinous Cubes (more or less what it sounds like: huge cubes of goo that trap people inside).“There are also deeper cuts, like the Intellect Devourer, a brain-shaped creature with legs that takes control of your mind and kills you,” Goldstein said.A Gelatinous Cube traps one character in the film.Paramount PicturesAnd that … owl … bear … thing?… is an Owlbear, actually. It’s a big owl-bear hybrid that the druid, Doric, transforms into a couple of times in the film. Large and powerful, it’s one of the film’s more striking creatures.“The traditional Owlbear design often is more of a grizzly bear, but we thought it would look more beautiful if it looked like a snowy owl,” Goldstein said.Where does the movie take place?“Honor Among Thieves” isn’t set in a generic fantasy land. In fact, its globe-trotting adventures are situated in clearly delineated spaces based on pre-existing “Dungeons” maps and settings. “While writing the movie, we consulted the map,” Goldstein said. “We treated it like it was a movie about a real place with a real history.”The film largely takes place within an area called the Sword Coast, of the Forgotten Realms, along the western side of the continent of Faerun. We see such cities as Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, glimpse the Arctic tundra of the northern Icewind Dale, and much more. The filmmakers took pains to make the geography game-accurate, being mindful of relative positions, travel times and how different areas relate. “If they go from Triboar to the Evermoors by horseback, we know that it’s a certain distance and that it would be possible,” Goldstein said.The film uses various locations from the game, like the ice prison Revel’s End.Paramount PicturesSo all of these places were already in the game?Not exactly. As the film opens, Edgin and Holga are serving a life sentence in the remote ice prison of Revel’s End, having been busted during a botched heist. Daley and Goldstein always knew they wanted to begin the movie this way — but when they reached out to the game’s manufacturer, Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), to ask if such a prison existed in the wintry region of Icewind Dale, they were informed that none did.Fortunately, Wizards worked their magic: A new “Dungeons” book released in the fall of 2020, “Rime of the Frostmaiden,” added Revel’s End and its parole board, the Absolution Council, to the official D&D canon. “That was one of the most gratifying parts of this whole process: seeing our names in a D&D book,” Daley said. “More so even than seeing our names on the poster for the movie.”What’s all that weird writing?As in “Star Wars,” “Honor Among Thieves” contains no written English. Instead, any of the script you see throughout the film is written in Thorass, a well-known in-game “Dungeons” language with its own established alphabet. Much as Trekkies can speak Klingon, many D&D obsessives will know the text by sight — and will no doubt be taking notes on what it means. “It was all very deliberate,” Goldstein said. “Anything you see in the film has meaning and can be translated.” More

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    4 New Artists You Need to Hear

    Listen to Jana Horn, Water From Your Eyes, Debby Friday and Anna B Savage.Debby Friday is on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Katrin BragaDear listeners,Each year when I watch the Grammys, I am reminded of the absurdity of the best new artist category. New to whom, I always wonder. The qualifications are notoriously fuzzy and historically unstable — just ask the country musician Shelby Lynne, who released her debut record in 1989 and was amused to find herself winning best new artist in 2001. (“Thirteen years and six albums to get here,” she remarked wryly from the stage.) In 2007, Justin Vernon’s folk-pop project Bon Iver put out the lauded “For Emma, Forever Ago,” but it took five years and two more acclaimed releases to pull off one of the category’s most dramatic upsets, when he took home the 2012 trophy by beating the fan favorite, Nicki Minaj — who, as it happened, put out her first mixtape all the way back in 2007, too.And yet I did feel sympathy for the Grammy nominating body while putting together today’s playlist, which is full of up-and-coming artists who have recently caught my ear. No, they’re not exactly “new” — all have previously released music, and in some cases a few albums. But they’re new to me, and I hope that means at least a few of them will be new to you, too. They’re an eclectic bunch, making confessional acoustic folk, brash electro-pop and off-kilter art-rock. All have fresh albums that have either just been released or will be very soon. I would happily break Milli Vanilli’s (rescinded) best new artist Grammy from 1990 into four pieces and redistribute it to the following acts.Listen along here on Spotify as you read, or hit the YouTube links as you go.Jana HornJana Horn is a native Texan with a