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      ‘Aloners’ Review: Plugged In but Shut Off

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      The director Hong Sung-eun’s debut feature is a quietly tragic tale of alienation and the ennui of modern life.Jina (Gong Seung-yeon), the reclusive figure at the center of “Aloners,” is lonely but never alone. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. She isolates herself at every point of her day — when she eats, when she works, when she smokes — turning to screens for companionship. She is always on her phone, scrolling even while talking to customers at the call center where she works. At night, she falls asleep with the TV on.Yet it’s clear in the director Hong Sung-eun’s quietly tragic tale of alienation, Jina is really just numb. Her mother has recently died, and she is estranged from her father. But at the call center, an eager new hire (Jung Da-eun) begins to push up against Jina’s walled-off existence.Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back. Life is not so simple, and healing is hard. As much as “Aloners” is about grief, it’s also a portrait of the ennui of modern life, how easily people can shut themselves off and fall into the void — and how mundane that withering away looks. Yet you can spot, in the superb, subtle performances from Gong and Jung, the pain and desperation under the surface. The only way out is if Jina might see the same in someone else and reach out.AlonersNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Flamin’ Hot’ Review: Neon Dust, Hollywood Corn

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      The actor Eva Longoria’s feature directing debut is a fictionalized account of the birth of a spicy, profitable snack.“Do I have initiative?” Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) asks his wife, Judy (Annie Gonzalez), in the dramatic comedy “Flamin’ Hot,” directed with affectionate brio by the actor Eva Longoria. Montañez, on whose memoir this fictionalized story is based, is eyeing an application for a job at the Frito-Lay facility in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. While he’s stumped about that word — “initiative” — soon enough he’ll embody it, as he goes from being a janitor to becoming a family man behind a Cheetos flavor that extended the snack maker’s reach, launching Montañez’s marketing career.Garcia and Gonzalez possess poignant chemistry as the economically struggling couple. They first meet as children. He, a child of farm workers, is being bullied in the lunchroom and at home; she has a bruise that suggests they might have more in common than simply being the brown kids at a predominately white elementary school. Montañez’s youth is recounted in a sometimes boastful, sometimes self-deprecating, always upbeat voice-over that softens the edges of his childhood, which include routine bigotry and outright racism, but also brutality and judgment from his father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera).Montañez came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the pride and resistance of the Chicano Movement, while adjacent, were not central to his upbringing. Instead, as he tells us in an account that swings from the present to the past, from the biographical to the fantastical, he found friends in a gang. It wasn’t until Judy got pregnant that the pair agreed that things had to change.From the moment he enters the Frito-Lay facility, Montañez is a dogged learner, asking questions about chemical processes, wondering about an extruder, even celebrating an industrial power washer. His curiosity aggravates his supervisor (Matt Walsh), worries the friend who helped him get the gig (Bobby Soto) and breaks down the defenses of an engineer (Dennis Haysbert) who knows the facility inside out, and who becomes Montañez’s initially suspicious mentor.The titular flavor, it seems, didn’t happen overnight. Montañez’s stint begins in the mid-70s and takes off in the early ’90s, when the facility faces hard times. An executive, Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), coaches the beleaguered work force to “think like a CEO.” And the ensuing scenes — of Rich landing his hot idea, inspired by the Mexican street corn elote — charm as intended. “It burns good,” the wee-est of the Montañezes (Brice Gonzalez) proclaims as the family samples seasonings.Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real? If you read too deeply about the ingredients that went into “Flamin’ Hot,” you might find enough confusion over whether Montañez actually invented the flavor (as claimed) to make your conscience mildly cramp.Flamin’ HotRated PG-13 for some strong language, and drug talk. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+ and Hulu. More

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      How ‘The Blackening’ Turns Horror Film Stereotypes Upside Down

