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      John Bailey, Oscars President at a Time of Strife, Dies at 81

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      A respected cinematographer, he guided the motion picture academy at the height of the #MeToo movement and dealt with infighting around the Oscar ceremony.John Bailey, an accomplished cinematographer who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2017 to 2019, a tumultuous period when Harvey Weinstein was excommunicated from the group and complaints mounted about the Academy Awards ceremony, died on Friday. He was 81.His death was announced by the academy, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.As a cinematographer, Mr. Bailey collaborated frequently with celebrated directors like Paul Schrader and worked on many well-known movies, including “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “The Big Chill” (1983).Before he was chosen to head the academy, he had never held a prominent public role, and he was never nominated for an Oscar himself, though he helped others win the award. In an interview in 2020 with the publication American Cinematographer, Mr. Bailey said he generally tried to make his own work “invisible.”After the academy announced in August 2017 that he would be its next president, The New York Times reported: “Hollywood scratched its head. Who?”It took only two months for Mr. Bailey to find himself in the news. Shortly after The Times and The New Yorker published investigations revealing previously undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment against the producer Harvey Weinstein, the academy voted overwhelmingly to “immediately expel” him. It was only the second known instance of an expulsion from the academy.(The first happened in 2004, when the character actor Carmine Caridi had his membership revoked after he broke rules about lending DVD screeners of contending films. Since then, the comedian and actor Bill Cosby, the director Roman Polanski and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel have also been expelled.)In a letter Mr. Bailey sent to members of the academy days after the vote, he wrote that the organization could not become “an inquisitorial court.” But he also expressed passionate support for the decision.“We are witnessing this venerable motion picture academy reinvent itself before our very eyes,” Mr. Bailey said to a luncheon of Oscar nominees several months later, according to Vanity Fair. “I may be a 75-year-old white male, but I’m every bit as gratified as the youngest of you here that the fossilized bedrock of many of Hollywood’s worst abuses are being jackhammered into oblivion.”In the kind of head-spinning turn of events that became familiar during the height of the #MeToo moment, Mr. Bailey himself became the subject of a sexual harassment accusation only weeks later.Variety reported that the academy had received three harassment complaints about Mr. Bailey. But the academy later announced that it had only one such accusation to look into, and within weeks it determined that there was no merit to the claim.More turmoil for Mr. Bailey’s academy lay ahead. The 2018 Oscars telecast saw a drop-off in ratings that has never been fully reversed. The comedian Kevin Hart was hired to host the 2019 ceremony, then stepped down amid criticism of jokes he had made years earlier about not wanting his son to be gay, leaving that year’s event hostless.Mr. Bailey made the case for two changes to the ceremony designed to maintain viewer interest in a new era: adding a “popular film” category, to include the kind of blockbuster movies that the Oscars otherwise overlook, and holding some award announcements during commercial breaks to shorten the broadcast. The academy encountered such severe blowback to those proposals that it scrapped both of them.In 2019, when term limits compelled Mr. Bailey to step down from his position, The Times described his tenure as “chaotic,” but in hindsight, perhaps none of the scandals of Mr. Bailey’s era rose to the level of Will Smith giving Chris Rock an unscripted slap to the face midbroadcast. (Mr. Smith received a ban of 10 years from the Oscars.)Getting embroiled in culture wars and power struggles was an unexpected career development for Mr. Bailey. He made it his modus operandi, he told American Cinematographer, to avoid “tawdry” films. Describing his youthful aspirations in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bailey said, referring to a long-dead French film critic, “I wanted to write — to be the American André Bazin.”Mr. Bailey in 1983 with the director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of “The Big Chill.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionJohn Ira Bailey was born on Aug. 10, 1942, in Moberly, Mo. He grew up in Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County, California. He told American Cinematographer that his father was a machinist who never went to high school.He earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1964, and several years later he earned a graduate degree in cinema from the University of Southern California. He entered that program to pursue film studies, a young cinephile hoping to become a critic, but found himself drawn instead to cinematography.Early in his career, he had small jobs on several enduring films, like being the camera operator on Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” The beauty of Néstor Almendros’s cinematography in that movie remained an inspiration for Mr. Bailey.When Mr. Schrader was preparing to shoot “American Gigolo” (1980), he planned to find a European cinematographer. But then, American Cinematographer reported, he was introduced to Mr. Bailey, found himself impressed by Mr. Bailey’s knowledge of foreign film and decided to hire him instead. The two men would go on to work together on five movies.That same year, Mr. Bailey worked with Robert Redford on “Ordinary People,” Mr. Redford’s directorial debut, which won several Oscars, including for best director.In later years Mr. Bailey repeatedly collaborated with the directors Michael Apted (on the 1996 movie “Extreme Measures” and other films) and Ken Kwapis (on films including “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” in 2005 and “He’s Just Not That Into You” in 2009). He also wrote a blog about film for American Cinematographer.His accomplishments at the academy included expanding international membership, which he told The Times helped the South Korean film “Parasite” win the best-picture award in 2020.He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol Littleton, an Oscar-nominated film editor.At the 2018 luncheon for Oscar nominees, Mr. Bailey had some useful advice for winners, The Times reported.“Thank your mom,” he said, “not your personal trainer.” More

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      ‘The Lady Bird Diaries’ Review: A 1960s First Lady Speaks

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      Lady Bird Johnson proves an engrossing narrator to her own story and that of a roiling nation.“The Lady Bird Diaries” opens with images of a drizzly November day in Fort Worth, and the voice of Claudia Alta Johnson. Lady Bird Johnson — a nickname she acquired as child growing up in Texas — is recounting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.Her cadence is measured, her account riveting. But it is a sliver of wrenching poetry that distinguishes the memory and hints that the subject of this documentary, directed by Dawn Porter, will be a singular and deeply observant guide to her own — and the nation’s — story. As their car sped off — a secret service agent physically covering her husband, the vice president, to protect him — Johnson looks back and sees, “a bundle of pink, like a drift blossom, lying in the back seat. It was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the president’s body.”Shortly after Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One, the new first lady began recording her thoughts. Those 123 hours of audiotape became a trove for the journalist Julia E. Sweig’s best-selling biography “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight,” which makes a persuasive argument that the first lady was the president’s go-to adviser for good reason. Based on Sweig’s book as well as her subsequent podcast, the documentary cements that reappraisal with first-person force.Many of the archival images Porter so fluidly employs will be familiar, but they gain fresh energy and timely urgency from Johnson’s absorbing narration and her often stirring observations about Lyndon Johnson, their political partnership, the environment and the two events she so presciently knew would shape us for decades to come: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.The Lady Bird DiariesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and on Hulu. More