poised, glassy voice that reminds me a bit of the great ’60s folk singer Vashti Bunyan, except Bunyan’s voice evoked pastoral realism instead of Horn’s subtly mischievous mirror-world. The sparse, spine-tingling “After All This Time” — from a new album coming out next week, “The Window Is the Dream” — was what first caught my ear, but it’s since led me back to her great 2020 album, “Optimism,” and the absolutely haunting song “Jordan,” a poetic meditation on a Bible verse that Horn unfurls with the fixed gaze and confident pacing of an expert storyteller.Water From Your EyesSonic Youth never made a guest appearance on “Sesame Street,” but what the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes presupposes with its latest single, “Barley,” is, well … what if the band did? “1, 2, 3, counter,” the vocalist Rachel Brown intones in a bone-dry deadpan. “You’re a cool thing, count mountains.” Nate Amos provides the perfect complement by kicking up dust storms of distorted, deconstructed guitar riffs. “Barley” stacks familiar words and musical elements in unpredictable shapes, creating an internal logic as alluring as it is mysterious. It all bodes very well for the group’s album “Everyone’s Crushed,” which comes out on May 26.Debby FridayThe Nigerian-born, Toronto-based singer and rapper Debby Friday’s ambitious, charismatic album “Good Luck” is one of my favorite debuts of the year so far. The strobe-lit club banger “I Got It,” which features Uñas, has been a mainstay of my running playlist for the past few months — it’s bona fide sprint fuel! But Friday shows off her range on the more introspective “So Hard to Tell,” which she frames as a tender but direct address to her younger self: “Lady Friday,” she sighs in a voice weighted down with the wisdom of hindsight, “all you do is rebel.” No matter her mood, though, Friday has what the kids call main character energy: She’s a shape-shifting, swashbuckling dynamo journeying through different tempos and genres, always on a heroine’s quest for self-discovery.Anna B SavageWhere does love go — like, energetically speaking — after the relationship that contained it ends? That’s the question that the British singer-songwriter Anna B Savage stares down in “The Ghost,” a quivering, emotionally raw incantation that begins her gripping new album, “In/Flux.” “I thought you were gone, but six years on, you’re back again,” Savage sings through gritted teeth before unlatching her jaw to let out a keening plea: “Stop haunting me, please.” There’s a rattling immediacy to Savage’s music; she writes like someone with a direct, unimpeded channel to her innermost feelings. “The Orange,” the album’s cautiously optimistic closer, provides a satisfying counterpoint to “The Ghost” and, I’d venture, a pretty good ending to this little playlist. “My new love is wind in the poplar trees,” Savage sings, finally free of the ghost’s interruptions and able to take stock of the simple pleasures all around her: “Round pebbles, poetry/Orange peel hacked on my knee.”If that’s not enough new music, Jon Pareles and I have 9 more song recommendations for you in this week’s Playlist.Yours in imagining Kim Gordon meeting Cookie Monster,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Best New (to Me) Artists, 2023” track listTrack 1: Jana Horn, “After All This Time”Track 2: Water From Your Eyes, “Barley”Track 3: Debby Friday, “I Got It”Track 4: Anna B Savage, “The Ghost”Track 5: Jana Horn, “Jordan”Track 6: Debby Friday, “So Hard to Tell”Track 7: Anna B Savage, “The Orange”Bonus tracksI cannot mention Vashti Bunyan without stopping everything and listening to “I’d Like to Walk Around in Your Mind,” and if you have two minutes and 15 seconds to spare, I suggest you do the same.Another absurd Grammy fact I learned this week and must share with you: Guess which song earned Bob Dylan his first ever solo Grammy? Actually, don’t guess, you’re never going to get it so I’m just going to tell you: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” which won best rock performance in 1980. Think about that: Bob Dylan didn’t win a single solo Grammy until 1980. (In 1973, when Ringo Starr accepted a podium full of album of the year awards for the many artists featured on “The Concert for Bangladesh,” Dylan got one of those. But still.) As it happens, I do love “Gotta Serve Somebody” — even more after seeing him play it at the Beacon Theater in November 2021 — so here’s to Bob Dylan’s first Grammy. Maybe that is what Soy Bomb was trying to protest. More

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    Review: Philip Glass and the Meaning of Life

