Eliana Willis

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    Kamala Harris Made the Political Personal on Her Media Tour

    The vice president’s whirlwind tour of talk shows and interviews revealed the kind of persona she wants to present as she seeks to become the election’s main character.Apart from “60 Minutes,” most of the interviews on Kamala Harris’s media tour this week — a multiplatform circuit that ran from daytime TV to late-night, satellite to podcast — were not what you would call adversarial. Howard Stern endorsed her. Whoopi Goldberg introduced her as “the next president of the United States.” Stephen Colbert’s audience greeted her with a chant of “Ka! Ma! La!”A friendly interview, however, is not automatically a safe one. Politicians can blunder worst when they feel at ease. Think of Barack Obama, who early in his presidency had to apologize after going on “The Tonight Show” and disparaging his bowling skills as “like the Special Olympics.”Friendly also does not mean insipid. A sympathetic interview might not drill down on contradictions the way a straight-news journalist would, or include as many “Critics say that you …” or “But how would you pay for it?” questions.But it can still be illuminating, about both who a candidate is and the persona she wants to present. Ms. Harris has been the first Democratic candidate, since Donald J. Trump rode down the escalator in 2015, to challenge him as politics’ main character. Being the protagonist of an election is an asset — not to mention a way to irritate an opponent who craves to be the center of every photo, the bride at every wedding.It is not, however, a role that the vice president takes to naturally. (“It feels immodest,” she told Mr. Stern.) The Kamala Harris who was everywhere on screens and speakers this week was a cautious politician and an expansive talk-show guest. She could be vague on policy detail and vivid in telling individual stories. She was the kind of candidate who would have a beer with you — she literally did with Mr. Colbert — but was guarded when it came to spilling the tea.The reality of elections today is that politicians, like entertainment celebrities, have more media options and leverage. With legacy outlets no longer owning the gateway to the public, politicians are freer to choose their own platforms and their own audiences. Mr. Trump has also limited his exposure this campaign mainly to interviews with conservative media and influencers, and “60 Minutes” reported that he backed out of an agreement to appear on the program.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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    Nobuyo Oyama, the Japanese Voice of Doraemon, Dies at 90

    Her alto timbre, which led to teasing as a child, and radiant laughter shaped how millions experienced the blue cartoon robot in the quintessential children’s anime of the same name.Nobuyo Oyama, the voice actress whose alto timbre and radiant laughter shaped how millions in Japan experienced Doraemon, the blue cartoon robot in the quintessential children’s anime of the same name, died at a hospital in Tokyo on Sept. 29. She was 90.Her death was confirmed by phone on Friday by Yozo Morita, the chief executive of her agency, Actors 7, who said that she had suffered a stroke in 2008 and been living with dementia for years.For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.Ms. Oyama found her talent while coping with being bullied for her voice as a child, she told Kakugo TV, an online interview series. She was often told by her classmates that she had a “boy’s voice,” she said. The students, laughing whenever she spoke, discouraged her from speaking in public.When her mother saw her withdrawing socially, she gave her a piece of advice that would shape her career: She should not hide her voice but find a way to use it. So she joined a broadcasting club in high school, where she hosted radio shows and performed in radio dramas.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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    Jimmy Kimmel Debunks the Government-Hurricane-Control Theory

    “The only person who can control the weather is Beyoncé,” Kimmel said on Thursday.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.The Eye of the StormMeteorologists in Florida and North Carolina have been facing death threats and angry messages from viewers who think they are complicit in a Democratic-led plot to direct hurricanes toward Republican voting districts.Jimmy Kimmel was flabbergasted on Thursday by this “bonkers idea.” He said, “Donald Trump has pushed us to the point where we can’t even agree on the weather. What a stupid time to be alive.”“And of course, before the storm even hit, the Trumpers were blaming the White House for all this, which is interesting because two weeks ago, 11 House Republicans from Florida voted against keeping the government and FEMA fully funded. Then, when Hurricane Helene came to visit, they all signed a letter asking President Biden for federal funding. This is how it goes now.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Has anyone thought about unplugging America and plugging it back in again? ’Cause it could use a reboot.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Donald Trump should be forced to live on an island with all these people. Listen, dummies, the government can’t control the weather. The only person who can control the weather is Beyoncé.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (25 Days Until the Election Edition)“You guys, Election Day is only 25 days away. Just think, in 25 days, Trump will either be saying he won or saying he didn’t lose.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, 25 days. Trump just got an election Advent calendar that gives him a new conspiracy theory every day: [imitating Trump] ‘Ooh, immigrants are stealing our Hulu passwords. They’re watching “Murders in the Building” for free.’” — JIMMY FALLON“The polls say it is a tossup. It might ultimately come down to which candidate can deliver a new R.V. to Clarence Thomas first.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingEric Idle of Monty Python discussed his new book, “The Spamalot Diaries,” with Jordan Klepper on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutLaura Dern and Liam Hemsworth in “Lonely Planet.”Anne Marie Fox/NetflixLaura Dern and Liam Hemsworth have a May/December romance in “Lonely Planet,” from the writer-director Susannah Grant. More