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      Russell Brand’s Alternate Reality

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      On Sept. 12, four days before he was expected at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater for another sold-out show, Russell Brand asked his fans for a favor. “I’ve always struggled with authority and being told what to do,” he wrote to ticketholders, attaching a questionnaire for a planned bit with his audience. “Even when it comes to something small like being offered a seat by a doctor, I’ll purposefully refuse rather than comply. Tell me about your relationship with authority — whether you tend to yield to authority or fight it.”Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.At the time, Brand’s more-than-two-decade quest for lasting attention had been proceeding apace along two tracks. In mainstream entertainment circles, at home and abroad, he remained the fading but still bankable British comedian whose selectively confessional accounts of heroin addiction and promiscuity made him an avatar of a very mid-aughts sort of fame — the guy who played a rocker version of himself in the 2008 film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and would later marry Katy Perry (it was brief). But for those partial to Brand’s midlife canon, he had come to resemble something more like a political sage.With Jesus-length hair, multidenominational tattoos and promises of unspecified revolution, Brand, 48, had in recent years been reaching millions daily across a media and wellness empire, fusing the downward-facing dogmatism of a proper guru with the cold efficiency of the YouTube algorithm. His remit was nothing less than “a social-political-spiritual movement,” he told listeners. His prime offering was a trove of foreboding and regularly misleading videos from his flagship series, “Stay Free with Russell Brand,” lobbed at a cumulative social media following of more than 20 million. His episode titles charted the ideological swerve of a man who once used his celebrity to elevate progressive causes: “STATE OF FEAR! COVID Propaganda EXPOSED!” “Leaked Audio PROVES Trump Right!”For the past year, Brand’s recording studio in the Oxfordshire countryside has been blessed as an emerging nerve center of the American right, or at least the anti-anti-right, with a procession of presidential candidates beaming in. In July alone, Brand interviewed Ron DeSantis, who compared Brand favorably to loathsome “corporate journalists”; hyped a pull-up contest with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., conservative media’s favorite lapsed Democrat and Covid conspiracy theorist; and scored the first sit-down with Tucker Carlson after the host’s dismissal from Fox News. “Maybe I’ve just been called a right-wing crazy for so long that I thought I was,” Carlson told me recently. “But if I agree with pretty much everything Russell Brand says, I don’t know what I am.”In July, Brand scored the first sit-down with Tucker Carlson after the host’s dismissal from Fox News.Screenshot from RumbleLike Joe Rogan, the carnivorous pooh-bah of this intellectual space, Brand appeared interested in teaching a certain kind of man how to be a certain kind of man, mining the tension between think-for-yourself riffs and listen-to-me conclusions. (Brand has been a repeat guest on Rogan’s podcast.) Unlike Rogan, he appeared to model a more expansive vision of manhood — vegan, sober, Aldous Huxley-quoting. The event in Wembley, part of a tour scheduled for late summer and early fall, seemed designed to accentuate Brand’s overlapping profiles: electric live performer and terminally online click-hunter. As with much of his output lately, the marketplace would help dictate his direction. The tour was called “Bipolarisation” for two reasons, he joked: because people would be polled and “because I’m severely mentally ill.” His September email to attendees requested answers to several related prompts. “What’s the strangest way you’ve yielded to or gone against authority?” the first question read. “What’s the weirdest/naughtiest/most embarrassing thing you’ve done in reaction to being told what to do?” another asked.Three days later, Brand’s followers received a less whimsical communication. In a prebuttal video posted across his social media, Brand said he was about to face “very serious allegations that I absolutely refute,” without detailing them. He insisted that all past relationships were consensual. He darkly suggested that “another agenda” might be at play, noting that supporters had long warned him about “getting too close to the truth.” The next day, Sept. 16, The Sunday Times, The Times of London and Channel 4 Dispatches published a yearslong joint investigation in which four women accused Brand of sexual assault between 2006 and 2013. The accounts were specific, revolting and, in some cases, bolstered by medical records and other contemporaneous evidence. The accusers included a woman who was 16, the British age of consent, during her relationship with Brand, who was in his early 30s. She said Brand once forced her to perform oral sex as she strained to push him off, stopping only after she punched him in the stomach. There was a time, as recently as a few years ago, when this sort of reputational earthquake almost certainly would have followed the dutiful rhythms of celebrity crisis management: performative introspection, nominal contrition (often paired with a narrow denial of the most grievous offenses), a pledge to disappear for a while. Instead, Brand’s story quickly became a self-evident data point in two divergent realities. In the first, the one still tethered at least somewhat to traditional notions of scandal and consequence, Brand was an overnight pariah and criminal suspect. The police in London opened investigations. More women came forward, including an extra on Brand’s 2011 film “Arthur,” who filed a civil suit in New York claiming that Brand assaulted her in a bathroom on set. Brand’s management company almost immediately dropped him. YouTube suspended him from making money from his channel, which has more than six million subscribers. A parliamentary committee chairwoman wrote to Rumble, the video platform that caters to the right and exclusively carries Brand’s full episodes (shorter clips still appear on YouTube), expressing concern that he might continue to profit there and “undermine the welfare of victims.”In the second reality, the victim was Brand, and his welfare was suddenly the concern of many, from the powerful new friends he has made to the “awakening wonders” (as he addresses his flock) refusing to abandon him. His example has become a repentance-free case study in a very 2023 template for public survival, a post-post-#MeToo lesson in the spoils and fortifications available to those who are thought to be scorned by the right people. “Criticize the drug companies, question the war in Ukraine, and you can be pretty sure this is going to happen,” Carlson said of Brand on X (formerly Twitter), to which Elon Musk, the site’s reply-guy owner, responded: “Sure seems that way!” Rumble also posted on X, calling the parliamentary letter a “deeply inappropriate” intrusion of the state. Already, for those who support Brand and those who do not, his fate is being processed as a kind of referendum — on who gets to decide what happens to the accused; on what a preternaturally charismatic figure can talk himself into or out of; on the limits, or limitlessness, of tribal loyalty.Brand leaving the Troubadour Wembley Park theater in London in September. He performed just hours after sexual assault allegations were made public.James Manning/Press Association, via Associated PressThough the balance of his live tour was scrapped within days, Brand kept one last date, Sept. 16 in Wembley, hours after the allegations landed. “You came,” he said to a crowd of about 2,000, according to the BBC, walking out to “You Don’t Own Me,” the feminist standard performed by Lesley Gore. He told his guests he loved them and talked about teaching his young children to be skeptical. One fan held a sign reading, “We stand by you.” Another threatened to kick down a ladder carrying paparazzi outside. And by the end of the night, the room had a new answer to Brand’s preshow queries.How had they most memorably snubbed authority? How had they responded when told what to do and think?With a standing ovation for a freshly accused predator.More than a week after the allegations, “Stay Free” returned, unbowed but discernibly altered. Brand appeared alone, his bare chest visible beneath a largely unbuttoned white button-down. The show credits, which once ran about 20 names deep, were gone — not necessarily because Brand’s whole team was but perhaps because associating with him had become more complicated. “The corporatist state and global media war against free speech is in full swing!” Brand told his listeners. “How do I know? Take a guess.”Seated at a desk, with a “Daily Show”-style prosecutorial montage of videos and text, Brand blamed the “collusion between big tech and government” and a “centralist state and globalist