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      ‘Fantastical’ Is a Catfishing Horror Story About Toxic Fandom

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      “Fanatical,” an eye-popping film directed by Erin Lee Carr, details the bizarre 16-year ordeal that the duo and their fans endured.The turn-of-the-century internet was organized not around content selected for us by algorithms, but around shared interests that we sought out. Whether you loved a band or were devoutly religious or had questions about your sexuality, someone had made an AOL chatroom or a message board or a LiveJournal community where you could meet people like you. It was often invigorating and life-affirming, especially if you felt lonely in the real world. It seems like the exact opposite of today’s personality- and ad-driven internet.The new, eye-popping documentary “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara” (Hulu), directed by Erin Lee Carr, is about that era and what became of it. But the lens through which it tells the story involves a truly bizarre series of events related to Tegan Quin, who with her twin sister, Sara Quin, formed an eponymous indie pop band that became huge right as the social internet was taking off. At the start of the film, Tegan says she’s never talked publicly about the situation before, which began 16 years ago. In fact, she admits to Carr, she already kind of regrets talking about it now.The duo started to become famous after their 2004 album, “So Jealous,” when the sisters realized their growing audiences skewed young, mostly female and mostly queer. Their concerts were safe spaces, and their fans often found one another through sites devoted to the band. Both women, but Tegan in particular, were active on the internet, and made a point of connecting with fans both online and at shows. They fostered a community.But “Fanatical” is not a profile of the band or its fans. It’s a horror story.In 2008, a fan named Julie contacted a Facebook profile that appeared to be Tegan’s. A yearslong messaging relationship ensued, one that turned close and even intimate. But then, in 2011, Tegan did something that felt off to Julie. So she contacted the band’s manager.From there emerged the kind of mystery that’s actually a nightmare, a story Carr tells through interviews with fans, the band’s former management, a few experts and both sisters. The user Julie had been talking to for years wasn’t Tegan at all — it was someone impersonating Tegan, a user they all started calling “Fake Tegan,” or “Fegan.” For Julie, this relationship had been deeply meaningful, especially since Tegan and Sara’s music was a way to process her fear when, as a college student, she began to question her own sexual orientation. When “Fegan” turned aggressive, even verbally abusive, she was wounded — and realizing that years of her life had been spent unburdening her secrets and her soul to someone who wasn’t Tegan was horrifying. As the band and their management discovered, these intimate messaging relationships went far, far beyond Julie — and so did the fallout.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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      Bob Yerkes, Bruised but Durable Hollywood Stuntman, Dies at 92

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      A body double to the stars, he performed sometimes bone-breaking feats in movies like “Return of the Jedi” and “Back to the Future.” And he was still at it in his 80s.Bob Yerkes, who was set on fire, thrown down stairs and hurled from skyscrapers, bridges and trains during a nearly 70-year career in Hollywood as a stunt double for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson and other big-screen stars, died on Oct. 1 in Northridge, Calif. He was 92.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Tree O’Toole, a stuntwoman who had been his caretaker. He had recently been ill with pneumonia.Though he was virtually unknown to audiences, Mr. Yerkes was a Tinseltown legend.In the 1980s alone, he flew through the air as Boba Fett in “Return of the Jedi,” hung from a clock tower as Christopher Lloyd’s character in “Back to the Future” and clung to scaffolding atop the Statue of Liberty in “Remo Williams.”“He is one of the few stuntmen I would say have celebrity status in the stunt business,” Jeff Wolfe, the president of the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures, said in an interview. “His lack of fear was kind of renowned.”Mr. Yerkes (rhymes with “circus”) performed stunts in the films “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Poltergeist” (1982), “Ghostbusters” (1984) and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988), as well as on television in “Gilligan’s Island,” “Wonder Woman,” “Starsky and Hutch” and “Dukes of Hazzard.”He was concussed more times than he could remember.“I’m better now, though,” he said in a 2016 video produced by My Gathering Place International, a religious organization. “It used to be that when I’d talk, I wouldn’t finish a sentence.”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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      Mitzi Gaynor, Leading Lady of Movie Musicals, Is Dead at 93

