Aurelia Butler

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    Doubling Up: How ‘Sinners’ and Other Movies Multiply One Actor

    This year at the movies, you’d be forgiven for thinking you are seeing double — because you are. Since March there have been three films featuring stars acting opposite themselves. “Mickey 17” has two versions (at least) of Robert Pattinson as an expendable working grunt on an alien planet in a futuristic world. Robert De Niro played two different mobsters in “The Alto Knights.” And Michael B. Jordan just made his doubles debut as swaggering twins in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a vampire movie set in 1930s Mississippi.Having the same actor appear two — or sometimes three or four or more — times onscreen is one of cinema’s most enduring tricks. And while the effect has long been a powerful bit of movie magic, the technology has evolved over the years. Here are some of the landmarks.‘The Playhouse’ (1921)An In-Camera Method to Buster Keaton’s MadnessThe use of doubling goes all the way back to the silent era in this Buster Keaton short in which the protagonist, played by the prodigious physical comedian, dreams himself as every single person in a show — from the band to the audience members. (He also appears in blackface as a minstrel, an upsetting byproduct of the era.) How did Keaton accomplish this? Through masking and double exposure. He and his cameraman Elgin Lessley would cover part of the lens, perform a beat, and then rewind, uncovering the previously masked portion to add another version of himself to the shot. The effect is a wondrous confluence of Keatons all acting at once.‘The Parent Trap’ (1961)Split-Screen High JinksWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Drop Dead City’: When New York Was on the Financial Brink

    This surprisingly entertaining film examines the 1975 fiscal crisis that nearly led the city to bankruptcy. The movie’s conclusions remain relevant today.There’s a bit of a puzzle at the center of “Drop Dead City” (in theaters), the new documentary about that time New York City barely escaped bankruptcy. Michael Rohatyn, who directed the film with Peter Yost, is the son of Felix Rohatyn, the banker and diplomat who led the Municipal Assistance Corporation. That’s the entity, established at the height of the crisis in 1975, that negotiated the solution with the city, the banks and the unions that ultimately pulled New York back from the brink of financial ruin. But while the elder Rohatyn is praised by many participants in the film, his connection to one of its directors isn’t mentioned at all.I admit I raised an eyebrow when I realized the link, and it’s true that at times “Drop Dead City” seems like a tribute to Felix Rohatyn’s acumen and ability. That might color the film’s credibility a bit. But on the whole, the movie probably benefits more from the younger Rohatyn’s involvement, not least because an incredible array of people who worked for the city and state at the time appear as participants, whether they are former aides and comptrollers or mayors, union leaders and members of Congress.That chorus of voices tells the story, helped by a lot of archival video that vividly illustrates how heated the protests and garbage-laden the sidewalks became while the municipal government tried to figure out the resolution. It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.The story, as a lot of New Yorkers know, is complicated, and “Drop Dead City” sets out to tell it as simply as possible, from the city’s progressive roots to its years of chaotic bookkeeping and sometimes profligate spending to its contentious relationship with both the state government in Albany and the federal government. The participants in the film don’t all agree with one another, which makes for a richer tale. No story about money is straightforward, but this version is about as fun and vivid as it could be without skimping on the details.Viewed through a wider lens, it’s also a parable, and it should be watched through that lens. When you think about it, it’s a bit of a miracle that the American system — involving many interlocking governments and interests, led by colorful personalities that often clash — ever works at all. But while the sheer size of the nation sometimes tempts us to think of faraway people as “them,” with problems that are only “theirs,” our fates are tied together. As people note repeatedly in “Drop Dead City,” it was in everyone’s interest to keep New York afloat, because what happened in the city had broad repercussions for the whole country. The crisis may have unfolded 50 years ago, but our interdependence is as important to remember now as it was then. More

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    Review: As New York’s Opera Scene Empties, Another Rises Upstate