elite” that he suggested was persecuting him. He discussed the letter from Parliament, alleging ties between its author and Google (“a competitor to Rumble”). He welcomed Jimmy Dore, another conspiracy-theory-minded comedian-podcaster, for a remote interview, thanking him for a mood lift “at a time where I plainly need it.” “Stay strong,” Dore said. This booking choice was notable. Dore, who has himself been accused of sexual harassment, is among a cluster of high-profile Brand supporters who seem particularly invested in the idea that false or agenda-led accusations are an occupational hazard for their lot. Andrew Tate, the misogynist mega-influencer awaiting trial on rape and human-trafficking charges in Romania, tagged Brand on X: “Welcome to the club.” Donald Trump Jr., whose father has been serially accused, posted a meme on Instagram showing the former president, Brand, Tate and Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, who was accused of rape. “Notice a pattern?” the meme read, alongside Trump Jr.’s caption: “One day they’ll be coming for you. I don’t believe in this much coincidence and neither should you.” For Brand’s audience, long encouraged to consider his voice too dangerous for entrenched interests to abide, the allegations stand as proof of concept, only making him more credible. “Enough of us know what’s going on here,” one commenter assured him upon his return. “No wonder they’re trying to silence you,” another posted on an October video that criticized President Biden.“It’s almost like cancel capital,” Nick Marx, a professor of film and media studies at Colorado State University and the co-author of a book on right-wing comedy, told me. “It’s something he recognizes as having a value distinct from money.” With Trumpian verve, Brand has reframed accusations against him as an act of war against everyone who backs him. “They’re out to get you,” he told his audience in November, citing “censorial forces” like YouTube and quoting from Kafka’s “The Trial.” “I’m just in the way.” And like the former president, Brand has channeled lessons from his early rise, betting on his basest self — and on the accommodations and calculations that those around him have always made.Since his public beginnings, Brand has derived his power from appearing to get away with something, from saying and doing what others never would. His fame was entwined with an almost ostentatious misogyny, a sizzle reel of mistreated women and gleefully poor taste for which he was broadly celebrated. His best-selling 2007 memoir relayed such rollicking tales as breaking the phone of a Turkish sex worker mid-encounter because the ringing bothered him. The British tabloid The Sun saluted him as its Shagger of the Year from 2006 to 2008. A breezy 2008 GQ profile winked at the “souvenir” that Brand acquired at a photo shoot (“her name is Penny”) and shared an anecdote from another romantic partner who claimed he told her, “I’m Russell Brand — I can do anything I like.” Brand denied this, semantically. “That may be the informing attitude,” he told the magazine, “but that’s never explicitly stated.”Brand with the singer Katy Perry, to whom he was briefly married, at the premiere of “Get Him to the Greek” in 2010. Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesEven scandal generally served Brand’s ends. In 2008, he and a co-host set off a national uproar after broadcasting on Brand’s BBC radio show the prankish voice messages they left for Andrew Sachs, a beloved former actor on “Fawlty Towers.” Sachs’s granddaughter Georgina Baillie was in a relationship with Brand in her early 20s. The messages to Sachs included singsongy Brand lyrics: “It was consensual/and she wasn’t menstrual.” Suspensions followed. Gordon Brown, the sitting prime minister, scolded him. Brand eventually resigned. His cad-for-the-masses legend grew anyway. “He was being very much rewarded,” Baillie, now 38, told me. “It didn’t even occur to me that I deserved an apology.”In interviews, people who know Brand described him to me as someone almost pathologically incapable of not having an audience and willing to do virtually anything to keep it. He has often admitted as much, joking that he could be whatever his followers wanted. “Are you unapologetically yourself?” he asked in August. “Because I’m not. I’m apologetically myself. ‘Hello, I’m me. Is this OK with everyone? I can change it if you want.’” (Brand and a longtime associate did not respond to an interview request or fact-checking queries.)In the 2008 GQ piece, Brand identified one clear gift (“attracting attention”) and warned playfully that his wider influence should be curbed. “I don’t think for a minute that I should be the person that comes up with how we organize a new postapocalyptic order,” he said, “because I think I’d exploit it to get girls.”When Brand speaks now about forging a new social order, he attributes his rise as a media force, accurately enough, to a collapse of faith in traditional institutions. Left unsaid is that Brand himself was a creation of legacy gatekeepers and their customers — the media companies that employed him, the outlets that toasted him, the viewers who couldn’t resist — and a leering testament to their priorities. What has lingered for some lately is not how so many people missed the signs about him but why they seemed so eager to ignore them. In recent months, two former employers, the BBC and Channel 4, announced internal inquiries into Brand’s past workplace behavior. Channel 4, where Brand was accused of flashing a female colleague, aired the investigative documentary about him in September. Its title: “In Plain Sight.”“It was this wash of devil-may-care, it’s-exciting-to-push-boundaries-or-just-have-no-boundaries, and women were less than,” Shaparak Khorsandi, an early peer of Brand’s on the comedy circuit, told me of the era that made him. “Yet a man behaving absolutely appallingly was given endless television and radio contracts.”The subject of the day in December 2014 was immigration, and the lineup for a BBC political panel was suitably formidable: a Conservative member of Parliament, another from Labour, a Sunday Times columnist. But two combatants stood out: Nigel Farage, then the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, reprising his argument that new entrants to Britain were a dangerous resource drain, and Brand.“There is a corrupt group in our country using our resources, taking away our jobs, taking away our housing, not paying taxes,” Brand agreed. But it was “the economic elite” funding Farage’s party. “His mates in the city farted,” Brand continued; Farage was “pointing at immigrants” and “holding his nose.” The studio audience roared.Raised as a working-class “bloke” in his frequent telling, Brand had long angled to amplify his voice on the left, infusing early appearances with sometimes deliberately shocking allusions to global affairs. He has delighted in claiming that on Sept. 12, 2001, while employed as a presenter at British MTV, he showed up at work dressed as Osama bin Laden. The following spring, he was detained by the police after fully disrobing at a protest in Piccadilly Circus, “explaining himself by mentioning ‘ecological,’ ‘Armageddon’ and ‘culture’ without making a great deal of sense,’” according to a news report from the time. (“Oh, God,” an MTV spokeswoman said then. “That sounds like Russell.”)Brand speaking in Parliament Square in London during a protest against the Conservative Party’s austerity policies in 2015.Tim Ireland/Associated Press“Even before he was famous, he sort of fancied himself a bit of a Che Guevara,” Khorsandi told me. After he was famous, Brand expanded his political footprint proportionally. In 2012, he was invited to testify before a parliamentary committee on drug policy, walking the halls in a black tank top and bolero hat. The same year, he developed a short-lived talk show for American TV, FX’s “Brand X With Russell Brand,” appearing with Matt Stoller, a liberal policy researcher. (The men met while Brand was shooting “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which Stoller’s brother, Nicholas, directed; they reconnected in 2011 at the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park in New York.) “They wanted to do a more radical version of ‘The Daily Show,’” Stoller told me of “Brand X” in August. “It was a bad show.”Brand’s political breakthrough came in a viral BBC interview in 2013 with Jeremy Paxman, one of Britain’s most fearsome questioners. Paxman appraised Brand as a “trivial man” whose calls for revolution and apathy about voting gave him away. “You’ve spent your whole career berating and haranguing politicians,” Brand responded. “Then when someone like me, a comedian, goes, ‘Yeah, they’re all worthless — what’s the point in engaging with any of them?’ you sort of have a go at me because I’m not poor anymore.” The exchange enshrined Brand as perhaps the nation’s foremost lefty. “It had a massive impact,” George Monbiot, a well-known environmentalist and writer, told me. “It galvanized people. It galvanized me.”In short order, Brand was hailed as a kind of crossover intellectual, validated