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      ‘Milli Vanilli’ Review: Blame It on the Fame

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      Luke Korem’s documentary retraces the manufactured pop duo’s rise and fall, while asking pertinent questions about the price of stardom.The performers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus earn your empathy in the documentary “Milli Vanilli,” a jolting, eye-opening investigation on how fame destroyed them. The war-of-words film, directed by Luke Korem, unfolds like a whodunit.The film retraces the bonkers events of Morvan and Pilatus’s naïve rise to the top in the late 1980s as Milli Vanilli, the image-forward pop duo who secretly lip-synced prerecorded songs to live audiences. Their hits included “Girl You Know It’s True” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number.”At first, the duo needed money to escape poverty, but their celebrity status kept them hooked, and their German producer, Frank Farian, held the bait.And then, the documentary revisits their fall: During a live performance on MTV in 1989, the song started to skip, exposing them as frauds. In 1998, Pilatus died of an overdose. “I lost my sobriety and every sense of reality,” we hear him say in the film.Impressively, Korem gets those who ran the business side of Milli Vanilli, including officials at Arista Records, to spill the juicy details on what actually happened to the duo: Morvan and Pilatus became Farian and the label’s scapegoats. As presented here, it’s easy to see how this could be the basis for a horror film by Jordan Peele.Morvan is the heart of the documentary; he reflects on the group’s past treatment (he thinks they deserved that revoked Grammy) and raises still-relevant questions about the way the music industry exploits vulnerable performers. Charles Shaw, one of the real singers behind Milli Vanilli, says that Farian, who also worked with the group Boney M., “made most of his money on Black artists, and it worked.”Milli VanilliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Miss Juneteenth,’ ‘Dredd’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Women in competitions, chaos in high places and documentary portraits of Covid life are among the running themes of this month’s off-the-radar selections on your subscription streaming services.‘Miss Juneteenth’ (2020)Stream it on Netflix.Of all the films that would have been sleeper hits, had they not been released in 2020 when a theatrical push was off the table, it’s hard to top this, the debut feature from the writer and director Channing Godfrey Peoples. Nicole Beharie stars as Turquoise Jones, a Texas single mother whose 15-year-old daughter (Alexis Chikaeze) is about to compete in the local Miss Juneteenth pageant Turquoise won, once upon a time. Peoples’s screenplay sensitively explores poignant questions of opportunities lost and gained, and the mother/daughter dynamics are convincing and compelling. But the real takeaway here is Beharie, whose marvelous, lived-in performance is both inspiring and shattering.‘Teen Spirit’ (2017)Stream it on Max.The actor Max Minghella (whose father Anthony directed the likes of “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley”) makes an impressive feature directing debut with this story of a girl from the sticks (Elle Fanning) whose golden voice catches the attention of a fallen opera star (Zlatko Buric), who mentors her onto a national singing championship. The story beats are dusty but the approach is fresh, as Minghella focuses on the small details of character and setting that make his telling unique. Fanning does her own singing, and does so convincingly (ditto on her British accent), while investing her 17-year-old character with an appropriately tormented inner life.‘Nobody Walks’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.The director Ry Russo-Young co-wrote this indie drama with Lena Dunham (who was just launching “Girls” on HBO), and it is an ace fusion of their sensibilities, and their mutual interest in the mind games attractive young men and women can play. Olivia Thirlby is Martine, a New York visual artist visiting Los Angeles — the title is a reference to the comparative absence of pedestrians — to finish an experimental film with the help of a sound engineer, Peter (John Krasinski), whose therapist wife Julie (Rosemarie DeWitt) puts Martine up in their pool house. And that’s when the trouble begins, as Russo-Young and Dunham’s smart script dramatizes how proximity, boredom and hormones can wreak havoc on a seemingly blissful existence.‘Dredd’ (2012)Stream it on Netflix.Thirlby’s other 2012 release could not have been a more startling contrast, a rough-and-tumble adaptation of the ultraviolent British comic book series (previously attempted, to universal pans, by Sylvester Stallone in the mid-1990s). Karl Urban is a square-jawed cop in a futuristic dystopia where police are allowed to not only enforce the law, but carry out its consequences. Thirlby is his partner and Lena Headey is their target, an underworld queen-pin who traps them in a sketchy apartment complex and offers up a healthy reward for their heads. The director Pete Travis executes the nearly nonstop action with bruising intensity, while the better-than-expected script (by the gifted “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation” screenwriter Alex Garland) fills the occasional silences with fastballs of social commentary.‘High-Rise’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel occasionally feels like it’s lapping itself — Ballard’s 1975 notions of futuristic class warfare and societal breakdown feel almost quaint compared to what we face today. But Wheatley’s film is wildly entertaining anyway, a boisterous, nose-tweaking portrait of well-bred people turning into feral animals at the slightest provocation. Tom Hiddleston is appropriately cynical in the leading role; Luke Evans, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller and Elisabeth Moss turn in memorable supporting work.