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      This comedy turns horror film stereotypes upside down. A look behind the scenes.What began as a smirking punchline traded in the clandestine realms of kitchens and living rooms has long since penetrated the mainstream. Now everyone knows: In the American horror film, you can expect the Black character to die first.That joke forms the foundation of the new horror comedy “The Blackening” (in theaters June 16), which arrives with the tagline, “We can’t all die first.” A Juneteenth weekend away in a remote, cavernous cabin turns deadly for a group of friends when they discover a board game in the basement. A Sambo figurehead occupies the center of the board and tests them on various touchstones of Black culture: What is the second verse of the Black national anthem? How many Black actors have guest starred on the television show “Friends”? A masked figure emerges from the shadows to exact the lethal consequences for wrong answers.“The Blackening” is based on a Comedy Central sketch of the same name originally developed by the comedian Dewayne Perkins, who co-stars in the film and wrote the script with Tracy Oliver (a writer of “Girls Trip”). In a video interview, Perkins said the concept came about during his time on the Chicago comedy circuit.“All of the Black people that have been in sketch were like, ‘Oh yeah, we always feel like individually we’re the most expendable within a lot of the institutions that we’re a part of,’” he said. “So that was kind of the impetus. If we put all the Black people together in horror movies, then they’d have to have a system as to who’s going to die first.”Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharaoh in the film.Glen Wilson/LionsgateIn the short, a group of Black friends confronted by a killer must decide who is “the Blackest” — and therefore liable to be killed first. Of course, the comedy lies in what naturally ensues: Everyone gathered tries to prove they are the least Black. One character retches through repeated attempts at insisting that “All lives matter,” the invalidating response to Black Lives Matter. After seeing the sketch, Oliver tracked down Perkins to adapt the piece into a feature. (“The Blackening” recreates the short in one of its funniest scenes.) Initially attached as a producer, Tim Story, best known for “Barbershop” (2002), fell in love with the script and additionally opted to direct. “It’s something that I really wanted to get to the screen,” Story said.The comedian and actress Yvonne Orji, who plays Morgan, was also drawn to the subversive script. “We’re turning the stereotype on its head and I love whenever stereotypes are tipped over,” she said.Foregrounding Black characters in the horror genre upends a fraught legacy that has often deployed them as comic relief or unceremoniously dispensed with them; Perkins explained that it was a purposeful decision to play with these archetypes so that the film is in constant conversation with this history. “My character is a Gay Best Friend, which is a trope. All of these characters, at the beginning, their origin is a trope,” he said. “Then we use the movie to constantly feed that character. And allowing the trope to become a fully realized character was the goal.”Although “The Blackening” functions principally as a comedy, the film also delivers dynamic moments of suspense and chilling scares, a result of Perkins and Oliver’s enduring admiration of horror cinema. “That was my favorite genre coming up,” Perkins said. ”I think that’s why the movie is so embedded with references.”The film’s director, Tim Story, right, on set with Byers, second from right, and other crew. “It’s something that I really wanted to