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      She was best known for starring in the 1958 screen version of “South Pacific.” But her Hollywood career was brief, and she soon shifted her focus to Las Vegas and TV.Mitzi Gaynor, the bubbly actress, singer and dancer who landed one of the most coveted movie roles of the mid-20th century, the female lead in “South Pacific,” but who abandoned film as the era of movie musicals came to an end, died on Thursday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93. Her managers, Rene Reyes and Shane Rosamonda, confirmed the death.The role of Nellie Forbush, a World War II Navy nurse and (in the words of a song lyric) a “cockeyed optimist” in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit 1949 Broadway musical, had been originated and defined by Mary Martin. But when it came time to cast the 1958 movie of “South Pacific,” some considered Ms. Martin too old (she was in her 40s) and perhaps too strong-voiced for any actor who might be cast opposite her. (Ezio Pinza, her Broadway co-star, had died.)Doris Day was considered. Mike Todd wanted his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, to play the role. Ms. Gaynor was the only candidate to agree to do a screen test, she recalled decades later, although she was an established actress, with a dozen films, seven of them musicals, to her credit.In fact, she was shooting “The Joker Is Wild” (1957), a musical drama with Frank Sinatra, when Oscar Hammerstein II came to town and asked to hear her sing. (Ms. Gaynor always credited Sinatra with making her best-known role possible, because he asked for a change in the shooting schedule that would give her a day off to audition.)Ms. Gaynor in 1962. A year later, she would make her last movie, but she became a star in Las Vegas.Don Brinn/Associated Press“South Pacific” was a box-office smash, and Ms. Gaynor’s performance, opposite Rossano Brazzi, was well received. (She turned out to be the only one of the film’s stars to do her own singing.) But she made only three more films, all comedies without music; the last of them, “For Love or Money” with Kirk Douglas, was released in 1963. She turned instead to Las Vegas, where she headlined shows at major resorts for more than a decade, and to television.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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      ‘Rumours’ Review: No One Will Save Us

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      Cate Blanchett stars as a lusty, preening stateswomen in a geopolitical satire from the experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin.“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” is both a Neil Young lyric and the quote that encapsulates the ethos of “Rumours,” an extremely funny geopolitical satire from the fertile imagination of Guy Maddin, the Canadian experimental filmmaker who once put Isabella Rossellini into a pair of beer-filled glass legs.There are no prostheses, see-through or otherwise, in “Rumours,” though there are substitute delights: a brain the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, a chatbot designed to ensnare pedophiles and mummified Iron Age corpses. All these creations bedevil the seven fictional heads of state who have convened at an annual G7 summit hosted by Germany, whose randy leader (Cate Blanchett) can’t wait to get it on with her sexy Canadian counterpart (Roy Dupuis). Over a lengthy lunch in a gazebo at a woodsy estate, the seven struggle to draft a joint statement on an unspecified global crisis, unaware that their anodyne musings on peace and prosperity will soon be derailed by mud-splattered mayhem and onanistic zombies.Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers, “Rumours” sees Maddin (writing and directing with his longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) abandoning his more familiar black-and-white, silent-film aesthetic for vibrant color. His fondness for soapy melodrama and bawdy humor, though, remains intact. Canada and Germany slip off for some sylvan slap-and-tickle, unnoticed by Canada’s former lover, the uptight United Kingdom (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Back at the table, France (Denis Ménochet) and Japan (Takehiro Hira) are bonding over historical speeches, while Italy (Rolando Ravello) is repenting for having once dressed up as Mussolini. An apparently addled United States (Charles Dance, who remains however resolutely British) just wants a nap.Shot in Hungary, Stefan Ciupek’s richly textured and often surreal images drive a mood that darkens inexorably from goofy to skin-pricklingly ominous. As night falls, the seven find themselves abandoned in the forest with neither cell service nor servants. Unnerved by eerie sounds and a vile wind, they discover that an ancient bog man, which Germany had exhumed, has now caused other oozing carcasses to rise up, some with penises slung around their necks like knobby necklaces. Or maybe they’re just filthy political protesters?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 Line’ Review: Greek Tragedy

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      The dark side of college fraternity life comes to light in this harrowing, well-acted campus drama.Films about fraternities tend to describe a familiar arc of moral degradation, and Ethan Berger’s campus cautionary tale “The Line,” about the initiation of freshmen into a well-heeled but toxic brotherhood at a Southern liberal arts college, is no exception: You probably won’t be shocked to learn that frat life is crude, boorish and dangerous, as “The Line” makes abundantly clear. But if the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor. Berger takes a keen anthropological approach to the rites and rituals of the fictitious Kappa Nu Alpha house, and he makes it so that you can almost smell the stale beer and crumpled Ralph Lauren. The details are believable, and therefore more disturbing.Our entree into the crass, bad-mannered world of KNA is Tom Backster (Alex Wolff), an obtuse sophomore militantly devoted to the traditions of the frat. Wolff plays him with a thick, mealy-mouthed Southern accent, which he painfully exaggerates to better fit in with his dunderheaded peers, for whom articulating a full sentence is tantamount to betrayal.Tom’s clashes with Gettys O’Brien (Austin Abrams), the club’s handsome, Billy Budd-esque newcomer who repeatedly flaunts the rules, is the conflict at the heart of the movie. Its escalation is predictable, but Wolff and Abrams (both excellent) embody their characters with intensity and conviction, which makes even the film’s most heightened confrontations feel deeply plausible.The LineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Woman of the Hour’ Review: Who is Bachelor No. 3?