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    Review: ‘Our Town’ Starring Jim Parsons Is Still Avant-Garde After 86 Years

    The first act of “Our Town” takes place in Grover’s Corners on May 7, 1901. Nothing much happens in the fictional New Hampshire village that day, except that two local teenagers, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, fall in love completely unaware that they do so under the shadow of the granitic pillars of time.But we are aware. Even in an act entitled Daily Life, the playwright, Thornton Wilder, quietly batters us with the news that we are mortal. Immediately upon introducing George’s parents, he has his mouthpiece, the Stage Manager, convey as if it were part of their names a detail of their deaths: Doc Gibbs’s in 1930, his wife’s on a visit to Canton, Ohio. He blithely jumbles together, like their bones, the joining and splintering of human lives. “Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married,” he comments without comment.So if you think of the play as small, sweet or old-fashioned, and Grover’s Corners as a twin town to Bedford Falls or Hooterville, I respectfully offer that you have the soul of a rock. In any good enough production, “Our Town” is titanic: beyond time and brutal.The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.And though some of the effectiveness of the revival is clearly the result of Kenny Leon’s swift and unsentimental direction, and of a fine cast led by the mercilessly acute Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, we must begin with wonder and admiration for the play itself. In its portrait of “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.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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    ‘The Confidante’ Is a Layered French Drama About a Heartbreaking Scam

    Streaming on Max, the series tells the story of woman who lies to a grief support group about her connection to the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015.Laure Calamy stars in “The Confidante.”MaxThe four-part French mini-series “The Confidante,” beginning Friday, on Max (in French, with subtitles), is based loosely on a true story and follows a woman named Chris (Laure Calamy), who claims falsely that her best friend was a victim of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Chris ingratiates herself into a survivors’ support network, providing real time and energy but also catfishing other members and committing fraud. She posts constantly on Facebook, offering herself as a shoulder to cry on, fielding texts, chats and calls from bereaved, traumatized — legitimate — victims.“Confidante” keeps its focus tight, with only slivers of Chris’s previous grifts creeping into the narrative — just enough to feel like half remembered rumors. We see Chris’s pain and vulnerability, the shabby ways some people treat her. And we also see her shamelessly scam cabdrivers and bartenders.In one of the show’s knottiest, most striking scenes, members of the support group join Chris at the hospital to visit “Vincent,” her comatose friend. They promise an unconscious Vincent that they care about him, they’re waiting for him. We, and Chris, know the man in the bed is not Vincent but rather a random victim whose room she weaseled into weeks earlier. What does one make of a misdirected vigil?Chris often blasts music on her headphones, which we hear in tinny second hand. A man sighs that everyone in Paris is connected to a victim somehow, given the scale of the attack. Another man, whose wife survived the attack, describes the second-degree trauma he and his son experience from watching her suffer. “Confidante” layers these moments carefully to build Chris’s psyche: Just because you’re not wearing the headphones doesn’t mean you can’t hear the music, right? Just because it didn’t happen to Chris the way she said doesn’t mean it didn’t happen in the broader sense, right? … Right?Well, no, of course not. “Confidante” subtly, effectively depicts how a fraud turns everything inside out. What seemed like generosity was selfishness. What seemed like support was damage.“The Confidante” kicks off a little social fraud boomlet in the coming days: “Anatomy of Lies,” “Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare” and “Scamanda” all premiere next week, and all follow outrageous, compounding scams. Those are all documentaries, and what a fictionalized drama can offer that ripped-from-the-podcast docs can’t is a real evocation of the present tense, the part before ruefulness, the part where it all feels true. More

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    Review: Trust ‘Disclaimer’ When It Tells You Not to Trust It

    The seven-part series from Alfonso Cuarón, about a familiar theme of the treachery of narratives, is easier to admire than to enjoy.“Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth, but they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate.”The warning comes early in the Apple TV+ thriller “Disclaimer,” as spoken by the journalist Christiane Amanpour. She appears in the series to present an award to a documentarian named Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), who is herself about to become the target of a malicious narrative intended to ruin her.Plant your feet too firmly in your assumptions, Amanpour’s speech tells us, and you may take a tumble. Consider this the disclaimer of “Disclaimer.”Audiences have already learned this lesson countless times — from “Gone Girl,” from “Rashomon,” from “The Affair,” from any number of stories-about-stories and tales of unreliable or competing narratives. But the warnings, overt and oblique, come repeatedly in “Disclaimer,” a seven-part adaptation by Alfonso Cuarón (“Roma,” “Children of Men”) of a 2015 thriller novel by Renée Knight.This is the series’s selling point and its problem. It spends so much time and care building a trap with its meta-story that its actual story suffers in the process.The aforementioned meta-story arrives at Catherine’s home in an envelope with no return address, in the form of “The Perfect Stranger,” a pseudonymously published novel that, she realizes with horror and nausea, details a terrible secret from her past. She is the book’s villain and its target. “Any resemblance to persons living or dead,” the front matter reads, “is not a coincidence.”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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    Seth Meyers Is Starting to Wonder About Trump and Putin