get to the screen,” Story said of falling in love with the script.Glen Wilson/LionsgateAnd there are references aplenty. An incomplete list includes “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974), “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977), “Friday the 13th” (1980), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “A Nightmare On Elm Street” (1984), “The People Under the Stairs” (1991), “Jumanji” (1995), “Scream” (1996), and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (1997). “The Blackening” revved up audiences last fall when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. And ahead of its release, it will screen as part of the Tribeca Festival, including a screening on June 13 at the Apollo Theater.Story brought his experience directing comedies to the funnier elements of the film, but he saw a challenge in tackling its scarier moments. “The cool thing about just being a movie lover is you actually end up studying all types of these genres,” he said. “I always wanted to mess with horror, but I had to find something that was still in my world.”The film’s title recalls an idea mentioned in a recently published book, “The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar,” by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The authors describe the increase in Black cinema representation of the late 1960s — or the “Blackening.” Both writers are particularly united in their love of George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” (1968), in which the Black guy famously dies last, if doubly tragically: He manages to survive a zombie apocalypse only to be killed by a vigilante mob. Harris credited the film with inspiring what he called in an interview his “love for horror.” Coleman and Harris chronicle these cycles of diversity — which inevitably meet an abrupt end — in their book, from the Blaxploitation era to the urban horror of the ’90s and now this latest, respectable generation of transparently politicized horror.Robertson and Walls in a scene from the film.Glen Wilson/LionsgateAlthough she accounted for the rise and fall of these past movements, Coleman said, “We’re moving away from what I conceptualize as Blacks in Horror to Black Horror, which really is a reflection of Black life and culture, experience.” Coleman, a scholar who also wrote “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films From the 1890s to Present,” praised the innovation in recent horror films, citing Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” (2021). “There’s art, there’s music, the vernacular, all of that is there.”In a testament to the sudden streamlining of the genre, at least two of the actors in “The Blackening” can already count prominent features from this wave of social-justice horror among their work. Sinqua Walls, who plays Nnamdi, recently appeared in the Sundance Grand Jury prizewinning film “The Nanny” (2022), and the “Saturday Night Live” veteran Jay Pharoah, who plays Morgan’s boyfriend, Shawn, was in the horror-comedy “Bad Hair” (2020). Pharoah said that he was happy to be in these genre films because of their distinct popularity.“It’s going to be some niche of people or this cult fan base that you have no idea about, that has watched your stuff over and over again,” he said. “They can quote everything and they know how you die. It’s just a cool thing to be a part of.”For Story, filming “The Blackening” was joyous.“What was great about making this movie,” he said, “it was dipped in celebration. I mean, that’s what’s so much fun about it. We are giving the foundation for a lot of great conversations. We want it to represent us and the many facets of us; and also invite others to make their version.” More