‘Gloria Bell’ (2019)Stream it on Max.With her new film “May December” (and her performance in it) earning rave reviews ahead of its upcoming Netflix debut, here’s another recent Julianne Moore film worth celebrating. She stars as the title character, a middle-aged woman who is still figuring out how to get the most out of her life, and herself, after divorce. An aid to that could come in the form of Arnold (John Turturro), who offers up love — or, at the very least, comfort — but “Gloria Bell” is not about finding yourself through someone else’s eyes. The Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio first told this story in his native tongue, in his 2013 movie “Gloria,” but this is no retread; his American take is lighter and funnier, and a resplendent showcase for the charms of Ms. Moore.‘Bad Axe’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.When the pandemic hit the U.S. in spring of 2020, the filmmaker David Siev was among the many Americans who went home, huddling up with his family in Bad Axe, Mich., to help keep their venerable local restaurant afloat. He brought along his video camera, and captured an indelible real-time snapshot of a country quickly banding together, and then splintering apart with even greater speed and velocity. The resultant documentary works on two levels simultaneously: as a social document of a country in free-fall (with particular focus on how much of the MAGA-infused community turned on the Asian American Sievs), and as an intimate portrait of the family’s own complicated relationships, and how they were tested by forces beyond their control.‘Back to the Drive-In’ (2023)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Restaurants, as you may recall, weren’t the only venues to take a big hit during lockdown, and with movie theaters out of commission, drive-in theaters became a safe alternative, and saw a big uptick in their long-struggling attendance. So the documentary filmmaker April Wright, who previously made the 2013 film “Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-In Movie,” went back to the drive-in to see how these (often family-owned) establishments had done during the unexpected boost, and how they were adjusting to life going “back to normal.” Once the topical matters are addressed, it becomes a fascinating character study, as these entrepreneurs — ranging from grizzled veterans to gee-whiz newbies — react quite differently to the regular difficulties of their throwback business. More

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      Writers Guild Faces Backlash for Not Condemning Hamas Attack

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      A union leader told members that the board’s viewpoints were varied and that a consensus could not be reached.Just weeks after the Writers Guild of America displayed solidarity by ending a monthslong strike and voting overwhelmingly in favor of a new contract with the major entertainment companies, the union is being roiled by a fight over its lack of a public statement condemning the Hamas attack on Israel.On Oct. 15, eight days after the attack, a group of screenwriters signed an open letter to the Writers Guild asking why it had not issued a statement condemning the attack. They noted that other major Hollywood unions had issued such statements. The letter now has more than 300 signers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) and Gideon Raff (“Homeland”).It questioned why the Writers Guild had previously made public remarks in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo reckoning but remained silent “when terrorists invaded Israel to murder, rape and kidnap Jews.”On Friday, 75 members of the guild took part in a Zoom meeting to discuss what to do about the silence. Options included withholding dues until the guild leadership convenes a proper conversation on the issue with its membership, according to a person who attended the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its delicate nature. Other members are considering resigning from the guild by filing for financial core status, in which they would pay reduced dues and still receive the contractual benefits of the collective bargaining agreement.Later Friday, Meredith Stiehm, the president of the Writers Guild of America West, sent an email to members who had inquired about the lack of a response. “Like the membership itself, the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach,” she wrote in the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. “For these reasons, we have decided not to comment publicly.”Calls to the union on Monday were not returned.Jewish leaders have encouraged Hollywood’s biggest voices to speak out in favor of Israel.“When celebrities speak out, it sends an important message to their tens of millions of followers that this is the right side to be on,” Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in an opinion piece published in The Hollywood Reporter.“In light of how distorting social media algorithms can present the world,” he added, “it’s even more important for these voices to cut through.”The writers’ union is not the only Hollywood organization dealing with fallout.On Sunday, Creative Artists Agency announced to its employees that Maha Dakhil, the highest-ranking female agent in the motion picture group, had resigned from the company’s internal board and was stepping away from her leadership role within the motion picture group after posting inflammatory remarks on Instagram that accused Israel of committing genocide.Ms. Dakhil has apologized for her comments. According to an email sent by the agency’s chief executive, Bryan Lourd, which was reviewed by The Times, she will continue to represent her clients, who include Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise and Reese Witherspoon. More

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      Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94