by authors and thinkers who schlepped to his East London home to appear on his popular YouTube series, “The Trews,” a portmanteau of “true” and “news.” Academics said they could become entranced by Brand’s free-associative conviction on their subjects, even when he sounded only semi-sensical — absorbing the quick-draw wit and baroque vocabulary of a host liable to deploy “perspicacity” or “effulgent” off the cuff. “I actually remember thinking at the time, Oh, this is how a new religion would start,” Edward Slingerland, an expert on ancient Chinese thought now teaching at the University of British Columbia, told me of their interview.For activists, Brand became a treasured ally, showing up at rallies — to oppose austerity, protect tenants, support firefighters — and invariably attracting cameras. He also began ingratiating himself with more mainstream politicos, at one point initiating a correspondence with Bill de Blasio, whose 2013 mayoral victory in New York had briefly stirred the left. “I do remember thinking of him as a fellow traveler,” de Blasio told me. In 2015, Ed Miliband, then the Labour Party’s leader, made a pilgrimage to Brand’s home for the web series, hoping to reach younger voters within its seven-figure following. Both men came to rue their choices. “Obviously knowing what I know now, I regret doing it,” Miliband said after the assault allegations. Brand’s second thoughts arrived sooner, when his imprimatur could not prevent a Conservative election triumph. “My only regret,” he said afterward, “is I thought I could be involved.”If Brand felt disillusioned, he was not alone on the British left. “They used Russell,” Monbiot said of Labour. “But they never embraced him.” Brand has since resolved to live “beyond all political systems.”Among onetime admirers, the most generous interpretation for Brand’s political transformation is bleak but straightforward: Today’s version of him is the logical upshot of social media incentives, boundless ego and a bespoke personal radicalism that was always a little ominously amorphous. (“I don’t know how to describe Russell’s politics,” Marianne Williamson told me in August, warmly recounting the fund-raiser he helped host for her during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.) In this reading, Brand is simply who we told him to be — or at least what the algorithm did. He has been known to track his trend lines on social media obsessively, staying apprised of follower counts and video performance. A job posting on Brand’s website earlier this year for a “YouTube Optimiser” was bracingly explicit: The task was to juice viewership and propose topics “based upon topics covered by similar channels and those that our audience watch.” This is the path from interviewing favored commentators of the right, like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, to having those videos recommended to fans of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, to sounding increasingly like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.“You can either try to drive the masses or be driven by them,” Faiz Shakir, the 2020 campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, told me after appearing on Brand’s show in August to push his labor-supporting nonprofit. “He’s more driven by them. It’s ‘Here’s where I think they already are.’”Brand has said that at least half his viewers are in the United States. After he interviewed DeSantis last summer, a person close to the campaign’s decision-making told me the host was seen as a conduit to men under 45, especially those who were not lifelong Republicans. On air, Brand can sound occasionally uncomfortable with his new constituency. Last year, he pressed Peterson to “prioritize compassion” rather than antagonize trans people. In the otherwise slobbering session with DeSantis, Brand almost begged him to agree that imposing an ideology on others was illiberal. “What about the freedom of those opposed?” Brand asked. But such flashes have been rare. In 2015, Brand called Trump a joke whose “punchline is a worse world for everyone”; by this February, he was posing with Trump Jr. at a Rumble event in Florida. He once quoted Gandhi on nonviolent protest; now he mocks those “clutching their pearls over Jan. 6.” Jeff Krasno, a former manager of Brand’s, suggested on his own podcast in September that Brand has by now “likely drunk his own kombucha,” adding, “there’s a clear business rationale for the content that Russell generates.”The Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis appeared on “Stay Free With Russell Brand” in July.Screenshot from RumbleOnstage, Brand has prided himself on a thrill-seeking gameness. “You have to be truthful and honest,” he has said of his comedy, “self-aware and willing to take risks.” Yet in many ways, Brand’s reinvention was exceedingly safe. He would be rewarded for playing the hits, for doing the expected. He would be cancel-proofed, if it came to it, with an army of backers primed to distrust anyone who attacked him.This is the less charitable read on Brand’s evolution: His alt-rightward drift — and his escalating insistence that mainstream outlets were corrupt agents of the status quo — has coincided roughly with the investigative journalism of mainstream outlets he now calls corrupt agents of the status quo. According to The Times of London, the reporting began in 2019, and Brand’s team was made aware of one assault allegation in 2020. In the years since, Brand has been “setting himself up more and more as the lone voice of truth,” Monbiot, Brand’s former progressive ally, told me. “It would definitely align with an attempt then to exonerate himself using the same argument.”Even privately, though, Brand’s orbit seems increasingly paranoid. After the allegations were made public, Brand’s father, Ron, wrote to Monbiot, who previously criticized Brand’s political shifts, to suggest that no one was safe from whatever plot had ensnared his son. “Do you think you could be next?” Ron Brand asked, according to messages Monbiot shared with me. The elder Brand later sent a conspiracy video about the World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum, two favorite targets for Brand and others who use “globalist” unironically. Tucker Carlson, who said that he and Brand have been speaking often, told me the allegations against Brand were “inevitable,” suspicious and cynically engineered to play on the debauched past of a man who is now remarried with children. “We’re leaving the part of history where people try to persuade each other in good faith,” Carlson said. “We’re entering the part where we just throw our opponents in jail or accuse them of crimes.”So far, Brand’s podcast guests have likewise stayed loyal. In an industry rife with voices insisting they are about to be silenced, loudly saying the things they swear you can’t say anymore, Brand represents a rousing spectacle, Staying Free despite the designs of a sinister “they.” “The cancelers of the world seem with each passing week to become more and more crap at their jobs,” the writer Matt Taibbi said on Substack in October, promoting his interview with the “conspicuously still-breathing Russell Brand.” Teasing an interview in November with Alex Jones of Infowars, who has described the assault allegations against Brand as a vast conspiracy, Brand suggested a kinship: “Have you noticed,” he said, raising two fingers for scare quotes, “how many of the wild Alex Jones ‘conspiracy theories’ have come to pass?”More than anything else, Brand is testing a tantalizing kind of liberty before a group that reveres the word. He has hinted about a financial crunch since YouTube began blocking his profits, telling viewers on Rumble that he is “plainly in a position where your direct support is going to be incredibly valuable.” But if Brand’s strategy is successful — if he can subsist without the institutions that long sustained him, the collaborators who abandoned him, the former fans who might wince through his movie scenes now — there is a new kind of power in that freedom, and a new kind of freedom in that power.“We’re planning a movement so that we can form new communities as the apocalypse apparently unfolds before our very eyes,” he told listeners on Oct. 26. “Without you, we are nothing.” The episode turned moments later to another aspiring movement leader: Vivek Ramaswamy, a returning guest and the first presidential candidate to appear with Brand after the allegations. Speaking from Iowa, midcampaign, Ramaswamy called for a “great uprising” against establishment forces. “It’s when they tell you to shut up that you have to actually grow the spine to be more vocal than ever,” Ramaswamy said.“I can see why there would be an appetite to censor you,” Brand replied admiringly. The host thanked his guest for “elevating the caliber of the conversation” in his “stream of freedom.” He previewed future episode subjects: the Covid lab-leak theory, another chat with Jordan Peterson, “the necessity for radicalism in politics.” Then he made a promise.“Next week,” Brand vowed, raising his open hands, “the revolution will grow a little stronger.” More

