Aurelia Butler

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    After ‘Another Simple Favor,’ Watch These Female-Centered Movies

    The filmmaker behind “Another Simple Favor” likes when things get “really, really extra” onscreen.Across outrageous, often scatological comedies like “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and “A Simple Favor,” the director Paul Feig, 62, has cemented his unlikely cinematic reputation as a girl’s guy.“I hate to say ‘strong female characters,’ because I don’t like that term,” he said in a video call from Los Angeles. “I just love seeing men and women as equals on the screen, so that’s what I’m always trying to do.”Feig, a Royal Oak, Mich., native whose latest film, “Another Simple Favor,” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, reflected on some of his favorite moments in movie parity.‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby.”John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy, Cary Grant plays a fussy paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn a madcap heiress with a pet leopard (the titular “Baby”) and a penchant for trouble. (Rent or buy it on major platforms.)“Honestly, I didn’t really discover these movies until I went to film school at USC. But over the years of watching comedy I had seen it become completely male-dominated, where women were just sort of props around the men to make fun of or to get in their way.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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    ‘Pavements’: A Sly Ode to the Last Band You’d Give the Biopic Treatment

    Part spoof and part serious, the film is about mythmaking as much as it is about music. The result is delightfully destabilizing.Everybody thinks they know their favorite musicians or bands inside and out: what the lyrics mean, when their style changed, which fabled event made or broke their careers. Filmmakers have always been willing participants in the process, from concert movies to intimate documentaries to glossy biopics. We crave the results, because the myth-weaving is collaborative. And sometimes it involves bending reality a bit to get a better story.Nominally, the subject of the eccentric new documentary “Pavements” (in theaters) is, well, Pavement — but in truth, it’s about the whole ecosystem that creates the legend. The 1990s indie-rock band reached moderate fame in its prime, broke up in 1999, and reunited for tours in 2010 and 2022, which is where “Pavements” begins. The band has a lot of lasting fans, mostly people old enough to have gone to shows or listened on their local college station during Pavement’s original run. There are also a lot of people who’ve never heard of it.That makes the band an unlikely subject for a documentary, which is kind of the joke — and which lends “Pavements” its bigger theme, too. Directed by Alex Ross Perry and edited by the documentarian Robert Greene, it’s a hard film to describe. Part spoof and part serious, its vibe is very much in keeping with its subjects. There’s the documentary part, about the band’s formation and various albums, with archival footage and interviews, a format familiar to anyone who watches documentaries these days.But there are at least three other things going on inside this movie, shot by the cinematographer Robert Kolodny in a variety of visual styles designed to recall genres we’ve seen before. We watch the creation and rehearsal process for “Slanted! Enchanted!,” a Pavement jukebox musical that culminated in two workshop performances in New York in 2022 (one of which I attended). We see the opening of a museum-style show with memorabilia.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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    Nicolas Cage’s Best Performances Onscreen

    We’ve reached the point in Nicolas Cage’s career when it’s easiest to refer to every new movie he’s in by just describing his antics in them. Dracula Cage, terrible boss — that’s “Renfield.” Moody chef Cage, retriever of beloved animal — that’s “Pig.” Serial killer Cage, servant of Satan — that’s “Longlegs.”The tactic works because it’s easy to imagine Cage donning any of those guises, and a thousand more besides. Many a commenter has noted Cage’s propensity for roles that can be described only as crazy, but the actor’s career is too expansive, and often more nuanced, to be reduced to his unhinged characters. Tell me he’s going to play, I don’t know, a ballet master or a mob boss or an enraged father (as in his latest movie, “The Surfer”) and I’ll believe you, because Cage has proved that he contains multitudes, over and over again. Sometimes he even plays more than one guy in the same movie — as in my favorite of his films, “Adaptation,” in which he appears as twins.That means the best way to get a grip on Cage as an artist is to consider him through his many faces. Even when he occasionally takes that face, um, off.‘Moonstruck’ (1987)The Sincere Love InterestEarly on, Cage worked to establish a career apart from his family name. (The “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle, and the directors Roman and Sofia Coppola and the actor Jason Schwartzman are his cousins.) He managed it swiftly in a string of movies that included many performances as a tousled, passionate, somewhat unpredictable young man. What shines through each is a full-bodied commitment to whatever the character’s emotional reality is — all the roiling desires, the suffering, the ecstasy.A great representative performance from this era is his turn as the lovelorn hothead Ronny, who’s smitten with his brother’s fiancée (Cher) in the 1987 romantic comedy “Moonstruck.” Ronny may be missing a hand thanks to a freak bread-slicer accident, but he’s not missing any gallantry, rough-hewn as it is. It’s a charming, uncouth, amorous role, and versions of that Cage show up in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona” (1987) and David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990).(Stream “Moonstruck” on the Roku Channel and the Criterion Channel, or rent it on most major platforms.)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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    Jill Sobule, Singer of ‘I Kissed a Girl,’ Dies in House Fire