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      She wrote of peasants, unsung women, border crossers and, most popularly, Martin Guerre, a 16th-century village impostor recalled in a 1980s movie.Natalie Zemon Davis, a social and cultural historian whose imaginative and deeply researched investigations of the lives of marginalized figures — peasants, long-forgotten women, border crossers of all sorts — profoundly influenced the discipline, died on Saturday at her home in Toronto. She was 94.The cause was cancer, Aaron Davis, her son, said.Drawing on insights from anthropology and literary criticism, as well as meticulous archival digging, Professor Davis both represented and inspired an emerging approach to history in the second half of the 20th century, often by filling in gaps in the historical record with informed speculations based on deep immersion in the period under study.Her best-known book was “The Return of Martin Guerre” (1983), based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who for several years successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Her book was a kind of follow-up to a 1982 movie by the same title, which was directed by Daniel Vigne and starred Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye. Professor Davis, who had published a groundbreaking collection of essays, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France” (1975), was the historical adviser to Mr. Vigne and the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière while they were working on the film.But with the release of “Le Retour de Martin Guerre” in theaters in France and elsewhere (it had its U.S. premiere in 1983), Professor Davis recognized that the movie could not convey the nuances of the story and so decided to give “this arresting tale,” as she put it in a preface to the book, “its first full-scale historical treatment, using every scrap of paper left me by the past.”Professor Davis’s “The Return of Martin Guerre” is based on the tale of a 16th-century peasant in Languedoc, France, who successfully impersonated a man from a rural village who had abandoned his family.Harvard University PressThe book was warmly received. In The New York Review of Books, the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie called it a “major work of historical reconstruction.”Most earlier accounts focused on Arnaud du Tilh, the Gascon peasant who passed himself off as Martin Guerre. Those accounts assumed that Guerre’s abandoned wife, Bertrande de Rols, had been fooled by the false Martin. They made Arnaud du Tilh “the inventive figure in the tale,” Professor Davis wrote.For her, though, Bertrande was central to the story. “By the time she had received him in her bed,” Professor Davis wrote of the impostor, “she must have realized the difference.” Bertrande, in Professor Davis’s telling, “knew the truth” and colluded in the masquerade until it became impossible to sustain.In the book’s introduction, Professor Davis wrote that “what I offer you here is in part my invention, but held tightly in check by the voices of the past.”A scene from the 1982 movie “The Return of Martin Guerre,” starring Gérard Depardieu (in the doorway). The director, Daniel Vigne, is second from right. Professor Davis was the film’s historical adviser. European International, via Everett CollectionHer next book, “Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France” (1987), examined stories that common people accused of homicide told in order to secure a pardon from the king. After 1990, her work embraced outsiders and border-crossers around the world.“Women on the Margins” (1995) presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname. In The New York Times Book Review, the historian Arthur Quinn called the book “a stylishly sketched 17th- and 18th-century biographical triptych” that was “yet another exploration of how the modest in early modern Europe strove to fashion identities for themselves.”Professor Davis published two books in 2000. “The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France” is an anthropological look at how gift-giving and reciprocal obligation helped structure society, and “Slaves on Screen” examined the portrayal of slavery, and resistance to it, in five movies, from “Spartacus” (1960), set in ancient Rome, to “Beloved” (1980), an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel rooted in the American South. Professor Davis said history films offered “thought experiments” about the past, but she criticized their use of fictions that misled viewers.Professor Davis’s 1995 book presented the lives of three 17th-century women of different religions — Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism — who came from different regions: Germany, Canada and Suriname.Harvard University PressAfter 2001, Professor Davis turned her attention to researching a 16th-century diplomat for the sultan of Fez, al-Hasan al-Wazzan al-Gharnati al-Fasi, who was kidnapped by Christian pirates in 1518 and taken to Rome. He converted to Christianity and lived there for nine years, writing books for Europeans in Italian and Latin about North Africa and Islam, most familiarly under the name Leo Africanus. He was best known as the author of the first geography of Africa published in Europe, in 1550.Her resulting book, “Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds,” was published in 2006.Africanus, Professor Davis said, had a “double identity and vision, a Muslim curious about Christianity, a North African interested in exploring the world of Rome and Italy.” But hard documentation about him was sparse; to figure him out, she said, she had to develop “a plausible life story from materials of the time.” As she had in the case of Martin Guerre, she speculated about Africanus’s behavior based on the practices in the world from which he came.Natalie Zemon was born in Detroit on Nov. 8, 1928, to Julian and Helen (Lamport) Zemon, both American-born children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father worked in the textile business, and her mother was a homemaker. Natalie was one of only a few Jews at Cranbrook Kingswood, a girls’ finishing school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Although she was popular and successful there, she felt like an outsider, by her account. Enrolling at Smith College in Massachusetts, she became involved in left-wing politics, participating in a Marxist study group and protesting racial discrimination. In 1948, she met Chandler Davis, a mathematics graduate student. They married six weeks later. After pursuing studies in social and cultural history, Ms. Davis graduated from Smith with a bachelor’s degree in 1949 and pursued a master’s at Radcliffe, where she was exposed to the research techniques of social history.She worked on her doctorate at the University of Michigan after her husband was offered a job there in 1950. But after he was held on charges of distributing Communist literature, the government seized their passports in 1952, preventing