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      Actors to Start Voting on Contract on Tuesday

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      The SAG-AFTRA board voted on Friday to send the tentative deal with studios to its members for a ratification process that will end in early December.The union that represents movie and television actors said on Friday that its national board had voted with 86 percent support to send a tentative contract with studios to members for ratification.The ratification process will start on Tuesday and end the first week in December. Actors can go back to work immediately, however.Members are expected to approve the contract, which Fran Drescher, the union’s outspoken president, valued at more than $1 billion over three years. She highlighted the “extraordinary scope” of the agreement, noting that it included protections around the use of artificial intelligence, higher minimum pay, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, improved hair and makeup services on sets, and a requirement for intimacy coordinators for sex scenes, among other gains.“They had to yield,” Ms. Drescher said at a news conference during a nearly 30-minute monologue that touched on Veterans Day, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula costume, her parents, the Roman Empire, the stubbornness of studios, Buddhism, Frederick Douglass and her dog.The union, SAG-AFTRA, which represents tens of thousands of actors, and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios, reached the tentative agreement on Wednesday. It followed a bitter standoff that contributed to a near-complete shutdown of production in the entertainment industry. At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history.The tentative deal was also historic, according to the studio alliance, which said it reflected “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.” The actors’ strike, combined with a writers’ strike that started in May and was resolved in September, devastated the entertainment economy. Hundreds of thousands of crew members were idled, with some losing their homes and turning to food banks for groceries. Some small businesses that service studios — costume dry cleaners, prop warehouses, catering companies — may never recover.The dual strikes caused roughly $10 billion in losses nationwide, according to Todd Holmes, an associate professor of entertainment media management at California State University, Northridge. While the big studios are based in Los Angeles, they also use soundstage complexes in Georgia, New York, New Jersey and New Mexico.Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist with the Milken Institute, an economic think tank, was more cautious with his estimate, putting losses at more than $6 billion. He said it “may take a while” to know the true size.On Friday, the SAG-AFTRA board, which includes Sharon Stone, Sean Astin and Rosie O’Donnell, made public a summary of the tentative contract’s contents. While not receiving everything it asked for, the union achieved significant gains.The final sticking point involved “synthetic fakes,” or the use of artificial intelligence to create an entirely fabricated character by melding together recognizable features from real actors. The union won consent and compensation guarantees.“You could imagine prompting a generative A.I. system that’s been trained on a bunch of actors’ performances to create a digital performer, for example, who has Julia Roberts’s smile,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s executive director, said in an interview. “Before this agreement, there wasn’t any contractual or legal basis to require consent or prohibit that. Now there will be.”But this strike was never about stars. A-listers like Jennifer Lawrence and Brad Pitt negotiate their own contracts (or, more precisely, their agents do). The tentative contract covers minimums, or what actors who don’t have any clout get paid.SAG-AFTRA had demanded an 11 percent raise for minimum pay in the first year of a contract. Studios had insisted that they could offer no more than 5 percent, the same as had recently been given (and agreed to) by unions for writers and directors. In the end, the union was able to win a 7 percent first-year raise.“This is really important because it sends a very clear signal to other unions,” Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said. “I’m not aware of anyone ever being able to break the pattern before, because it’s always been that the A.M.P.T.P. establishes a number and everyone gets held to it.”SAG-AFTRA failed in one regard. It had gone into negotiations demanding a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Ms. Drescher had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”Instead, the studio alliance proposed a new residual (a type of royalty) for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take. It is similar to what the Writers Guild of America achieved in its negotiations: Actors in streaming shows that attract at least 20 percent of subscribers will receive a bonus.Unlike the Writers Guild, however, SAG-AFTRA also got the studio alliance to agree to a system in which 25 percent of the bonus money will go into a fund that will be distributed to actors in less successful streaming shows.“I felt like, is this a win or a loss?” Ms. Drescher said. “But we’re getting the money. We opened a new revenue stream. What matters is that we got into another pocket.” More