    The director Phelim McDermott, who has acted like a visual translator of Glass’s music, pays tribute to the composer in their show “Tao of Glass.”Once, when the theater-maker Phelim McDermott was a child, he missed out on the show of his dreams.It was an “Aladdin”-like play called “Billy’s Wonderful Kettle” in Manchester, England, and the 7-year-old McDermott was so excited the night before, he got a stomachache that kept him from going. He often thought about that show in the years that followed. In his mind, it was a thing of magic — the best piece of theater he never saw.“I’ve spent my whole life trying to make a show as good as ‘Billy’s Wonderful Kettle,’” McDermott says in “Tao of Glass,” his fragmentary, fantastical and often moving tribute to the composer Philip Glass and the power of art to flow through our lives, as he describes it, like a river.If McDermott hasn’t matched the idealistic image he has of “Kettle,” he certainly has made an earnest effort with Improbable, the inventive theater company he co-founded in 1996. Some of his most inspired creations have been stagings of Glass’s operas — especially the ritualistic set pieces of “Satyagraha” and the juggling spectacle of “Akhnaten.”McDermott truly gets Glass’s music, and so can act as a kind of visual translator. That, we learn in “Tao of Glass,” which opened at NYU Skirball in New York on Thursday, comes from an affection that runs deep, and far into the past.Here, for the first time, McDermott and Glass have built something together from scratch — written, co-directed (with Kirsty Housley) and performed by McDermott, with an original score by Glass. On its most basic level, the production is “the story of a show that never happened,” McDermott says, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen.” But eventually, “Tao” becomes the story of its own creation.The show is metatheatrical from the start. As the lights go down, McDermott is in the aisle, carrying a Skirball tote bag on his shoulder, pretending to look for his seat in the dark. Then a spotlight shines on him, and he looks out at the audience in shocked horror, playing out a bad dream many have. The comedic moment past, he begins, “This is my favorite bit.”McDermott is an effortlessly endearing, self-deprecating host, so passionate when speaking about Glass’s music that he’s reminiscent of the Man in Chair from “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a narrator with an infectious delight for his favorite Broadway cast album.Over a series of nonlinear, discursive vignettes, McDermott illustrates a vision of reality, laid out by the psychologist Arnold Mindell, on three levels: Consensus Reality, Dreamland and Essence. The goal is to experience what Mindell calls “Deep Democracy,” the state of all three levels activated at once. And that provides something of an outline for how “Tao” is presented, down to the concentric rings that hang above or sit on the stage in Fly Davis’s design.McDermott, left, with Wright and Janet Etuk operating a bunraku puppet in the show, which blends memory with Eastern philosophy and a new score by Glass.Tristram KentonOn the first level, Consensus Reality, “Tao” has the appearance of a workaday one-man show, with McDermott sharing memories and fondly miming Glass conducting with his hair at the keyboard during early performances. In the second half, McDermott is joined by three puppeteers as the scenes becomes dreamier, drifting for what feels like too long before returning to the initial focus on music — the Essence, “the Tao which cannot be said.”Your tolerance for this might depend on your relationship with Glass’s music. If you think of it as an extension of his Eastern-inspired meditative practice, everything here is of a piece: McDermott’s obsessions with Lao Tzu, the I Ching and the Rig Veda weave naturally with the slowly transforming, churning arpeggios that are Glass’s trademark. If not, the digressions into states of being could come off as a bit silly.Among the stories McDermott shares are memories of the nights he drove his family mad while he played “Glassworks” on repeat; of using that album in his first professional theater gig; of the time he met Sendak, “a grumpy, gay Oscar the Grouch”; of losing his cool over the destruction of a beloved, ahem, glass table. Interspersed are interludes about Eastern philosophy, flotation tanks and the practice of pretending to be in a coma.With an aesthetic that is whimsical but not twee, McDermott and his fellow performers — David Emmings, Avye Leventis and Sarah Wright — conjure a shadow play of “In the Night Kitchen,” a fantasia that transforms briefly into a silhouette of Glass at the keyboard, and bring to life additional characters with, for example, surprisingly human sheets of tissue paper and bunraku puppetry.There is a version of “Tao” — call it the best piece of theater we never saw — that would have featured Glass playing piano alongside the action onstage. But early in development, the idea was shot down by his manager; Glass just didn’t have the time.But his score is a substantial, crucial contribution. This is late Glass — far from the echt Minimalist sound of “Glassworks,” McDermott’s obsession — performed by a quartet of the percussionist Chris Vatalaro (the show’s music director), the clarinetist