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      ‘Dalíland’ Review: Ben Kingsley as Salvador Dalí, Man and Myth

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      Ben Kingsley plays Salvador Dalí, the man and the mustachioed myth, as he contends with his demanding wife and the far more voracious art world.One of the best things about “Dalíland,” Mary Harron’s amused and amusing fictional look at the singular Salvador Dalí, is that it isn’t a cradle-to-grave exhumation. Instead, the movie focuses on a period in Dalí’s later years when he was widely, wrongly and seemingly permanently eclipsed both by the commercial profile of his art and by the flamboyant scandal he had made of his life. Harron’s result is less a consummate portrait and more a distillation of a sensibility, as if she had dropped Dalí in an alcohol still to extract his very essence.The man, the myth and the mustache are all here, albeit modestly. Harron’s path into Dalí’s world is through an invented character, James (the newcomer Christopher Briney), who’s recently landed a job at the artist’s New York gallery. An anodyne pretty boy, James serves as a proxy for the viewer, a wide-eyed tourist in a seductively foreign land. He enters partly by chance, although his looks and good timing help: Dalí (Ben Kingsley), who’s struggling to produce sufficient new work for an upcoming show, recruits James as an assistant, ushering him into the frantic, at times funny and often bleak bacchanalia of the movie’s title.Much of the story takes place in 1974, starting with one of Dalí’s customary winter sojourns at the St. Regis Hotel in New York. There, in a spacious suite wreathed in cigarette smoke and throbbing with rock music, he and his formidable, sometimes terrifying wife, Gala (Barbara Sukowa), preside over a glittery circus that’s populated by beautiful people and supplicating waiters, and watched over by Dalí ’s longtime aide, Captain Moore (Rupert Graves). Amid the ostrich boas, flowing Champagne and lines of coke, the slack-jawed James meets hangers-on like Alice Cooper (Mark McKenna) as well as the artist’s muse Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic), and one exceedingly dull love interest, Ginesta (Suki Waterhouse).James isn’t all that interesting, either, and there’s too much of him in the movie. This isn’t Briney’s fault; he’s pleasant to look at, and he manages his transition from tourist to accidental Dalí-wood guide well enough. It’s just that once Dalí and Gala swan in, they immediately and rightly become the only characters you want to spend time with. They’re entertaining, for one, having long settled into roles that feed their public profiles and public relations: She’s the money-grubbing dominatrix while he alternately cowers, begs for her attention and upstages her. The relationship provides tension and mystery that the well-matched Kingsley and Sukowa complicate with gargoyle masks and shocks of vulnerability.The story — the screenplay is by John C. Walsh — follows James as he tumbles further and further down the curious Dalí-Gala rabbit hole. It’s a predictable scene on one level, filled with writhing bodies, orgiastic evenings, pathological marital warfare and a great deal of tawdry art-world shenanigans. Considerably less obvious is Dalí and Gala’s confounding union, which began in the 1920s. Harron fills in some of the couple’s fascinating story largely through a few inventively staged flashbacks in which the old Dalí and James share the screen with the young Dalí (Ezra Miller, vivid and otherworldly in a small role) and Gala (Avital Lvova).I wish “Dalíland” incorporated more of the young Dalí and Gala, partly because the images of the older Dalí physically transported into his memories are both visually striking and quietly touching. They also illustrate the centrality of time in Dalí’s work, a theme encapsulated in his most popular painting, “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), of a clock melting like warm Camembert on a long-lashed human face. The flashbacks help establish the emotional and psychological foundation for the couple’s relationship, one that’s encapsulated by the sight of the young Dalí, having apparently just completed that early masterpiece, weepily burying his head in Gala’s lap like a child. (The movie doesn’t include any of Dalí’s actual artworks.)Dalí and Gala’s relationship mystified many people over many well-publicized tumultuous decades. The filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Dalí’s old schoolmate and collaborator on the Surrealist classics “Un Chien Andalou” and “L’Age D’or,” pointedly blamed Gala in his memoir “My Last Sigh” for the men’s estrangement, calling her “a woman I have always tried to avoid.” Buñuel’s violent animus toward Gala (he wrote that he once physically attacked her) is startling, and it’s hard to know how much of his loathing was inflamed by old-fashioned sexism. While “Dalíland” occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.“We need money,” the older Gala blurts out to the abashed Dalí during one bellicose confrontation over his lack of productivity, “money, money!” It’s a comic-pathetic scene, and while it would be easy to turn Gala into the villain of this story, Harron never does. Gala may be outrageous and at times deeply unkind, but Dalí married her, stayed with her, painted her. And she isn’t wrong: With their expensive habits and tastes, she and Dalí do need money to pay their bills, but also — as this movie repeatedly reminds you — “money, money, money” is what the far crueler, far greedier and far more destructive art world demands.DalílandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Universal Says On-Demand Film Strategy Has Increased Audience