    R.B. Schlather’s vibrant staging of Handel’s “Giulio Cesare,” playing in the Hudson Valley, is a bright spot in a bleak landscape for Baroque work.New York City Opera had recently shuttered when the director R.B. Schlather started to present Handel operas in a white-box gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan about 10 years ago. Those spare, surreal stagings of “Alcina” and “Orlando” felt like an elegy for City Opera’s innovative productions, and for its devotion to Handel — most famously, a landmark 1960s “Giulio Cesare” starring Beverly Sills.Now, as Schlather’s vibrant vision for “Giulio Cesare” plays at Hudson Hall in Hudson, N.Y., the landscape for opera — especially Baroque opera — is even bleaker in New York City, two hours south by train.The Metropolitan Opera, whose 4,000-seat theater isn’t a natural fit for early music, does less than it used to, and it’s become more or less the only game in town. City Opera was revived in name, but as a wan shadow of its former self. The Brooklyn Academy of Music used to be a destination for revelatory Baroque stagings by the likes of Les Arts Florissants; no more. Lincoln Center, ditto. Carnegie Hall presents Harry Bicket’s English Concert in a single Handel performance a year — on May 4 it’s, yes, “Cesare” — but unstaged, in concert.Upstate, Schlather has been unfurling a series of Handel productions with the terrific period-instrument ensemble Ruckus; “Cesare,” running through May 2, comes on the heels of “Rodelinda” at Hudson Hall in 2023. It is a precious bastion of an ever rarer breed.His directorial style in dealing with this composer’s works has gotten clearer with experience. “Alcina” and “Orlando” were always quirky, often thrilling and sometimes bewildering. But this substantially yet intelligently trimmed “Cesare” — with intermission, it’s just under three hours — is a stylishly straightforward account of a story of vengeance and lust set amid Julius Caesar’s campaign to conquer both Egypt and Cleopatra. Hudson Hall has a proscenium, but Schlather’s set pushes the action downstage in front of it with two angled walls painted iridescent black. Under Masha Tsimring’s stark, shadow-throwing lighting, those walls twinkle like a starry sky.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Andrea Nevins, Who Made Touching Films on Quirky Topics, Dies at 63

    Her documentaries, one of which received an Oscar nomination, explored subjects like punk-rock dads and Barbie dolls.Andrea Nevins, a documentary filmmaker who brought sensitivity and depth to seemingly lighthearted stories about underdogs and unlikely heroes, including punk-rock dads and Barbie dolls, died on April 12 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her daughter, Clara, said the cause was breast cancer.Ms. Nevins received an Academy Award nomination in 1998 for her first independent project as a producer, the short film “Still Kicking: The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies,” about a cabaret group made up of retirees in the Southern California desert city.The film bears all the hallmarks of her later work: offbeat characters in unconventional circumstances who, through their struggles, say something meaningful about life and how to live it.Her first full-length project, “The Other F Word” (2011), was based on the 2007 memoir “Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life,” by Jim Lindberg, the lead singer of the band Pennywise.In some ways the opposite of the performers in Palm Springs, Mr. Lindberg was known for his aggressive stage presence and profane lyrics, even as he navigated the everyday challenges of raising three daughters.In a clip from the documentary “The Other F Word,” Fat Mike, the lead singer of NOFX, tends to his second job, parenting his daughter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Havoc’ Review: Tom Hardy Is Primed for a Fight

    Tom Hardy is a crooked cop looking to make amends in Gareth Evans’s action-packed film.Brimming with action archetypes — the grizzled hero, the upstart deputy, renegade police, a crooked politician and young lovers on the run — the writer-director Gareth Evans’s gritty crime movie “Havoc” makes it hard to find anyone in it who feels like a real person.The clichés commence with Walker (Tom Hardy), a sadder, more deflated John McClane type estranged from his wife and daughter at Christmastime. In the film’s opening, Walker, speaking with a low grumble similar to the one Hardy uses for playing Venom, laments his unscrupulous life. “You live in this world, you make choices,” he says. “And for a while it works. Until you make a choice that renders you worthless.”A cop-turned-fixer for the mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), Walker is called into service when Beaumont’s troubled son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), are implicated in a high-speed chase that put a cop in the hospital. They’re also tied to the murder of a high-ranking Yakuza gangster. Beaumont needs Walker to retrieve Charlie before vindictive cops like Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) or the vengeful mother (Yeo Yann Yann) of the slain hoodlum find him. In return, Beaumont will release Walker from any further debts.Following the one-last-job path, “Havoc” offers few surprises, taking nearly an hour to map its huge web of characters. In the meantime, Walker leans on paid informants and his upstart partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), to provide him with witnesses, such as Mia’s resourceful uncle (a scene-stealing Luis Guzmán). The gritty rendering of this crime-riddled city, aesthetically recalling “Sin City,” but in color, provides some additional background stimulation. Still, “Havoc” is mostly shifting around characters to bide time until its gory set pieces.Because what “Havoc” lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.” In the first blood-soaked brawl, Walker finds Mia and Charlie at a club. Unfortunately, so do Vincent and the Japanese gangsters. The four parties collide. With his background as an action choreographer, Evans, who directed the “Raid” films, can artfully craft long elaborate action while maintaining coherency. Walker swings a metal pipe, Mia (Sepulveda’s physicality is impressive) wields a cleaver and others blanket the neon-lit party space with bursts of gunfire.The film’s final skirmish, this time with Walker, Charlie and Mia holed up in a woodland cabin, is equally exhilarating. There are goons crashing through windows and coming up through the floorboards, harpoons and hooks used as weapons. Whip pans instill some moments with a crazed franticness, while slow motion in other instances gives the vicious violence an intoxicating glow. Though the characters in “Havoc” are forgettable, the carnage is gripping.HavocNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Masahiro Shinoda, Leading Light of Japan’s New Wave Cinema, Dies at 94