Jack McNeill, the violinist Laura Lutzke and the pianist Katherine Tinker.There is experimentation with found-object percussion, and recent Glass touches including colorful texture, expressive shifts in harmony and soundtrack-like tone painting. McDermott’s childhood memories are matched by naïvely excited music; the flotation tank, by a soporific étude; the simulated coma, by a melody so shapeless yet alluring that it could have been written by Satie.Glass does appear briefly, in the form of a Steinway Spirio piano — an instrument that can record sound and touch then reproduce it, like an advanced player piano. He tells McDermott that this way, he can be with him onstage “like a ghost.”It was a reminder that while Glass, 86, is still with us — he was in the theater on Thursday, and bowed with the performers — he won’t always be. But his art will remain, and it’s through his music that McDermott reaches the Essence level. Culture, McDermott suggests, is the route to our deepest selves.With a running time of two and a half hours, “Tao” doesn’t make that point quickly. By the end, though, McDermott’s scattered thoughts satisfyingly cohere like kintsugi, the Japanese art of rejoining broken pottery pieces with golden lacquer, which he describes near the beginning. Some of his memories reveal a clear, clean image; others are imperfect shards that don’t seem to fit. But together, they create something new, and beautiful.Tao of GlassThrough April 8 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. More

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    How Taylor Swift Shapes the Story of Her Eras

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTaylor Swift’s Eras Tour began this month in Glendale, Ariz., and will continue through early August in stadiums throughout the United States. The performance is grand-scaled: almost four dozen songs over more than three hours.It is the first major Swift tour since her dates supporting “Reputation” in 2018, and even though it touches on tracks from each of her 10 albums, it focuses heavily on her last four: “Lover,” “Folklore,” “Evermore” and “Midnights.” Those are vastly different albums, and the segments of the concert devoted to them varied very widely.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how Swift translates her music for a live audience, how she reconciles the different categories of her catalog and the persistent fervor of the fans who support her.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect 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

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    Now Playing in China: Putin-Aligned Artists Shunned in the West

    As Russia works to shore up its image and rebuild its soft power after its invasion of Ukraine, it is strengthening cultural ties with friendly nations, including China.Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the star Russian maestro Valery Gergiev has been persona non grata in the United States and Europe, fired by many cultural institutions because of his long record of support for President Vladimir V. Putin, his friend and benefactor.But this week, on the heels of a summit between Mr. Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Moscow, Mr. Gergiev received a hero’s welcome in Beijing, where he appeared with the Mariinsky Orchestra for the ensemble’s first foreign tour since Russia invaded Ukraine.Chinese fans showered Mr. Gergiev with cards and bouquets, calling him by his nickname in China, “brother-in-law,” a play on the Chinese version of his surname. Audiences cheered his Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, as well as a surprise rendition of a Chinese Communist classic, “Ode to the Red Flag.” The state-run news media hailed the visit as the beginning of a new era of Russia-China cultural ties.During the tour Mr. Gergiev rebuked his Western critics and vowed to redouble his efforts to promote Russian culture around the world.“It is not Russian music that is facing challenges,” he said at a news conference at China’s National Center for the Performing Arts. “It is the people who think they can stop Russian music.”The Ukraine war has badly damaged Russia’s cultural engine, which once sent ballet dancers from the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky to the world’s leading stages and brought Russian soloists, opera singers and conductors like Mr. Gergiev to leading concert halls and theaters in the United States and Europe.Now, with artists who are seen as too close to Mr. Putin being shunned in the West, Russia is working to shore up its image and rebuild its soft power elsewhere, strengthening cultural alliances with friendly nations and neighbors, including China, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Serbia, with mixed results.Mr. Gergiev’s tour came on the heels of a recent summit in Moscow between China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Sputnik, via ReutersThe Bolshoi Ballet, the storied company whose name is synonymous with ballet, is considering two tours of China this year. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, an art institution, is working to open a sister branch in Serbia, after losing partnerships in the West because of the invasion. A St. Petersburg ballet company recently brought two works by the Russian choreographer Boris Eifman, “Anna Karenina” and “The Pygmalion Effect,” to Kazakhstan. Star Russian musicians who were once regulars in New York and Berlin, including the pianist Denis Matsuev, who was seen as close to Mr. Putin, are booking engagements instead in Dubai, Istanbul and Belgrade, Serbia, among other cities.China, with its legions of concertgoers and skepticism of Western ideals, has emerged as an attractive market for Russian artists aligned with Mr. Putin. While the two countries have long had cultural ties — Mr. Gergiev has been visiting the country for decades — the timing of his visit, coming a week after the meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, suggested Russia and China were eager for a fresh display of camaraderie as they work to counter American dominance.“Russia is looking for cultural exchanges wherever it can get them, just as it is looking for allies in technology, energy and the military,” Simon Morrison, a specialist in Russian music at Princeton University, said. “Putin is desperate to show that Russia still has friends.”Russia’s attempts to use culture to soften its image abroad face significant challenges, even in friendly countries, experts say, because of its continuing attacks on Ukraine.Classical music, dance, theater and visual art were “some of the last bridges between Russia and the West,” said Vera Ageeva, an international relations scholar at Sciences Po in France. But the disappearance of these cultural exports presents a “huge, incalculable loss for Russia and its soft power,” she said, which cannot be offset simply by expanding cultural ties with allies.Protesters outside an Anna Netrebko concert in Paris last spring.James Hill for The New York TimesAfter Russia invaded Ukraine, cultural institutions in the United States and Europe rushed to cut ties with Russian artists and institutions aligned with Mr. Putin, upending decades of cultural exchange that had endured even during the depths of the Cold War.The Bolshoi and Mariinsky faced cancellations in London, Madrid, New York and elsewhere; a popular program to broadcast Bolshoi performances into more than 1,700 movie theaters in 70 countries and territories was suspended. And several Russian stars with ties to Mr. Putin lost work in the West, including the soprano Anna Netrebko, Mr. Matsuev and Mr. Gergiev, who was fired as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic.While Mr. Putin has repeatedly portrayed Russia as a victim of a Western campaign to erase Russian culture and cancel great composers like Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, Russian works continue to be played throughout the United States and Europe.Mr. Gergiev, once one of the world’s busiest international conductors, has hunkered down in St. Petersburg, leading a packed schedule of performances at the Mariinsky, including classics like Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” and Glinka’s “A Life for the Tsar.” Mr. Gergiev is the general and artistic director of the Mariinsky, which has been his base for decades, and which has expanded with funding and support from Mr. Putin.“I don’t find that my life has taken a turn for the worse,” he said in a recent interview with a Russian news outlet. “I find myself ready to be at home as much as possible.”Mr. Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater did not respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.The Bolshoi, in a statement to The Times, said that overseas tours were necessary to maintain its image and reputation.“The fact that the Western world has been forced to deprive itself of the opportunity to see classical ballet the way Bolshoi is dancing saddens us,” the statement said. “But we ourselves continue to work actively and tour in those places where they are waiting for us.”Since the start of the war, performing has also become increasingly difficult for artists and institutions inside Russia because of a broad crackdown on free speech and expression by Mr. Putin. A “cultural front” movement has spread in recent months with the aim of mobilizing artists in support of the war.Several artists who have publicly expressed opposition to the war have been fired or forced to leave the country. The Bolshoi Ballet scrubbed the name of the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, once a close collaborator and a former artistic director, from its roster after he criticized the war and left Moscow shortly before he was to premiere a new work; the company recently called in replacements to help finish one of his