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      Lara Parker, a Memorable Witch on ‘Dark Shadows,’ Dies at 84

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      Her three-dimensional portrayal of a character who was also a vampire helped the Gothic soap opera develop a cult following.Lara Parker, who found small-screen fame in the 1960s and ’70s as a beguiling and vengeful witch on the popular Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died on Oct. 12 at her home in Topanga, Calif. She was 84.The cause was cancer, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, a friend and fellow “Dark Shadows” actress.“Dark Shadows,” seen daily on ABC from 1966 to 1971, was a departure from standard soap opera fare, blending romantic intrigue with horror and science fiction. The show chronicled a wealthy and eccentric Maine family dealing with the usual soap melodramas — but also time travel, ghosts, werewolves and vampires.With her icy beauty and elegant demeanor, Ms. Parker proved coolly seductive in her primary role among several on the show, Angelique, an 18th-century servant girl and witch who puts a curse on a wealthy shipping scion, Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) after he spurns her for Ms. Scott’s character, Josette, turning him into a vampire and dooming the two to carry on a tempestuous cycle of passion and revenge as they time-hop through history.Despite the pulpy premise, Ms. Parker brought a complexity to her role. “I played her as somebody who was much more of a tragic figure, who was desperately, desperately in love,” she said in a 2016 interview with Den of Geek, a pop culture website.In doing so, Ms. Parker, whose character also dabbled in vampirism, and Mr. Frid helped expand the two-dimensional portrayals of vampires and witches seen in old Hollywood B-movies.“When you’re invited into someone’s living room in a show that is essentially bodice-ripping horror, you have to make yourself palatable to the household, which in those days mostly meant housewives and children,” Ms. Scott said in a phone interview. “Lara and Jonathan did that by bringing a dimension of vulnerability, so you cared about the characters as people, not just evil forces. In that way, ‘Dark Shadows’ was really the granddaddy for all contemporary vampire films.”As the show grew in popularity, Ms. Parker found herself continually recognized by loyal viewers on the streets — although not always in ways she expected. “I used to get on the subway platform when school let out at 3:15 in the afternoon,” Ms. Parker said during a television appearance in the early 1990s, “and instead of the fans coming up and asking for an autograph, they would run.”Ms. Parker brought a complexity to her portrayal of Angelique. She played the character, she said, as someone “who was desperately, desperately in love.”Everett CollectionLara Parker was born Mary Lamar Rickey on Oct. 27, 1938, in Knoxville, Tenn., to Albert and Anne (Heiskell) Rickey. Her lineage included the Confederate general James Longstreet and L.Q.C. Lamar, a Mississippi statesman who achieved a national profile as a congressman, senator and Supreme Court justice after the Civil War.Ms. Parker, who went by the name Lamar, grew up in Memphis, where she attended Central High School, and eventually earned a scholarship to Vassar College, where she studied philosophy, before transferring to Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in Memphis.She later studied speech and drama in a master’s program at the University of Iowa and had several lead roles at a repertory theater in Pennsylvania before moving to New York City. Within two weeks, she was in the cast of “Dark Shadows.”After the show went off the air, Ms. Parker moved to Los Angeles, where she turned her attention to prime-time television, appearing on “Hawaii 5-0,” “Kung Fu,” “Baretta,” “The Incredible Hulk” and other shows, as well as several television movies. She also had a powerful, if brief, role as a prostitute who tries to revive a client after he has a heart attack in the 1973 feature film “Save the Tiger,” for which Jack Lemmon won the Academy Award for best actor.Still, Ms. Parker’s relationship with the show that made her famous was far from over: “Dark Shadows” become an enduring cult favorite to new generations of horror fans, and Ms. Parker fed their obsession after turning her attention to writing. In 1998, she published “Dark Shadows: Angelique’s Descent,” the first of her four novels inspired by the show, which chronicled the early life of her character.She also helped revive the show on the big screen, appearing, along with her former co-stars Ms. Scott, Mr. Frid and David Selby, in a cameo role in the 2012 feature-film version of “Dark Shadows,” directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas, with Eva Green as Angelique.Ms. Parker’s survivors include her husband, Jim Hawkins; two sons, Rick and Andy Parker; a daughter, Caitlin Hawkins; and a grandson.In the years following her breakout role, Ms. Parker discussed the significance of the show, which in her view helped modernize — and sexualize — the vampire figure in the years before “Twilight.” To her, this seemed only natural.“The bite itself is like the act of sex,” she once said. “There is penetration, and there is pleasure and there is abandonment.”“The story of the vampire goes back to before the Egyptians, before the Greeks, and exists in every single culture,” she added. “Why is it so widespread? Not because it’s true, but because it contains the truth of our fears and our desires.” More

