Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 150 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    ‘Culte’ Is a Fascinating Romp Through the Dawn of French Reality TV

    A new docudrama recounts the conflicts and controversy surrounding “Loft Story,” a French twist on “Big Brother” that divided critics and generations.Anaïde Rozam stars as a reality TV creator in the French series “Culte.”AmazonThe behind-the-scenes French docudrama “Culte” (in French, with subtitles), available on Amazon Prime Video, captures the birth of reality TV in France. And like many births, it’s a messy and emotional process, with plenty of screaming and crying from multiple parties, some unhelpful meddling from the families, fits of doubt and unknown reservoirs of determination.No one is quite the same after, and then there’s this whole new being to take care of. In this case, it’s “Loft Story,” a “Big Brother” adaptation that debuted in April 2001.Isabelle (Anaïde Rozam) is a stymied TV producer, a failure in her publishing-royalty parents’ eyes. She seizes on the format of “Big Brother,” a new hit show in the Netherlands, but the bigwigs are averse to anything they deem trashy. Reality shows are “voyeuristic, macabre, mind-numbing,” says one executive. “Hellish,” another agrees. “We can’t be the nation of Chartres cathedral and 12 dummies living in an apartment.” Well … just you wait, monsieur!Isabelle vows that her show will be something politically provocative, a social experiment with participants who reflect the totality of France in age, income, ethnicity and outlook. But once the production countdown begins, some of her grander ambitions give way to what we can now see as the basis of most reality casting: Round up some sexy drama llamas, and let the cameras roll. No one is prepared for what unfolds — the fame, the derision, the ratings bonanza.Over its six episodes, “Culte” moves with speed and agility — and, praise God, only one timeline — and its characters’ maneuverings are just as loaded and occasionally backstabby as any reality villain’s. The apparently nationwide hand-wringing about the dangers of lowbrow entertainment feel quaint, almost darling. “Does French TV still have morals?” someone wonders.But lurid tabloid stories have a way of setting the conversation, and TV networks are rarely in the morality business; they’re in the ratings business. “The Americans have a term for this,” a network head says, his eyes agleam. “‘Buzz.’” “Loft Story” indeed puts every apiary to shame.“Culte” makes the most of its festive, exciting ambiguities, and the “Loft” folks do not try to occupy a moral high-ground, nor could they really. They merely wander the bumpy natural topologies of society, and maybe no one is much higher or lower than anyone else. More

  • 138 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    Kimmel and More Late Night Hosts Mock Trump’s Garbage Truck Stunt

    The comment shocked “everyone who couldn’t believe Joe successfully logged onto Zoom,” the guest host of “Gutfeld” said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘We Are Garbage!’President Biden came under fire this week after seemingly referring to Trump supporters as “garbage” during a Zoom call. (In a posting on social media, Mr. Biden said he was talking about racist language, not Trump supporters.)On Wednesday, Jimmy Kimmel said that he didn’t blame the Trump campaign for jumping “all over this garbage thing.”“It’s not a smart thing to say,” Kimmel said. “Joe Biden should drop out of this race immediately.”“Today Kamala Harris was like, ‘Can someone drop Joe in a corn maze and leave him there till Wednesday, just have him wander?’”— JIMMY FALLON“Now, obviously, what he meant to say was nothing. Why are you saying anything? Did you forget that you’re so bad at saying things we had to go get somebody else?” — SETH MEYERS“Shocking everyone who couldn’t believe Joe successfully logged onto Zoom.” — TOM SHILLUE, guest host of “Gutfeld”“This happened during Trump’s rally, and fortunately, someone was there to help boost Marco Rubio up onto the stage so he could frantically share this important news.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s like an excited little Minion bringing big news to Gru: It’s like ‘Mr. President! Stop the proceedings! I’ve got a bulletin!’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And if you thought that was insulting, wait until those people hear what you said about Donald Trump.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Look how excited Rubio is: ‘Everybody, everybody, everybody! I have great news: We are garbage!’” — RONNY CHIENG“Celebrate good times, come on! I mean, Rubio delivered that news like he was announcing the war is over.” — RONNY CHIENG“And you can tell how excited Trump is because his face is at full orange alert.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Mookie Edition)“At the World Series last night, two Yankees fans tried to pry a foul ball out of the glove of Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts. I’ve got to be honest, it’s nice to see New York fans try to steal something besides a wallet.” — TOM SHILLUE“On the bright side, they were offered season tickets by the Phillies.” — SETH MEYERS“It’s Mookie versus the mooks.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“They call that the Staten Island handshake.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingSalma Hayek showed Jimmy Fallon how to dance with a snake circling his neck on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightConnie Chung, a veteran journalist, will discuss her new memoir on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutLili Taylor, left, with Annabella Sciorra in “The Addiction.”Fast Films, Inc.The subscription streaming service Arrow has several spooky film options for a horror-filled Halloween. More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    Two Climate Change Plays Keep the Flames of Hope Alive