dances.Russia is now looking to its allies to help prop up its flagship cultural institutions, just as it has turned to China and other countries to make up for lost business since its economy was abruptly severed from the West’s.Mr. Gergiev’s appearance in Beijing, which included four sold-out concerts, drew wide attention.The state-run news media hailed the visit as the “grand return” of the “toothpick conductor” (Mr. Gergiev has been known to conduct with a toothpick instead of a baton). Commentators seized the occasion to rail against the West for “politicizing art and venting their sentiment toward innocent people from Russia.”In Beijing, Mr. Gergiev said he felt he was “coming home.” He toured the Forbidden City, where he said he was reminded of China’s enduring cultural traditions, and visited old friends.At the news conference, Mr. Gergiev said the recent meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi would open the door to more frequent cultural exchange between Russia and China. He spoke about a patriotic Chinese composer who is a favorite of Mr. Xi — Xian Xinghai, who was stranded in the Soviet Union during World War II and died in Moscow. Mr. Gergiev said he hoped one day to lead an orchestra of young Russian and Chinese musicians.“These concerts,” he said of his appearance in Beijing, “mark the restart of international cultural exchange.”Milana Mazaeva contributed research from Washington, D.C., and Li You from Shanghai. More

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    Adam Sandler Grows Up (Mostly)

    At 56, the formerly juvenile funnyman has matured into a subtler, more nuanced comedy performer. It’s why the “Murder Mystery” films work so well.“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m so sad,” wails Howard Ratner, voice choked up, tears streaming down his cheeks, a wad of tissue stuffed inside his bloody nose. “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Everything I do is not going right.”Howard, played with frazzled, manic intensity by Adam Sandler, is at the end of his rope. At this point in the gambling drama “Uncut Gems,” the Diamond District jeweler is in leagues of debt, and his one final, desperate hope to raise cash — a gem auction — has just failed spectacularly. Roughed up by the guys he owes, he turns to his mistress, Julia (Julia Fox), for consolation.“Unzip my skirt,” she tells him consolingly. Turning around, she reveals that she’s had his name tattooed in cursive on her backside. “It says ‘Howie’!” she exclaims.“I don’t deserve it!” Howard moans. After a pause, the Jewish New Yorker thinks to add, “You can’t even get buried with me now!”Recent Sandler films, including “Murder Mystery” and its new sequel, “Murder Mystery 2,” have this same familiar intensity. They may have less serious ambitions, but they have also been greatly bolstered by the depth and nuance he has lately seemed to harness.In many ways this is much the same Sandler that we have seen onscreen since the early 1990s, as the star of often juvenile feature comedies and as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live”: an oversize man-baby in the throes of an antic tantrum. In films like “Billy Madison” and “Happy Gilmore,” Sandler specialized in a kind of galvanic caricature of Gen X arrested development, oscillating wildly between boyish puppy-dog charm and explosive, bratty anger. His shtick was the interplay of two distinct types: bashful, vaguely pathetic one moment, utterly rabid the next.But there’s a depth of feeling evident in Sandler’s “Gems” performance that wasn’t on view in those earlier roles. From his tense shoulders to the way he grinds his teeth in moments of stress, Howard embodies a world-weariness that borders on exhaustion, looking harried and bedraggled even at his most well-rested and upbeat. All of the childish vigor Sandler is known for is still there, but filtered through several decades of indelible experience. He’s no longer a man-child. He’s an old man-child — and the effect of all that time on earth shows in every gesture and every pore.Sandler opposite Julia Fox in “Uncut Gems,” which marries the actor’s childish persona with decades of experience.A24This weariness isn’t exclusive to his work in “Gems” (available to rent on major platforms). While he’s regularly met the challenge of demanding roles under the direction of auteurs — giving complex, acclaimed performances in James L. Brooks’s “Spanglish” (2004), Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” (2009) and especially Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” (2004) — over the past several years he’s brought subtler and more thoughtful shading to broader, lighthearted comedies. He’s drawing on his art-house gifts even in farcical contexts, and the result is some of the most rewarding work of his career.In “Murder Mystery” and the new sequel “Murder Mystery 2,” streaming on Netflix, Sandler plays Nick Spitz, a New York City police detective longing for a promotion (more to the point, a raise). In the first film, Nick and his wife, Audrey (Jennifer Aniston), are celebrating their 15th anniversary with a long-overdue trip across Europe. On the plane, Nick spots Audrey chatting with Charles (Luke Evans), a dashing, titled billionaire, and can barely contain his envy.