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      Marina Cicogna, Italy’s First Major Female Film Producer, Dies at 89

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      A countess from an influential Italian family, she charted her own course and produced films by the likes of Pasolini and Zeffirelli.Marina Cicogna, an Italian countess who became her country’s first major female film producer, guiding to the screen celebrated films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Zeffirelli and Elio Petri, died on Nov. 4 at her home in Rome. She was 89.Her death was announced by La Biennale di Venezia, the organizer of the Venice Film Festival. No cause was given.Rising to prominence in an era when the only female names on film posters were often those of actresses, Ms. Cicogna (pronounced chi-CONE-ya) became one of the most powerful women in European cinema, as both a producer and a distributor.She started from a lofty perch. Her maternal grandfather, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, was an industrialist and statesman who served various government roles, including as Italy’s minister of finance under Mussolini. He also founded the Venice Film Festival. In the mid-1960s, when Ms. Cicogna was in her early 30s, she and her brother Bino took control of her family’s production and distribution company, Euro International Films.Even so, she faced challenges: working with imperious male auteurs; earning the respect of the country’s left-leaning cultural leaders despite her titled upbringing; and openly dating women as well as men at a time when such topics were rarely discussed in public by figures of authority.Ms. Cicogna in 2009. She brought prominent films to the screen, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Medea” and “Teorema,” as well as Elio Petri’s “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” which won the 1971 Academy Award for best foreign-language film.Nick Harvey/WireImage, via Getty ImagesNor was her path as a woman always easy. “At the time I didn’t think about it,” she said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter Roma this year. “But at the end of the day, yes, the intention to put you down was there, definitely.”Among the prominent films she produced or distributed were “Medea” (1969), Pasolini’s hypnotic reimagining of the Euripides tragedy, starring the opera singer Maria Callas; “Teorema” (1968), also directed by Pasolini, in which Terence Stamp plays an enigmatic stranger who seduces, one by one, members of a wealthy family in Milan; “Brother Sun Sister Moon” (1972), Zeffirelli’s lush retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi; and “Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion,” Petri’s Kafkaesque thriller, which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1971.Ms. Cicogna also had three films at the 1967 Venice Film Festival, including Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour,” starring Catherine Deneuve as a Paris housewife who secretly works at a bordello, which won the festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion. In addition, she put her stamp on the proceedings by throwing a lavish party that became festival lore.“I didn’t give a big ball, but rather said that everyone could dress as they wanted, as long as they were in white and yellow or white and gold,” Ms. Cicogna said in a 2013 interview with T, The New York Times’s style magazine. “I sent two small Learjets, one to Corsica to pick up Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and the other to Rome to pick up Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim.”Such obvious displays of wealth would go out of fashion following the leftist student uprisings in Europe in 1968. “You couldn’t have a big party without hurting people’s feelings,” she continued. “You couldn’t go around with a Rolls-Royce without being thrown eggs at.”Ms. Cicogna, center, with the actresses Gina Lollobrigida, left, and Jane Fonda at the lavish party the countess threw for the 1967 Venice Film Festival. The party became festival lore.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesCountess Marina Cicogna Mozzoni Volpi di Misurata was born on May 29, 1934, in Rome, the daughter of Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni, a banker, and Countess Annamaria Volpi di Misurata, who purchased Euro International Films, ultimately handing control over to her children.Growing up, Ms. Cicogna was a cinema lover who mingled among the children of David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind,” and other film heavyweights at the Venice festival.After an education in Italy, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she roomed with Barbara Warner, whose father was the Hollywood film mogul Jack Warner. During a school break, Ms. Warner invited her to California.“I never went back,” Ms. Cicogna told T. “I stayed for three months in California at the Warners’.”She later studied photography in the United States, brokering her platinum connections to shoot luminaries like Ezra Pound and Marilyn Monroe in candid moments.Her early forays into the film business included distributing a 1967 West German film, “Helga.” “It was the first time you saw a birth, a woman producing a child, on film,” she told T. “I decided we should publicize it. We put ambulances at the exit of the film, saying that people would faint when they saw that.”Ms. Cicogna in 1967 with the director Luis Buñuel, whose “Belle de Jour” won the Venice festival’s highest prize, the Golden Lion.Giorgio Lotti/Mondadori Portfolio, via Everett CollectionShe was at times linked romantically with the likes of Warren Beatty and Alain Delon, but she also spent decades in a relationship with Florinda Bolkan, a Brazilian model and actress.After they split, she began a long relationship with Benedetta Gardona, a woman more than two decades her junior, whom Ms. Cicogna legally adopted for financial reasons. Ms. Gardona remained her companion until Ms. Cicogna’s death. (Complete information on survivors was not immediately available).Ms. Cicogna looked back on her career highlights of the 1960s and ’70s in the 2021 documentary “Marina Cicogna: La Vita e Tutto il Resto” (“Life and Everything Else”), directed by Andrea Bettinetti, as well as her autobiography, “Ancora Spero: Una Storia di Vita e di Cinema” (“I Still Hope: A Story of Life and Cinema”), published this year.Still, in a 2017 video interview, she expressed regret that she had not remained in the film business. “If I had to look back, I should have never stopped producing, although Italian cinematography has not been the same since. It’s not so great,” she said, adding: “I am also a person who is very torn between the European rather lazy aesthetic way of life and the American more creative, more active way of life.”“I’ve been more European than active,” she said. “I haven’t done as much as I should have done. But I can’t say I’m sorry. That’s the way it was, and that’s it.” More

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      ‘The Taste of Things’ and the Transcendence of a French Meal