her for a time from going to France to pursue her chosen area of concentration, 16th-century French society.In 1954, after refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee on First Amendment grounds, Mr. Davis was cited for contempt. He was fired by Michigan and blacklisted. Afterward, the couple, who by then had three children, eked out a living through part-time teaching and journal editing. Professor Davis did not receive her Ph.D. until 1959.Her career, like those of most academic women of her generation, was shaped in part, and stalled, by her husband’s. She and her family moved again, in 1962, when Mr. Davis obtained a teaching job at the University of Toronto.But while teaching part-time, she continued her research, publishing the results in essays and papers and presenting her work at conferences. (“Sometimes I typed with a child on my lap,” she said.) She held a faculty position at Toronto from 1963 to 1971.In 1971, she and a colleague, Jill Ker Conway, shook up Toronto’s conservative history department by teaching a course on the history of women and gender, one of the first in North America. (Dr. Conway went on to become the first woman to be named president of Smith College.)President Barack Obama presented Professor Davis with the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2013. Pete Marovich/Getty ImagesThat same year, at 42, Professor Davis landed her first tenure-track teaching post, at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the first woman in the university’s history department. Four years later, she published her first book, “Society and Culture in Early Modern France.” This strikingly original collection of essays reflected her “remarkable breadth of learning,” one reviewer wrote.Professor Davis moved to Princeton in 1978 and stayed for 18 years, succeeding Lawrence Stone as director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. In 1996, she retired as the Henry Charles Lea professor of history. She had helped found women’s studies programs at both Princeton and Berkeley.Returning to Canada, she was named a professor emerita in the University of Toronto’s history department.Professor Davis became president of the American Historical Association in 1987, only the second woman to hold that position. She was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2012 and was presented with the 2012 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.Chandler Davis died of a stroke last year. In addition to her son, Professor Davis is survived two daughters, Hannah Taïeb and Simone Davis; a brother, Stanley Zemon; four grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Professor Davis was a charismatic teacher well loved in the profession. “At conferences and round tables, Dr. Davis is usually the most senior and well-known face in the room,” an article about her in a University of Toronto magazine said, “yet she’ll often pull aside grad students to ask about their work — and how they’re juggling it with family.”In a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies, Professor Davis told of how her years of study had given her confidence in the resilience and adaptability of societies.“No matter how bleak and constrained the situation,” she said, “some forms of improvisation and coping take place. No matter what happens, people go on telling stories about it and bequeath them to the future.” She added, “The past reminds us that change can occur.”Alex Traub More

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      ‘Here We Are’ Review: The Last Sondheim, Cool and Impossibly Chic

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      This inventive, beguiling and not quite fully solved puzzle of a show is a worthy and loving farewell to the great musical dramatist.Stephen Sondheim had a genius for genre. Some of his best works were adapted from very niche sources like penny dreadfuls (“Sweeney Todd”), epistolary novels (“Passion”) and Roman comedies (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”). Leaning hard into their specific styles, he mined their expressive potential in songs that could hardly be improved and never sounded alike.Still, for him and for others, surrealism was often a genre too far. Musical theater is surreal enough already. (Why did that taciturn man suddenly start singing? Who are those dancing women in lingerie?) Building a show on a willfully irrational source risks doubling down on the weirdness, leading to “Huh?” results like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” and Sondheim’s own “Anyone Can Whistle.”So as we waited what seemed like decades for what would turn out to be his last musical, never quite knowing if he’d ditched it or not, the dribbles of information he and his collaborators let drop suggested that the new show — eventually titled “Here We Are” — might be misbegotten.Not only are the two Luis Buñuel films that Sondheim and the playwright David Ives took as their inspiration maximally surrealist, they are also surreal in different, seemingly incompatible ways. “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) is a sunny romp about a group of friends who, seeking a meal, are mysteriously unable to find one. “The Exterminating Angel” (1962) is a much darker affair, about a dinner party no one can leave. Both movies ridicule aristocrats who are underfed yet over-sated: people for whom nothing is ever enough. But one is like the silky tartness of a lemon meringue pie and the other like chicken bones stuck in your throat.The best good news about “Here We Are,” the combo platter Buñuel musical that opened on Sunday at the Shed, nearly two years after Sondheim’s death in November 2021, is that it justifies the idea of merging these two works and succeeds in making a surrealist musical expressive. In Joe Mantello’s breathtakingly chic and shapely production, with a cast of can-you-top-this Broadway treasures, it is never less than a pleasure to watch as it confidently polishes and embraces its illogic. Musically, it’s fully if a little skimpily Sondheim, and entirely worthy of his catalog. That it is also a bit cold, only occasionally moving in the way that song would ideally allow, may speak to the reason he had so much trouble writing it.There are just a few songs in Act II, which, inspired by Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” takes