    His films tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics. But unlike his peers, he did not shun tradition.Masahiro Shinoda, a leading director of the postwar Japanese New Wave whose films, notably “Pale Flower” and “Double Suicide,” fused pictorial beauty and fetishistic violence, died on March 25. He was 94.His production company, Hyogensha, said in a statement that the cause was pneumonia. It did not say where he died.In the 1960s and ’70s, Japanese New Wave cinema, like its French predecessor, tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics, with a tinge of nihilism. But unlike his peers, Mr. Shinoda refused to shun tradition. Instead, he used feudal-era theatrical forms like Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki to recount how cycles of violence have persisted since imperial Japan. His films were wrought with poetic imagery — hooded puppeteers, striking femmes fatales (including his wife, the actress Shima Iwashita) — but for all their sensuality, they espoused the idea that nothing really matters.“Culture is nothing but the expression of violence,” Mr. Shinoda said in an interview with Joan Mellen for her book “Voices From the Japanese Cinema” (1975), adding that “human tenderness is unthinkable without violence.”From left, Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga and Takashi Fujiki in “Pale Flower” (1964), Mr. Shinoda’s best-known film.ShochikuWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Yale Will Teach a Course on Bad Bunny’s Cultural Impact

    With a new fall offering, Yale becomes the latest university to offer a course on the cultural impact of the Puerto Rican star.Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga are among a handful of living pop artists who have amassed enough cultural clout to result in college classes being taught about them. At 31, the global superstar Bad Bunny is about to have (at least) his third, as Yale University plans to offer a course about him this fall.The Yale course, “Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics,” was conceived by Albert Laguna, an associate professor of American studies and ethnicity, race and migration. The Yale Daily News was the first to report on the new course, saying that Professor Laguna was inspired to create the class by Bad Bunny’s latest album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos,” which the artist has described as his “most Puerto Rican album ever.”Bad Bunny was raised in the coastal town of Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, and has risen over the past decade to become a megastar of reggaeton and Latin trap, helping launch Spanish-language music into the contemporary pop mainstream. He has since netted three chart-topping Billboard albums, headlined at Coachella and become one of the most streamed artists in the world. But his new album, which was recorded in Puerto Rico, is a soulful ode to his roots and homeland, where he was born as Benito Martínez Ocasio.The Yale course intends to use the album to study the Puerto Rican diaspora, Caribbean politics and culture, colonialism and musical genres that Bad Bunny has experimented with, such as salsa, bomba and plena.In a phone interview, Professor Laguna described an experience with Bad Bunny’s new album during a trip to New Orleans, which inspired him to design the class.“I was walking around New Orleans listening to it, connecting with the Caribbean feel of the city in neighborhoods like the French Quarter, which can feel a bit like San Juan, and I just became struck by everything this album is doing,” Professor Laguna said. “You have all these creative ways he’s addressing Puerto Rico’s colonial past and present in it and the current challenges the island faces. It’s all over the album. And he’s engaging these issues in music that’s joyful.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More