    “Hothouse,” at Irish Arts Center, fends off despair with loopiness; “In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot,” at Playwrights Horizons, is a fuzzy world lacking depth.Critic’s Pick‘Hothouse’Through Nov. 17 at Irish Arts Center, Manhattan; irishartscenter.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.Humans have a habit of averting their gaze from danger, even when it’s upon them. Even when it’s chronic, with one emergency piling atop another.That’s what Barbara did for years and years, staying with her violent husband.“Because you want to think it’s — I don’t know,” she says to her daughter, who grew up in that terrifying home. “A blip on the radar. That things’ll go back to being normal. That all this isn’t normal.”Domestic violence is not a theme you might expect from “Hothouse,” a climate change play from the Dublin-based Malaprop Theater. It’s principally set aboard a cruise ship taking passengers to the North Pole “to say goodbye to the ice.”But this alluringly strange and spangly show, at Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, is not solely or simplistically about ecological catastrophe. It’s about self-destruction as learned behavior through generations of safeguarding failures: the harm that parents do to children, who pass that on to their own, and the harm that humans do to the planet, abdicating their duty of care.It’s like a riff on Philip Larkin’s enduring poem “This Be the Verse” — you know the one, about man handing on misery to man — except that it takes cleareyed exception to Larkin’s grim final lines: “Get out as early as you can, / And don’t have any kids yourself.”Written by Carys D. Coburn with Malaprop and directed by Claire O’Reilly, “Hothouse” is a lament for the present and an elegy for the past that keeps alight a flame of hope for the future. It’s also yet another bit of smart programming from Irish Arts Center at a time when New York’s theater scene is somewhat starved for contemporary European work.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

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

    And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.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

  • 88 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Tonight’s Monologue Is for Republicans’

    Kimmel made a 19-minute case against Donald Trump on Tuesday, asking viewers to “send it to a Republican you love.” (He did throw in a Biden joke.)Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Crossing the Aisle“Tonight’s monologue is for Republicans,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Tuesday. He then made a 19-minute case against Donald Trump, asking his viewers to send the clip to “a Republican you love and respect.” “Ask them to watch this whole thing as a personal favor to you,” he said. Then, after promising no “liberal virtue-signaling” and throwing in a Biden joke, he introduced himself to “those of you who don’t ever watch.”“I’m Jimmy Kimmel. Maybe you remember me from ‘The Man Show.’ We had a pretty good relationship back then — the beer, the trampolines. Good times, right? We had fun. But now times are less fun.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“We are very divided, and not just because of Donald Trump, because of people like, if I’m being honest, me. I do a lot of mocking and belittling, and it isn’t always productive.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Am I biased against Donald Trump? Yes. Do I think I have good reasons for being biased against him? Yes. And I’m probably wrong, but I think when you hear some of those reasons, you might agree with me, even just a little bit.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Maybe there’s a little voice in the back your head saying, ‘I might not want this guy driving the bus.’ And if you’re one of those people who think Democrats are controlling the weather or Beyoncé eats baby skin, forget it. This is not going to help at all.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Donald Trump is the exact meeting point between QAnon and QVC. You remember when Ronald Reagan was selling high-tops in the 1980s? No, you don’t, because he wasn’t.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Not to mention the 34 felony convictions. Will he be president from jail? I mean, how do you see that working?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Anyway, if you made it this far, thank you for listening.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (What a Joke Edition)“It’s rare to tell a joke so bad that it alters the course of human history.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on the backlash over the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally who compared Puerto Rico to garbage“Today, following his disastrous rally at Madison Square Garden, former President Trump defended the event and called it an ‘absolute lovefest.’ Then Kamala Harris looked at the polls and said, ‘Well, I’m certainly loving it.’” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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

  • 125 Shares129 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Ragtime’ Crushed Brandon Uranowitz’s Dream. Now It’s Healing His Wounds.

    Nearly 30 years after being let go from the Broadway-bound show, this Tony Award winner is taking a lead role in a new revival at City Center.In 1997, Brandon Uranowitz was a 10-year-old from West Orange, N.J., who dreamed of being on Broadway. He got one small foot in the door that year when he replaced Paul Dano as the wide-eyed little boy Edgar in the musical “Ragtime” during its premiere in Toronto.A year later, “Ragtime” opened on Broadway, and the musical — about three families navigating America at the turn of the 20th century, based on E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel — featured most of the Toronto cast, a powerhouse roster that included Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Peter Friedman, Marin Mazzie and Lea Michele. But Uranowitz wasn’t chosen to make the move. (Alex Strange was cast in the role instead.)That disappointment remains an “open wound,” Uranowitz, 38, said.“It was just, see ya, thanks for coming,” he added. “It felt unfinished.”Uranowitz, center, and other cast members during a rehearsal for the show, which begins performances on Wednesday.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesUranowitz eventually got to Broadway, making his debut in the short-lived musical “Baby It’s You!” and later appearing in “Falsettos,” “An American in Paris” and other shows. Last season, he won a Tony Award for his role in Tom Stoppard’s play “Leopoldstat.”Starting Wednesday, Uranowitz hopes to finally close that open wound when “Ragtime” is revived, not on Broadway but at City Center, where Lear DeBessonet’s new production is to begin performances. And Uranowitz, returning to the show for the first time since his Toronto run, will play the Jewish immigrant father-protector Tateh, the role for which Friedman received a Tony nomination.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