a darker turn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe first act, about an hour long and with perhaps seven numbers — though it’s hard to count because they weave in and out of the dialogue — introduces us to Ives’s American versions of Buñuel’s French gourmands from “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.” Leo Brink (Bobby Cannavale) is a crass tycoon and Marianne Brink (Rachel Bay Jones) a society decorator; their Saturday morning is interrupted when four of their circle arrive at the couple’s hyper-sleek apartment, insisting they’ve been invited for brunch.The interlopers include Paul Zimmer (Jeremy Shamos), a plastic surgeon celebrating his 1,000th nose job, and his wife, Claudia Bursik-Zimmer (Amber Gray), an agent, she brays, for “a major entertainment entity.” Along with them are Raffael Santello Di Santicci (Steven Pasquale), the horndog ambassador from a Mediterranean country called Moranda, and Fritz (Micaela Diamond), Marianne’s sour younger sister, a revolutionary with champagne tastes.Ives quickly and amusingly delineates the six with specific and almost universally obnoxious traits. Raffael, who butchers his English, and Claudia, quick to pull rank, have a weekly assignation behind Paul’s back; Paul and Leo run a drug cartel with Raffael’s ambassadorial assistance. Fritz is a pill. As they go on the road in search of a meal, accompanied by a Sondheim vamp that starts out marvelously jaunty and ends like water swirling down a drain, each reveals worse and worse traits, except for Marianne, who is too dim to be venal. When she asks her husband to “buy this perfect day” for her, it seems less acquisitive than sentimental.The changes of scenery as they visit various establishments featuring outré waiters (Tracie Bennett and Denis O’Hare) in ever more ludicrous wigs (by Robert Pickens and Katie Gell) are accomplished with swift grace on David Zinn’s shiny white box of a set, as neon marquees descend from the flies and then descend further to form tables or banquettes. (Zinn’s costumes are also telegraphic, including Leo’s velour sweatsuit and Claudia’s sky-high purple Fendis.) The theme-and-variations format is enchanting, allowing Sondheim, the great puzzler, to treat songs almost as anagrams. Eventually, along with three other characters they pick up — a colonel (Francois Battiste), a soldier (Jin Ha) and a bishop (David Hyde Pierce) — the crew lands, by now starving, at Raffael’s embassy, where they dine as Act I ends.Here the musical hinges into “The Exterminating Angel,” only instead of a completely different set of characters (Buñuel’s were Spanish, living under Franco), Ives, in a neat piece of joinery, continues with Leo and Marianne and the others. It is they who find it impossible to leave after dinner, and wind up, in Act II, sleeping, bickering and eventually fighting over food scraps as their metaphysical entrapment persists for days. Ives also complicates Buñuel’s antifascist, anti-bourgeois glee, in which plutocrats are exposed as pigs, by implicating the revolution as well; Fritz turns out to be less of a threat to her own way of life than she intended.Clever as all that is, the windup has problems, as is true for many new shows finding their final shape. To make the characters in “Here We Are” worthy of punishment in the second act has meant making them too obviously awful in the first. Their brutishness throughout also lets us off Buñuel’s hook: His movies are about people whose sophistication and disposable income we should recognize, but “Here We Are,” which sometimes feels like a butterfly box, is about people we don’t dare to.In the first act, inspired by Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” the characters visit various establishments, each distinguished with swift grace by neon marquees that descend to form tables or banquettes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHad Sondheim written more songs for Act II — there are just a few, bunched at the beginning — that problem might have been eased. In any case, Mantello and Ives decided to reframe the dearth as an opportunity. Before his death, Sondheim apparently agreed with them that the lack of songs in fact made structural sense: Once trapped in a repeating nightmare of deprivation, these characters would have no reason to sing. But then why retain the ones he’d already written?Perhaps because the songs he did write are everything you could want them to be. There are fewer trick rhymes than usual, but laugh-out-loud jokes nonetheless. A rhapsodic love song for the soldier and a paean to superficiality for Marianne — “I want things to gleam./To be what they seem/And not what they are” — have the familiar Sondheimian depth and luster to crystallize complex insights.Though we sorely miss that in Act II, and especially at the attempted triple lutz of an ending (which is probably two lutzes too many), Ives, the author of “Venus in Fur” and innumerable clever comedies, has done much to compensate. Some of his dialogue scenes — including a riveting colloquy between the questing Marianne and the questioning bishop — have the shape, rhythm and sorrowful wit of a Sondheim song. (Jones and Pierce are standouts in the excellent cast.) Also lovingly filling in blanks are the musical supervisor, Alexander Gemignani, and Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator, Jonathan Tunick, who have arranged themes from the earlier part of the show as instrumental interludes to take up the slack in the later part.You can understand their care. Pending the discovery of some unpublished juvenilia or yet another iteration of the penultimate “Road Show,” this is the last Sondheim musical we will ever have. That alone makes the production historic, a pressure that happily does not show in the product, which is fleet and flashy. Natasha Katz’s lighting, Tom Gibbons’s sound and Sam Pinkleton’s droll choreography do a lot of the heavy lifting for Mantello’s agenda.More important, “Here We Are” is as experimental as Sondheim throughout his career wanted everything to be. To swim through its currents of echoes of earlier work — some “Anyone Can Whistle,” some “Passion,” some “Merrily We Roll Along” — is to understand the characters’ monstrous insatiability. We, too, will always want more, even when we’ve had what by any reasonable standards should already be more than enough.Here We AreThrough Jan. 21 at the Shed, Manhattan; theshed.org. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes. More