“I know I’m not a duke,” Nick tells Audrey sheepishly, when they have a moment alone.“He’s a viscount,” Audrey corrects him.“I don’t even know what that is,” Nick replies.This exchange is typical of the couple’s banter, which ranges in the films from tender to acrimonious to protective, sometimes in the span of a single line. Sandler plays the devoted but put-upon husband with a delicate balance of compassion and aloofness, and in moments like this, a wounded candor comes through that is oddly touching. While there’s humor in Nick’s jealousy of his rich and handsome competitor, Sandler laces it with a feeling of threatened ego and husbandly pridefulness. You get a real sense that Nick loves Audrey, and an equally clear impression of how 15 years of husband-and-wife routine have calcified their partnership.“Murder Mystery 2” picks up where the first film left off, with Nick and Audrey having parlayed their crime-solving success into a career as professional gumshoes. As with the original, this sequel works because it remains grounded in the mundane rhythms of a longtime marriage. And again, Sandler channels a hangdog torpor, almost a melancholic air, in a performance that bristles with comic realism. When he has to carry the ransom to a hostage exchange, he grouses about the weight of the briefcase (then gets defensive about the size of his hands); moments after a murder, he bickers with his wife about appropriate before-bed snack portions. This is a man with more down-to-earth concerns than the mystery he is ostensibly solving. Sandler, with surly charisma, makes those concerns palpable.Even the broadest of Sandler’s recent comedies benefit from this maturation. “Hubie Halloween” (2020, on Netflix), a goofy horror parody very much in the style of vintage Happy Madison productions, stars Sandler as Hubie Dubois, a sweet-natured simpleton reminiscent of the characters he played in “Little Nicky” and “The Waterboy.” (As in those films, Sandler speaks entirely in a squeaky, abrasive voice.) The difference is that “Hubie” leans into Sandler’s latent sweetness, counterbalancing the raunchy lowbrow humor with a heartfelt — perhaps even sentimental — touch. There’s always been a deep-seated earnestness in his work: Consider the Frank Capra-esque ending of his mawkish (and underappreciated) farce “Click” (2006). Lately, alongside the weariness, that warmth has come to the fore.Sandler, opposite Juancho Hernangómez, gives a sad, moving performance in “Hustle.”Scott Yamano/NetflixThe subtler, more mature Sandler of recent years is most fully showcased in “Hustle,” the sports comedy-drama by Jeremiah Zagar that was released to glowing reviews on Netflix last summer. Sandler stars as Stanley Sugerman, an international scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Well-respected in his field, Stanley longs for a position on the bench: In his mid-50s and with a wife and teenage daughter he rarely sees, he badly wants to spend less time on the road and more time at home.Sandler plays Stanley as a man who is grateful for what he has but desperate for a little bit more. A hot basketball prospect in college with a shot at a championship, he squandered his one opportunity to make it as a player in the N.B.A.: After a night of partying, Stanley got into a drunk-driving accident that sent him to jail for six months and instantly derailed his career. Now he carries the guilt of that choice in his every movement.As Sandler capably plays him, he’s haunted — doomed to work in a kind of karmic penance, incapable of forgetting what might have been. It’s a sad and moving performance of remarkable emotional depth. It’s also the kind of performance that hints at where Sandler might go from here. As he continues to grow older, we might see him further hone this melancholy, perhaps eventually taking on roles like the one an aging Jerry Lewis played in Martin Scorsese’s great “The King of Comedy.”At one point in “Hustle,” asked about the dreams he still hopes to follow, Stanley offers a rebuke meant only semi-ironically. “Guys in their 50s don’t have dreams,” he insists. “They have nightmares and eczema.” Clearly Sandler — whether he personally agrees with the sentiment or not — has been channeling that feeling into his work. Onscreen now, at 56, he’s the guy who’s no longer dreaming: He’s only got nightmares and eczema, and whatever jokes he can muster to make about them. More

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    Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain