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      Anna Kendrick’s ably directed drama about a real-life serial killer focuses on his victims instead.An oft-repeated quotation usually attributed to the writer Margaret Atwood — it’s actually a paraphrase, but no matter — posits that men are afraid women will laugh at them, while women are afraid men will murder them. It’s repeated frequently because it has the ring of truth. Most women have experienced the panicked discomfort of placating a man who seems unhappy with some response of hers, because it’s unclear what will happen if she doesn’t. Whether he is a guy at a bar, an explosive partner, a random stranger, a colleague after hours or someone else, her own unease takes a back seat to mollifying his bruised ego.“Woman of the Hour,” directed by Anna Kendrick and written by Ian McDonald, is this maxim in the form of a feature-length movie. It’s based on the true story of Rodney Alcala, a serial killer who sexually assaulted his victims. He was convicted of murdering six women and one girl in the 1970s, though text at the end of the movie states that some authorities believe he murdered as many as 130 women.Alcala also, improbably, appeared as Bachelor No. 1 on a 1978 episode of “The Dating Game,” right in the middle of a yearslong killing spree. He won, though the woman on the show subsequently declined to go on a date with him because he creeped her out.That “Dating Game” appearance, lightly fictionalized (he’s become Bachelor No. 3, for one thing), provides one of the main narrative threads in “Woman of the Hour,” named for the woman who queries the three bachelor contestants during the show. Kendrick plays the woman, here named Sheryl, an aspiring actress on the verge of giving up altogether and leaving Los Angeles. Her agent convinces her to go on the show because it will get her “seen,” and Sheryl reluctantly agrees.There are other women in other timelines, too. In 1979, a teenage runaway (Autumn Best) is trying to find somewhere to sleep and meets a gentle man who compliments her looks. In 1971, a flight attendant (Kathryn Gallagher) is moving into her new New York City apartment and asks the guy across the street for help. In 1977, a pregnant woman abandoned by her boyfriend (Kelley Jakle) has met a longhaired photographer who seems like a sweet guy. And in 1978, a woman (Nicolette Robinson) attending a taping of “The Dating Game” suddenly begins to feel nervous about one of the guys onstage.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

    • 63 Shares129 Views

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      ‘Union’ Review: Amazon Workers Unionize

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      As this documentary by Brett Story and Stephen Maing chronicles, the efforts to unionize a warehouse in New York were successful — but also a grind.When employees at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, the result was seen as a major victory for organized labor. A year earlier, the documentarians Brett Story (“The Hottest August”) and Stephen Maing (“Crime + Punishment”) got on the ground with the workers and the organizers; in their engrossing new film, “Union,” they show how the vote’s outcome was hardly assured.The filmmakers introduce Christian Smalls — a founder of the Amazon Labor Union, the group striving to represent the workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center — as he grills food at a tent outside the warehouse. Even then, in 2021, Smalls is already, as a woman meeting him puts it, “low-key famous,” having been fired in 2020 after planning and attending a walkout over pandemic safety conditions.“Union” is partly about the grind of organizing: of chatting with workers over burgers, of attending video meetings, of resolving petty disputes. Smalls’s leadership does not always command the group’s full confidence. Natalie Monarrez, an early ally, grows disillusioned as “Union” proceeds. “I can’t leave one boys’ club at Amazon and work for another boys’ club in the union,” she tells Madeline Wesley, an organizer and recent college graduate who becomes another compelling voice in the story.Like Barbara Kopple’s organized labor documentary “American Dream,” “Union” is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well, as Smalls and company face daunting math and an anti-union campaign from inside, where the sometimes-tense footage, the filmmakers have said, was shot by the workers themselves.UnionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Nocturnes’ Review: They Come at Night

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      In the forests of northeast India, an ecologist tracking moths creates a tiny oasis of light in the darkness.Early in the enlightened nature documentary “Nocturnes,” a simple cut captures the mix of micro and macro that its directors, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, explore.Mansi Mungee, a quantitative ecologist, is counting moths in the forests of northeast India by hanging a lamp-lit sheet of fabric for the insects to land on. One such setup becomes a tiny oasis of light in the woods, and then, suddenly, we see the moon. Through this visual play with scale, moths and humans are placed in perspective as fellow creatures on the same level in the cosmos.“Nocturnes” is about Mungee’s hard work as a scientist, scouting and watching, and it’s also about the land itself. This lush and gorgeous stretch of Arunachal Pradesh, its misty landscapes drizzled with rain, has its own life apart from the scientific observers who come to the area. Mungee is measuring the sizes of hawk moths at different elevations and the effects of changing temperatures, but the filmmakers allow our gaze to dwell on the arabesques of wings on the hanging sheets, or, by day, the ethereal tree cover.This isn’t nature as an orderly picture book. Mungee and her team at one point must smash fallen rocks to clear a road, and they patiently endure cold and damp weather. In the award-winning film’s sound design, the din of animals — rustling and fluttering, plus calls of all sorts — becomes a raucous narration of its own.The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.NocturnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More