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      From ‘Goodfellas’ to ‘Flower Moon’: How Scorsese Has Rethought Violence

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      The director was long identified with ornately edited set pieces. In “The Irishman” and his latest film, the flourishes have given way to blunt truths.Of all the haunting images and disturbing sounds that permeate Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” none is more upsetting than the guttural cry from Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), a tortured wail of rage and grief that escapes her reserved visage when tragedy strikes. And it often does: “Killers” tells the true story, adapted from the book by David Grann, of how Mollie’s Osage community was decimated by murderous white men, who killed dozens of her tribe members for rights to their oil-rich land.Mollie’s howl of pain is not quite like any sound heard before in a Scorsese film. But in many ways, Scorsese is emulating her jarring cry in the ominous aesthetics of “Killers of the Flower Moon” itself, and of his 2019 feature, “The Irishman.”The movies have much in common: their creative teams, expansive running times, period settings, narrative density and epic scope. But what most keenly sets them apart from the rest of Scorsese’s work is the element by which the filmmaker is arguably most easily identified: their violence. In these films, the deaths, which are frequent, are hard and fast and blunt, a marked departure from the intricately stylized and ornately edited set pieces of his earlier work.“The violence is different now, in these later movies,” Thelma Schoonmaker, his editor since 1980, noted recently. “And often it’s in a wide shot. It’s hardly ever a tight shot, which is very different from his earlier movies, right?”It certainly is. Wide shots, for those unfamiliar with the lingo of cinematography, are spacious, open compositions, often full-body views of characters and their surroundings (frequently used for broad-scale action or establishing shots). Medium-wides are slightly closer, but still allow us to observe multiple characters and their surroundings. The “tight shots” that Schoonmaker references as more typical of Scorsese’s earlier work are the medium shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups that place the camera (and thus the viewer) right in the middle of the melee.Take, as an example, one of Scorsese’s most effective sequences, the murder of Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) in his 1990 crime drama, “Goodfellas.” When Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) kill Batts, it’s dramatized in a flurry of setups and rapid-fire edits: from a three-shot of Tommy’s initial punch, to an overhead shot of Batts hitting the floor, a low-angle composition (from Batts’s point of view) of Tommy pummeling him with his fists, then an already-dollying camera that tracks Henry (Ray Liotta) as he goes to lock the bar’s front door. Scorsese cuts back to Tommy landing more punches, then cuts to Jimmy contributing a series of kicks, with a quick insert of a particularly nasty one landing on Batts’s brutalized face. We then see, briefly, Tommy holding a gun, Henry reacting to all of this in shock, more kicks from Jimmy and more punches from Tommy, as blood spurts from Batts’s face.It’s a signature Scorsese scene, combining unflinching brutality, dark humor and incongruent music (the jukebox is blasting Donovan’s midtempo ballad “Atlantis”). It’s a tough, ugly bit of business — and it’s also pleasurable. There is, in this sequence and much of Scorsese’s crime filmography, a thrill to his staging and cutting that is often infectious.He’s such an electrifying filmmaker that even when dramatizing upsetting and difficult events, we find ourselves swept into the visceral virtuosity of his mise-en-scène. It’s this duality, the discomfort of enjoying the actions of criminals or killers or vigilantes, that makes his pictures so potent: Jake LaMotta’s beatings in “Raging Bull,” the high-speed execution of Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets” and particularly the gun-toting rampage of Travis Bickle at the end of “Taxi Driver” are all the more disturbing because of the spell Scorsese casts.That’s not how the violence works in “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” When people die in these films, it’s grim, nasty, divergent in every way from the dirty kicks of “Goodfellas” or “Casino” (1995). In “The Irishman,” Sally Bugs (Louis Cancelmi) is dispatched in two setups, one wide and one medium, bang bang bang; the deaths of Whispers DiTullio (Paul Herman) and Crazy Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco) are likewise framed wide, hard and fast — simple, bloody, done. One of the film’s most upsetting scenes, when Frank (De Niro) drags his young daughter to the corner grocery store so she can watch him beat up a shopkeeper, is staged with similar simplicity: Scorsese keeps the scene to a single wide shot as Frank goes in, drags the man over his counter, smashes him through the door, kicks him, beats him and stomps on his hand. Scorsese cuts away only once — to the little girl’s horrified reaction.Scorsese carries this sparseness into “Killers of the Flower Moon.” An early montage of Osage people on their deathbeds concludes with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn (Anthony J. Harvey), who is killed in two cold, complementary medium-wides. Another character is hooded on the street, dragged into an alley and stabbed to death, with all of the action in two wide shots; a third is knocked down in one wide shot, then thrashed to death in a low-angle medium. The mayhem is over before it even starts.