    Ms. Sobule, 66, died Thursday morning in Woodbury, Minn., her publicist said. She had been scheduled to perform songs from her musical later in the week.Jill Sobule, the singer and songwriter whose hit “Supermodel” and gay anthem “I Kissed a Girl” were followed by three decades of touring, advocacy and a one-woman musical, died on Thursday morning in a house fire in Woodbury, Minn., according to her publicist. She was 66.The Public Safety Department in Woodbury, a Minneapolis suburb, said that firefighters had responded at 5:30 a.m. to a house that was engulfed in flames. The homeowners said one person was possibly still inside. Firefighters found the body of a woman in her 60s inside the house, the department said.The cause of the fire was not immediately clear.Ms. Sobule was scheduled to perform songs from her one-woman musical, “F*ck7thGrade,” on Friday at the Swallow Hill Music venue in her hometown, Denver, according to her publicist. She was staying with friends in Minnesota while she rehearsed for the musical, the publicist said.A free, informal gathering will be held in Ms. Sobule’s honor instead.On her 1995 self-titled album, Ms. Sobule, who was bisexual, featured “I Kissed a Girl,” which tells the story of a woman kissing her female friend. The song came out when it was “dicey” to be a queer musician, Ms. Sobule recalled. But it broke into the mainstream, making its way onto the Billboard charts.“Supermodel,” a rebellious rock song from the same album, was included on the soundtrack of the romantic comedy “Clueless” and further cemented Ms. Sobule’s popularity.“People call me a one-hit wonder,” Ms. Sobule said in a 2022 interview with The New York Times. “And I say, ‘Wait a second, I’m a two-hit wonder!’”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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    When Taxpayers Fund Shows Like ‘Blue Bloods’ and ‘S.N.L.,’ Does It Pay Off?

    Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has proposed an increase in the film tax credit to stay competitive with New Jersey and other states.New Yorkers — and residents of many other states — have paid more for entertainment in recent years than just their Netflix or Hulu subscriptions.Each New York household has also contributed about $16 in taxes, on average, toward producing the drama series “Billions” since 2017. Over that period, each household has also paid roughly $14.50 in production incentives for “Saturday Night Live” and $4.60 for “The Irishman,” among many other shows and movies.Add it all up, and New York has spent more than $5.5 billion in incentives since 2017, the earliest year for which data is readily available. Now, as a new state budget agreement nears, Gov. Kathy Hochul has said she wants to add $100 million in credits for independent productions that would bring total film subsidies to $800 million a year, almost double the amount from 2022.Other states also pay out tens or hundreds of millions each year in a bidding war for Hollywood productions, under the theory that these tax credits spur the economy. One question for voters and lawmakers is whether a state recoups more than its investment in these movies and shows — or gets back only pennies on the dollar.New York has one of the largest tax credit programs and makes most of its data public, so we totaled its spending to see which productions benefited the most. More

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    Martin Scorsese Interviews Pope Francis in Upcoming Documentary ‘Aldeas’