    A book says Donald Trump sent Covid testing equipment to the Russian leader. Meyers suspects he threw in “some snacks, a bath bomb and a CD.”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.Testing, TestingFormer President Donald Trump has denied a report in a new book that he sent Covid testing machines to Vladimir Putin for his personal use during the pandemic, but Seth Meyers wasn’t buying it on Wednesday’s “Late Night.”“How did Trump send them? Was it part of a care package with some snacks, a bath bomb and a CD that said ‘Mixtape for Vlad from Don: My heart is loyal only to you’?”— SETH MEYERS“People were quarantining, contact tracing, seeking medical care. I know you weren’t doing that since you were basically a Typhoid Gary who would hold superspreader events at the White House, and then when you yourself got Covid, took a joyride in an S.U.V. like you were an off-brand pope.” — SETH MEYERS, addressing Trump“Trump was telling Americans that Covid testing was overrated on the exact same day he was telling Vladimir Putin he was sending him his best Covid tests — his [expletive] Glengarry Covid tests.” — SETH MEYERS“To be fair, lots of people in Putin’s circle were suddenly dying: [imitating Putin] ‘Falling from balcony is very common Covid symptom.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Kamala’s Media Blitz Edition)“So with less than a month to go, both campaigns are going all out — starting with Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, who has been everywhere recently: news shows, daytime talk shows, satellite radio, podcasts, your kid’s piano recital — she applauded, but seriously, ‘Chopsticks’? I mean, you can do better, Arlo.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Meanwhile, today, Trump complained that CBS edited Kamala Harris’s interview on ‘60 Minutes’ to make her look better. Trump said, ‘It was clearly edited. She didn’t say one thing about people eating pets in Ohio. Not one. Didn’t even mention it.’” — JIMMY FALLON“In a new interview with radio host Howard Stern, Vice President Kamala Harris said that she doesn’t really take naps, setting up a clear contrast with President Biden, who took one mid-debate.” — SETH MEYERS“During the same interview with Howard Stern, Vice President Kamala Harris said that she usually eats a bowl of Raisin Bran or Special K for breakfast, whereas her opponent, as we all know, is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingQuinta Brunson, the “Abbott Elementary” creator and star, dished on her series’ crossover episode with “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightJordan Peele will promote his revival of the horror-themed hidden-camera reality series “Scare Tactics” on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This Out“Unknown American” is a portrait from the 1940s to 1950s.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Twentieth-Century Photography FundThe Met Gala’s 2025 theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” is the museum’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color. More

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    In ‘The Counter,’ With Anthony Edwards, a Cup of Joe and a Side of Secrets

    A diner patron asks a waitress for an extraordinary side dish in Meghan Kennedy’s sweet but shaggy new play.With their twirly stools, chipped mugs and napkin contraptions, old-fashioned diners are apparently dying out. But not onstage, where they solve a lot of playwriting problems.Getting strangers to talk to each other? Easy: Waitress, meet customer. Motivating random pop-ins and exits? Jingle the door and pay the bill. Signal “America” without having to say it? The Bunn-O-Matic might as well be a flag.All of those are ingredients in “The Counter,” a sweet but shaggy dramedy by Meghan Kennedy that opened Wednesday at the Laura Pels Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The waitress is Katie (Susannah Flood): a big-city exile returning to her small-town home for reasons that emerge over the play’s 75 minutes. Her first customer, most days, is Paul (Anthony Edwards): a retired firefighter slumping onto his favorite stool for coffee and a lifeline of conversation.Kennedy’s dialogue is piquant and suggestive but mechanically avoidant. Needing to hold back the play’s big events, she lets her characters spend most of its first third dropping bread crumbs of information and noodling amusingly around the edges of not much. Paul has trouble sleeping and is a cinephile. Katie prefers Netflix. Both, it’s clear, if only by the impenetrable fog on the windows, are lost and lonely, in a way we are meant to understand as American.The banality of all that is undercut, in David Cromer’s typically thoughtful staging, by hints that the story will soon be heading sideways. That’s literally true of Walt Spangler’s set, which orients the title character — the counter — perpendicular to the audience, so we see the divide between Katie and Paul at all times. At some point, each also gets a private soliloquy, with lighting (by Stacey Derosier) and sound (by Christopher Darbassie) altered to indicate interiority.But these breaks in the production’s otherwise closely observed naturalism — including hoodies, plaids and puffers by Sarah Laux — come off as passing tics, especially in comparison to the plot’s wackadoodle bombshell, which distorts the rest of the play.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