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      “The Taste of Things” is the latest movie to luxuriate in France’s gourmand tradition, a safe way of attracting audiences outside the country.In France, a robust appetite is a virtue if not a heroic trait.Eating gratifies all the senses: We take in the aroma of a handsome dish, delight at the sound of a sizzling steak or crave the crunch of a crusty baguette. So to fully appreciate the various sensory dimensions of a fine French meal is, essentially, to express a sophisticated artistic judgment.“The Taste of Things,” by the director Tran Anh Hung, is a 19th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. The feature opened in theaters Wednesday in France and will play on screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 10 before its Oscar-qualifying run in mid-December.The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.“The Taste of Things” is an 18th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. via Carole Bethuel/IFC FIlmsWhen I first watched “The Taste of Things” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surrounded by a delightfully vocal audience. The oohing and ahhing was ubiquitous and, apparently, a visceral response, similar to what is elicited by beholding Monet’s water lilies or being wrapped in the velvety textures of Whitney Houston’s voice. Savoring a tasty meal (or even just watching one come together on a big screen) brings a kind of joy that can’t be explained by logic or reason.Reviews of the film in France have been mixed. Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre found its blissful atmosphere and near-absence of dramatic tension perplexing and boring. Olivier Lamm of Libération wrote that there’s much more to the film than its food-porn attractions — it’s also about the assault of junk food and globalization on French standards.“Chocolat,” starring Juliette Binoche, also celebrated the French devotion to the culinary arts and made a lot of money at the U.S. box office.AlamyThe country’s rich gastronomic tradition — and its long history of federally regulating the quality and authenticity of its wines and produce — is a particular point of national pride, and French film industry leaders have embraced the gourmand label. This year, “The Taste of Things” was selected as the French submission for the Oscar’s best international film category over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”The decision was met with objections from French critics, who said Triet was punished for the political charge of her acceptance speech at Cannes. However, the selection of Hung’s film isn’t all that surprising given the selection committee’s evident partiality to films commenting on the country’s national identity — or, from a more cynical standpoint, films that offer Oscar voters a tourist-friendly idea of France.The French devotion to the culinary arts is a bit of an onscreen cliché, and Hollywood films like “Ratatouille” and “Chocolat” (the latter, also starring Binoche, made big money in the United States, but fared far less well in France) have relied on stereotypically French settings, like a rustic village and a Parisian bistro, to communicate lessons about food’s revolutionary and unifying powers.More rewarding — and complex — is the 1956 French classic “La Traversée de Paris,” starring the Frenchest of all Frenchmen, Jean Gabin, as an artist-turned-black market courier in Nazi-occupied Paris. This black dramedy stars Gabin and the comedian Bourvil, who play a bickering duo who must transport four suitcases of contraband pork across the city while evading the authorities and a horde of hungry hounds.Political instability not only cuts off access to revered foodstuffs, it drains the very spirit of those committed to the art of eating. In the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French chef, is forced to flee from her Parisian neighborhood when the Paris Commune, an insurrectionist government, seizes power in 1871.Seeking refuge in the Danish countryside, Babette moves into a spartan Protestant household manned by two Protestant sisters accustomed to eating the same brown fish stew, which has a mudlike consistency. Fourteen years into her employment with the sisters, Babette miraculously wins the French lottery and, rather than fund her return to France, spends all her winnings on a multicourse dinner for the townspeople.Stéphane Audran as Babette in “Babette’s Feast.”Entertainment Pictures, via AlamyThe feast — a turtle soup, stuffed quail, rum sponge cake and more — breaks the guests’ brains, while Babette, in the final scene, emerges as an emissary of the sublime. Her culinary gifts, her cooking’s ability to disrupt the very foundations of what her Danish friends perceived to be reality, make her angelic.At the same time, isn’t fine dining — like certain kinds of music, literature and art — rather bourgeois? Nothing screams upper middle class like the prim and proper dinner scene. This is delightful in films by, say, Éric Rohmer, who was fond of depicting the natural choreography of mealtime, the mess of wine glasses and plates of fruit and cheese floating between guests in the middle of a meandering conversation.In other films, dinnertime can seem ridiculous. Consider Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which three couples try over and over to enjoy a white tablecloth feast, but do not actually eat. Over the course of the film, their polite mannerisms and refined gestures become increasingly absurd.Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe” plays like a glutton’s version of “Salo,” linking the pleasure of eating to consumerist society and the gross hedonism of the leisure class. In the film, four friends literally feed themselves to death, feasting on an endless parade of shrimp, turkey, pot roast and sausage while reading excerpts from canonical works of literature and, notably, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomical bible, “The Physiology of Taste.”Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi and Andréa Ferréol in “La Grande Bouffe,” which links the pleasure of eating to consumerist society.Alamy“La Grande Bouffe” is a nauseating showcase and a welcome retort to the glorification of tunnel-vision foodies like Brillat-Savarin. Ferreri was also a gourmand, and he reportedly had difficulties keeping himself from binge eating. His film points a finger at himself as well as society at large.“The Taste of Things” is an adaptation of the 1961 novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, which was itself inspired by none other than Brillat-Savarin. “The Physiology of Taste” is supposed to be about the science of eating, but it often veers off into discussions about sex, love and sensuality.Brillat-Savarin’s passion for food is not unlike the passion he might develop for another person, a dynamic that Hung’s film depicts with a hypnotic warmth. When I see Binoche’s Eugénie, laboring away on a buttery risotto or a vegetable omelet, I’m overcome by the sense memory of something deliciously intimate, like being held tight or a loved one’s scent. In that moment, nothing else seems to matter. More

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      ‘This Much We Know’ Review: Asking Why After a Friend’s Death

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      L. Frances Henderson’s intricate debut documentary investigates a suicide, raising plenty of questions, including one about its own ethics.Our yearning for answers and the limits of knowing are at the heart of the intricately crafted, unsettling documentary “This Much We Know.” The director L. Frances Henderson based this very personal debut on John D’Agata’s lauded book “About a Mountain,” which deftly yoked the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas to the Department of Energy’s since-scuttled plans to use Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of that city, as a repository for nuclear waste.Henderson says in her poetic and philosophical narration that she discovered the book while searching for answers to a friend’s suicide. It drew her to Las Vegas, where in 2002 16-year-old Levi Presley leaped to his death from a tower. That same year, Congress was pushing forward plans to bury waste beneath Yucca Mountain. Like many of the words, data sets and facts here, Presley’s final act gets probed.Certainty and doubt are juxtaposed repeatedly. In one scene, Vegas’s longtime coroner upends Henderson’s somewhat hopeful theory of an accidental suicide. In another, a confident engineer of the Yucca project is rattled by a quote Henderson reads to him stating that scientific truths can change.“This Much We Know” opens with a frenetic re-enactment of Presley’s final hours leading up to when a security guard approaches him. This kind of flashy filmmaking sets an ethically disquieting tone the film never completely shakes, even after Henderson gently interviews Presley’s parents and his friends. As eloquent as it is, “This Much We Know” may also be exploitative.This Much We KnowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States. More