“When I was growing up, I was in situations where everything was fine — and then, suddenly, violence broke out,” Scorsese told the film critic Richard Schickel in 2011. “You didn’t get a sense of where it was coming from, what was going to happen. You just knew that the atmosphere was charged, and, bang, it happened.”That feeling — that “bang, it happened” — is what makes the violence in “Killers” so upsetting. The most jarring and scary death comes early, with the murder of Sara Butler (Jennifer Rader) as she attends to her baby in a carriage; it’s all done in one medium wide shot, a pop and a burst of blood. A late-film courtroom flashback to an inciting murder is even more gutting, because we know it’s coming, so as the characters walk into the wide shot and arrange themselves, it’s more tense than any of Scorsese’s breathless montages could ever be.In contrast to the constant needle drops of “Goodfellas” or “Casino,” the murders in “Killers” and “The Irishman” often occur without musical accompaniment, nothing to soften or smother the cold crack of a single gunshot. This is most haunting in the closing stretch of “The Irishman,” as Frank makes the long, sad trip to kill his friend Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It’s an order from on high, and Frank is merely a foot soldier, so he can’t do a thing about his pal’s fate but dwell. Scorsese makes us dwell with him, lingering on every detail, filling the soundtrack with the thick, heavy silence of surrender. And when the time comes, Scorsese stages one of the most famous unsolved murders of our time with a glum, doomed inevitability, as Frank stands behind Hoffa, puts two into him, drags him to the middle of the freshly laid carpet, and leaves.In these films, Scorsese has stripped his violence of its flourishes and curlicues, boiling it down to its essence. Of the comparatively restrained violence of his “Gangs of New York” (2002), Scorsese told Schickel, “I don’t really want to do it anymore — after doing the killing of Joe Pesci and his brother in ‘Casino,’ in the cornfield. If you look at it, it isn’t shot in any special way. It doesn’t have any choreography to it. It doesn’t have any style to it, it’s just flat. It’s not pretty. There was nothing more to do than to show what that way of life leads to.”Perhaps Scorsese was ready to dramatize violence as he remembered it, rather than how he’d seen it in the movies. Or perhaps, at age 80, he is acutely aware of his own mortality, and that awareness is affecting how he sees and presents death in his own work. Scorsese ends “The Irishman” with Frank literally picking out his own coffin and crypt; side characters are all introduced with onscreen text detailing their eventual deaths (“Frank Sindone — shot three times in an alley, 1980”). It’s coming for everyone, the director seems to insist, not in a razzle-dazzle set piece, but in a sudden moment of brutality, shrouded in a cold, endless silence. More

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      ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Cameos Guide

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      Musicians, comedians and even a filmmaker make appearances in the epic drama.Throughout his acclaimed filmography, Martin Scorsese has been known for left-of-center casting choices. His longtime collaborator and casting director Ellen Lewis said in an interview that they always “try to go outside the box in interesting ways.” For evidence, consider memorable appearances by Scorsese’s mother, Catherine, in “Goodfellas” and the writer Fran Lebowitz as a judge in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”The director’s epic new drama, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is no exception. The film tells the story of a 1920s plot by white Oklahoma men, notably an uncle and nephew played by Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, to murder members of the Osage Nation, including Mollie Burkhart and her three sisters. Alongside those recognizable Scorsese regulars, a variety of musicians, comedians and other nonactors (some recruited by the Indigenous casting director Rene Haynes) blend in seamlessly.Here’s a spoiler-heavy guide to some of the film’s most interesting cameos.Jason IsbellJason Isbell as the husband of an Osage woman in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”AppleTV+The country singer-songwriter Jason Isbell appears as Bill Smith, husband of Mollie’s ill-fated sister Rita (played by JaNae Collins). For such a sizable part, “Killers” is the first major onscreen acting gig for the four-time Grammy winner. (He had a recurring voice role as a pastor on the Adult Swim series “Squidbillies.”) How did Isbell end up in the film? Chalk it up to downtime. The movie was shot during the pandemic when musicians would have otherwise been touring around the country. As for his main gig, Isbell’s most recent album, “Weathervanes,” with the group the 400 Unit was released earlier this year.Pete YornThis indie-rock singer-songwriter (whose most recent album was “Hawaii,” a 2022 collaboration with Day Wave) eventually shows up as the much-talked-about and elusive Acie Kirby, whom DiCaprio’s hapless Ernest is tasked with finding throughout the film. While “Killers” is Pete Yorn’s first big-screen acting role, he is no stranger to the Scorsese sphere. His brother is Rick Yorn, an executive producer of “Killers” and other Scorsese projects, including “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Gangs of New York.” Rick Yorn also happens to be Scorsese and DiCaprio’s manager.Sturgill SimpsonSturgill Simpson as a bootlegger in the drama.AppleTV+Another noteworthy country singer-songwriter, Sturgill Simpson plays the bootlegger Henry Grammer. Though he won the 2017 best country album Grammy for “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” the guitarist has turned Hollywood roles into a bustling side hustle. In addition to a recurring part on the HBO comedy series “The Righteous Gemstones,” he appeared in the 2019 drama “Queen & Slim” and was on the big screen last month in the sci-fi opus “The Creator.”Tatanka MeansThis busy comedian and actor plays John Wren, a Native American investigator. Means boasts an eclectic filmography ranging from the 2014 comedy “A Million Ways to Die in the West” to a recent appearance on the series “Reservation Dogs.” The son of the Oglala Sioux activist Russell Means (a Scorsese friend who died in 2012), the younger Means is perhaps best known for stand-up routines that reflect the Native experience.Jack WhiteThe former White Stripes musician has a thriving career as a guitarist on his own and in groups like the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, but he can be seen at the end of “Killers” providing multiple voices for a radio play that explains the eventual fates of the real-life figures dramatized in the film. This isn’t Jack White’s first acting gig. When he’s not at the helm of his indie label Third Man Records, he has found time to portray Elvis Presley in the 2007 music biopic spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” and to appear in “Portlandia” and “The Simpsons.”Charlie MusselwhiteThis harmonica ace plays the gruff Alvin Reynolds. Charlie Musselwhite is a Chicago blues legend who is said to have inspired Dan Aykroyd’s Blues Brothers character Elwood. Lewis, the casting director, is a music fan who said she sought out Musselwhite after being taken by his weathered look while researching the Chicago label Delmark Records. “Killers” is the 79-year-old’s most sizable acting role after parts in movies like “Blues Brothers 2000” and “Windows on the World.”Everett WallerThe film features several prominent members of the Osage Nation including Waller, who serves as the tribe’s Minerals Council chairman. In the movie, Waller gives an impassioned speech about the plight of his people. Haynes, the casting director, said that much like the other Indigenous performers, Waller was discovered during an open casting call to fill the movie’s 62 Native roles. “His daughter actually came through and she knew I was looking for a gentleman with long hair,” Haynes recalled, adding, “I told her that if she could get him to come in, I’ll let him skip the line because I’d love to meet him.”Brendan FraserBrendan Fraser as a lawyer for Robert De Niro’s character. AppleTV+Though not strictly a cameo, the actor doesn’t appear till late in the film. Chosen by Scorsese and Lewis well before “The Whale” led to a career renaissance and a best actor Oscar win earlier this year, Fraser plays W.S. Hamilton, the defense attorney for De Niro’s William Hale. Lewis said Fraser was an 11th-hour choice after another actor she didn’t name dropped out.John LithgowThis is also not quite a cameo, but John Lithgow doesn’t appear until late in the film. The two-time Oscar nominee has enjoyed a long and eclectic career in roles that span genres, onstage and on the big and small screens. But this is the first time he’s worked with Scorsese. Here he plays the prosecutor Peter Leaward in a series of courtroom scenes.Martin ScorseseOne of the three-and-a-half-hour film’s most surprising moments occurs during the radio-play coda. It’s Scorsese himself who reads from the obituary of Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). Scorsese is no stranger to appearing in his own work, from his 1973 breakout “Mean Streets” (he can be seen firing a gun during the car-crash finale) to “Silence” (a brief and bearded cameo in that 2016 drama). His turn in “Killers” serves as a fitting tribute to both the forgotten subjects of the story and the director who helped remind us of them. More

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      SAG-AFTRA Advises Actors Against Character Costumes Amid Strike

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      The SAG-AFTRA union told its members not to dress as characters from major productions and post pictures, which could be seen as promoting the work of companies they are negotiating with.Barbie, Ken and Wednesday Addams costumes are out. Ghosts and zombies are in.Halloween this year is tricky for actors on strike, under new union guidelines that tell them how to avoid crossing the virtual picket line: Don’t dress as characters from major studio productions or post photographs of the costumes online.“Let’s use our collective power to send a loud and clear message to our struck employers that we will not promote their content without a fair contract,” the union, SAG-AFTRA, said in the guidelines on Thursday.The union urged its members to “celebrate Halloween this year while also staying in solidarity.”SAG-AFTRA, representing more than 150,000 television and movie actors, has been on strike since July while it negotiates a contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents major movie and streaming companies including Disney, Netflix and Warner Bros.Generally, the union encourages striking members to share photographs of their union engagement and the picket line in order to amplify their demands, which include increased residual payments from streaming services, a wage boost and protections regarding the use of artificial intelligence. But SAG-AFTRA said its Halloween guidelines were intended “to make sure our members don’t inadvertently break strike rules.”The guidelines urge members to choose generic costumes — of zombies, spiders or ghosts, say — or to base their costumes on characters from animated television shows.In its coverage of the new guidelines on Thursday, The Hollywood Reporter highlighted some of the rules’ technicalities. For example, a costume based on Barbie, which is owned by Mattel, could suggest that the wearer was promoting the summer’s biggest movie from a major studio.“Presumably, actors could dress up like struck characters if they weren’t seen publicly in their costumes, but it’s probably best not to risk it — after all, nothing is scarier than getting called out for scabbing,” the publication wrote, using the slang term for someone who disregards a strike.Social media photos of costumes inspired by content covered by the strike could be considered publicity work, according to the union. It was not clear how actors would handle dressing up as Barbie or J. Robert Oppenheimer at events that would not be publicized or whether actors would influence the costume choices of their family members.“I look forward to screaming ‘scab’ at my 8 year old all night. She’s not in the union but she needs to learn,” the actor Ryan Reynolds said in a joking post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.John Rocha, a union actor and the co-host of “The Hot Mic,” a film review podcast, called the decision “foolish” and said he hoped that SAG-AFTRA would reverse course.“Partying at Halloween dressed as the characters their fellow SAG actors brought to life (while they blow off some steam) should be ENCOURAGED,” he said on X.Negotiations between the entertainment studios and the union collapsed last week, with both sides saying they remained far apart on the most significant issues. More