  • 75 Shares169 Views

    in Television

    Why ‘Perfect Strangers’ Keeps Coming Back

    From “The Leftovers” to “Only Murders in the Building,” “Perfect Strangers,” the wacky 1980s sitcom with a bombastic theme song, is enjoying a strange afterlife.In the latest season of “Only Murders in the Building,” the show’s trio of amateur detectives are investigating yet another murder and discover a theme — and a song — from an unlikely source: another TV show.The show is “Perfect Strangers,” the wacky 1980s sitcom that paired two cousins who — like the stars of “Only Murders” and its new cast of characters this season — couldn’t have been more different. The uplifting, bombastic “Perfect Strangers” theme song appears in the “Only Murders” fourth season, which concludes Tuesday.“We needed something that landed as a clue, something that opened up something curious for our trio to discover, something that kept hitting over and over again,” John Hoffman, the “Only Murders” showrunner, said.And so the “Perfect Strangers” theme song appears as a call sign over the ham radios of misfit residents introduced in this season of “Only Murders” and referred to as “the Westies.” Those are the tenants who live in the West tower of the Arconia, across from where Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin) live and where much of the investigation focuses.In one scene, in an apartment in the West tower of the Arconia, the New York City residential building at the center of the show, Mabel softly begins singing.“No matter what the odds are this time / nothing’s gonna stand in my way,” she chimes.Oliver mumbles along: “This flame in my heart / long-lost friend / Gives every dark street / a light at the end.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

  • 150 Shares159 Views

    in Television

    New Horror TV Shows to Stream This Halloween: ‘Teacup,’ ‘Uzumaki’ and More

    This year’s horror series take us to damned villages, cursed towns and countries fallen into anarchy.This selection of shows from October’s annual parade of horror series will take you on a tour of places where the world appears to be out of control: a South Korea going through a religious frenzy, a Georgia farm under attack, a bucolic English village visited by aliens, a Japanese seaside town haunted by spirals. Just keep telling yourself it’s fiction.‘Hellbound’Based on an online cartoon, this Korean series on Netflix has a comic-book hook, repeated a time or two per episode: A trio of towering, golem-like figures materialize, heralded by cracks of thunder, and roast a human who has been identified as a sinner. This usually involves a lot of smashing and tossing about of people and vehicles. These scenes are kinetically satisfying — it is a Korean production, after all — and there’s something counter-intuitively adorable about the silent, hulking reapers. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho of the “Train to Busan” zombie films, “Hellbound,” whose second season premiered last week, is a solidly constructed supernatural thriller, with well-choreographed action that often features a tight-lipped lawyer (Kim Hyun-joo) who gets more use out of her police baton than her legal training.The bam-pow does not dominate the show, however. The screenwriter Choi Gyu-seok, adapting Yeon’s 2002 webtoon, focuses less on explaining the supernatural happenings than on portraying a society’s reactions to a terrifying rip in reality. Those responses are bad and badder, running from coercive religious fanaticism to cathartic, mordant anarchy — parallels to current trends around the world are almost certainly intentional — while a few contrarians fight for rationality and free will.The drama of ideas is talky and pitched between comic book and Philosophy 101, but there is enough inventiveness and feeling in the storytelling to keep you attuned to the show’s evocation of a world quickly going mad.‘The Midwich Cuckoos: Village of the Damned’When this mini-series premiered in Britain two years ago, it had the same title as the John Wyndham novel on which it is loosely based, “The Midwich Cuckoos.” For its American release, Acorn TV and Sundance Now (both will have the third of seven episodes on Thursday) tacked on the name of the cult-favorite 1960 film adaptation, “Village of the Damned.” The series is a solid, watchable piece of work, though it might have been better if they hadn’t reminded us of the chilling, compact, highly satisfying movie.The story, if you are unfamiliar, begins with everyone in a British village blacking out; shortly after, every woman of childbearing age finds herself pregnant. The resulting children, as you might guess, are a scary bunch, with powers of mind control that represent an extinction-level threat. “The Midwich Cuckoos” handles the science-fiction aspects capably, and like the film, it has its share of quietly creepy moments. Filling out the expanded running time with a lot of agonizing about motherhood and parenting, though, feels a little precious when the story is about aliens getting Earth women pregnant. Focus!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