    The project will highlight scripted short films from international communities along with snippets of a conversation between the director and the pontiff, who died last month.Martin Scorsese will produce a new documentary featuring an on-camera interview with Pope Francis that was recorded at Vatican City in December, a few months before the pope died at the age of 88.The film, “Aldeas — A New Story,” is about the worldwide cultural project developed by Scholas Occurrentes, a global educational movement founded by Francis in 2013, the same year he was elected pope. Communities around the world will create scripts for short films that highlight their identities, histories and values.Snippets of the conversation between the pope and Scorsese will be interwoven into the film, which does not have a release date.In a statement on Wednesday, Scorsese said it was important to Francis for “people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.” Before the pope’s death, Francis called “Aldeas” a poetic project because it “goes to the roots of what human life is.”The project punctuates a long relationship between the pope and Scorsese, whose work has sometimes been religious in nature. When “The Last Temptation of Christ” was released in 1988, it drew protests and outrage from religious groups.In 2016, Scorsese met with Francis to discuss his movie “Silence,” a drama about a Portuguese Jesuit priest who heads to 17th-century Japan, where Christians are persecuted. They met again in 2023, when Scorsese announced he would make another film about Jesus. The director’s most recent project, “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.Before his death, Francis called “Aldeas” a poetic project because it “goes to the roots of what human life is.”Aldeas Scholas Films, via Associated PressWhen Francis died, Scorsese said in a statement to Variety that he was lucky to have known him and that his loss for the world was immense.“He had an ironclad commitment to the good,” Scorsese said. “He knew in his soul that ignorance was a terrible plague on humanity. So he never stopped learning. And he never stopped enlightening.” More

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    ‘Rust’ Review: Alec Baldwin Western Hit by Tragedy Is a Hard Watch

    During every scene of this western, I couldn’t stop thinking about the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, who was killed on set in an entirely preventable tragedy.It’s impossible to watch “Rust,” a period western steeped in death, without thinking about the catastrophe that occurred on set while it was being filmed in New Mexico on Oct. 21, 2021. During a rehearsal, a gun that the star Alec Baldwin was handling discharged a live bullet, fatally wounding the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and injuring the director, Joel Souza. Hutchins was 42; she is survived by a son and her husband, Matthew Hutchins.In March 2024, the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter; she received an 18-month sentence. In July 2024, a case against Baldwin was dismissed after a judge determined that some of the evidence had been mishandled.“There is no way for the court to right this wrong,” the judge said.Those words haunt “Rust,” which is now being released simultaneously in theaters and on streaming. The fact that it is now available to the viewing public isn’t enough to justify a review. And, in truth, this is no longer an ordinary movie; it is, rather, a deeply depressing coda to an appalling and entirely preventable tragedy. In general, live ammunition should never be on any film set, per industry standards. Gutierrez-Reed, who was 24 at the time and an inexperienced armorer, was supposed to load the revolver that Baldwin was holding with dummy rounds. But one of the rounds she loaded into the gun was live.This wasn’t the first time that someone died in a preventable accident while making a movie. In 2014, Sarah Jones, 27, was struck by a train while working as a camera assistant on the drama “Midnight Rider.” The project was never finished, and crews began putting Jones’s name on clapboards as part of a campaign known as “Safety for Sarah.” As the cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who had started another safety initiative for more humane working hours, said: “We are making entertainment, and there’s no reason to risk our lives and our health to get a shot.” His words should have been seared into the minds of everyone in the industry, and anyone who flouts safety protocols should be banned.Three and a half years after Hutchins’s death, the only question that seems worth asking about “Rust,” I think, is what does its release mean to her family. In 2022, some members reached a settlement in a wrongful-death lawsuit against the movie’s producers a few months before production resumed. Hutchins was named as one of the movie’s executive producers, and “Rust,” somewhat queasily, has been dedicated to her. A release from the “Rust” representatives states that its original producers will not gain financially from the movie. The terms of Matthew Hutchins’s settlement were sealed, the release said, but it has been confirmed that he and the couple’s son, Andros, will receive profits from the film.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