    Rotating a colorful shape before slotting it into the perfect position is such a satisfying experience that Tetris has joined chess in the pantheon of universally recognizable games.Less familiar is the true story of how a prototype created in 1984 by a software engineer for the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences ended up reaching millions of players across the world. The movie “Tetris,” which stars Taron Egerton and was released on Apple TV+ on Friday, explores those humble beginnings.The addictively simple puzzle game features seven uniquely shaped pieces, each composed of four square blocks. Players move, rotate and position the pieces to form solid lines, which are then cleared away, allowing for potentially endless play. The game’s name — derived from the words “tetra” (Greek for “four”) and “tennis” (the sport enjoyed by the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov) — has even pervaded culture as a verb, like when you “Tetris” your luggage into the overhead bin on a plane.In an interview with The New York Times, Pajitnov described Tetris as “the game which appeals to everyone” and said he hoped that its future included e-sports and the integration of artificial intelligence. He is also working on making “a very good” two-player version of the game but said “we are not there yet.”Before Tetris was able to cement itself as a household name with releases on consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, Henk Rogers, the character played by Egerton, had to journey to the Soviet Union and fend off competitors to secure the game’s rights. As the film shows, that was an arduous task that paid off immensely.Here are more details about the game’s creation and why it has resonated with so many for so long:The Nintendo Game BoyIn the nearly four decades since Pajitnov created Tetris using the Pascal programming language on the Electronika 60, a Soviet-made computer, more than 215 officially recognized versions of Tetris have been released.Perhaps the most notable variant is the one that was packaged with each copy of the Nintendo Game Boy when the hand-held gaming console was released in 1989. But that incredibly successful pairing — the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color have combined for about 120 million unit sales — almost didn’t happen.The president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa, initially wanted to bundle Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, following the company’s success packaging Super Mario Bros. with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers, however, was able to convince Arakawa that Tetris should be included instead, in part because it would appeal to a broader group of demographics.Pajitnov described the partnership as “two creatures created for each other: Game Boy for Tetris and Tetris for the Game Boy.”“Tetris” shows an early example of the video game featuring seven unique shapes.AppleThe Tetris EffectAs anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.You may have experienced the Tetris Effect yourself if you’ve ever seen tetrominoes, officially known as Tetriminos, when you’re trying to bag your groceries.In professional studies, the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex. Haier’s studies also demonstrated how Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.A study in 2017 by researchers at Oxford University and the Karolinska Institutet showed that Tetris had the potential to provide relief for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, if they played the game after an incident while recalling a stressful memory.The Quest for PerfectionDecades after it was invented, Tetris continues to have staying power. Newer versions of the game include Tetris Effect, which builds a Zen experience via music, and Tetris 99, in which players try to outlast opponents who are meddling with their boards.In competitive play, new methods of moving the pieces are still being discovered. The standard way to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris — yes, the game first released in 1989 is still used at the Classic Tetris World Championships — is by holding the gray rectangular controller so that the left hand controls the movement of the pieces, and the right hand manages the rotation. But that method, known as “delayed auto shift” in the competitive community, has been usurped in recent years by “hypertapping” and “rolling.”Hypertapping involves rapidly pressing the buttons, countering the traditional sensation that pieces are slowly being dragged into position. Rolling lets pieces be moved even more quickly, by flicking the fingers of one hand along the back of the controller.The power of hypertapping became clear in 2018, when a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee used the method to defeat Jonas Neubauer, a seven-time world champion. But in the years since, the rolling method has dominated the competitive scene. Not only is it incredibly effective, but it seems to be less strenuous on fingers and hands. More