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      The studio let viewers rent or buy movies earlier for a higher price. This made more than $1 billion in less than three years, with nearly no decrease in box-office sales.In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Universal Pictures and its art-house sibling, Focus Features, set off alarm bells in Hollywood by ending the long-held practice of giving theaters an exclusive window of about 90 days to play new movies. Instead, their movies, which have since included “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “Belfast,” “Cocaine Bear” and “M3gan,” would become available for digital rental or purchase — at a higher price — after as little as 17 days.For a change-phobic industry that still views the 1981 arrival of armrest cup holders as a major innovation, the introduction of the service, known as premium video on demand, prompted extensive hand-wringing. Filmmakers and theater owners worried that ticket buyers would be more reluctant to leave their sofas if they could see the same films on their TV sets or iPads just a couple of weeks later.Universal’s competitors mostly stuck with the status quo.But the willingness by Universal to experiment — to challenge the “this is how we’ve always done it” thinking — seems to have paid off. Universal has generated more than $1 billion in premium V.O.D. revenue in less than three years, while showing little-to-no decrease in ticket sales. In some cases, box-office sales even increased when films became available in homes, which Universal has decided is a side effect of premium V.O.D. advertising and word of mouth.Universal, for instance, made “Minions: The Rise of Gru” available for premium V.O.D. after 33 days in theaters in 2022. The movie stayed in theaters after that, selling more tickets than “Minions,” released in 2015, did after 33 days, according to data from Comscore, an analytics company. Data for Universal’s “Jurassic World” and “Fast and Furious” franchises show a similar effect.An interesting wrinkle: Donna Langley, the chairwoman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, which includes Focus Features, said the company had seen only a small decrease in revenue from traditional V.O.D. That service lets viewers rent or purchase movies at a lower price after 90 days in theaters. She said the premium offering was “an additive, important new revenue source that didn’t exist three years ago.”In other words, Universal thinks that, to some degree, it has found an entirely new customer.“It has had a hugely positive impact on our business,” Ms. Langley said, adding that without it, Universal would have likely had to make fewer movies. Universal and Focus will release 26 movies in theaters this year, more than any other Hollywood studio.Donna Langley, the chairwoman of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, calls premium on-demand “an additive, important new revenue source.”Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUniversal charges as much as $25 to rent a film for 48 hours and $30 to buy it during its premium V.O.D. sales period. Those prices can drop to $6 and $20 in the later, traditional sales window.About 80 percent of premium V.O.D. revenue goes to Universal, with sales platforms like iTunes and Google Play keeping most of the rest. (A small cut goes to theater chains like AMC Entertainment — grease to get them to agree to reduced exclusivity.) Ticket sales are typically split 50-50 with theaters.Premium V.O.D. revenue is small compared with box-office sales. But it’s certainly not nothing.“The Super Mario Bros. Movie” has generated more than $75 million in premium V.O.D. revenue since May 16, Universal said. “Jurassic World: Dominion,” “The Croods: A New Age” and “Sing 2” each collected more than $50 million. Universal said 14 films, including “News of the World,” a period drama starring Tom Hanks, and “M3gan,” each had more than $25 million.Films from Focus, including “Belfast” and “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” have generated roughly $5 million each. For some art films, a theatrical release has become valuable mostly as “a marketing tool” for premium V.O.D. rentals and purchases, according to Julia Alexander, the director of strategy at Parrot Analytics, a research firm.Much like DVD sales in the 1990s and 2000s, premium V.O.D. has started to provide a type of financial safety net on box-office misses. “The Focus titles, in particular,” said Peter Levinsohn, the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group’s chief distribution officer. “Those smaller films aimed at older moviegoers have become, I wouldn’t say reliant on it, but they have benefited hugely.”It’s also about flexibility, Mr. Levinsohn said. The studio often decides that 17 days (three weekends) of theatrical exclusivity is enough. Sometimes, based on ticket sales, it allows for longer. “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” played exclusively in theaters for 41 days.“We have also taken back control of the decision of when to make our content available in the home, based on the most optimal timing for an individual film,” Mr. Levinsohn said. NBCUniversal said in January that revenue from its studios (both film and TV) increased 23 percent in 2022 from a year earlier, to $11.6 billion.Every studio has been trying to find creative ways to maximize movie profits in a fast-changing business. Part of Universal’s challenge is guessing what kind of impact premium V.O.D. might have on streaming: If movies are sold or rented more widely before they arrive on a streaming service (in Universal’s case, on Peacock and Netflix), does that make the movies less valuable tools for encouraging people to sign up for streaming services?“The impact on streaming is not quite as big as people might have expected, but it’s still notable,” Ms. Alexander said. More

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      Pat Cooper, Comedian of Outrage, Is Dead at 93

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      He built his act on making fun of his Italian American heritage. He later publicly insulted stars he had worked with, including Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern.Pat Cooper, the stand-up comic who made outrage his act, progressing from mocking Italian American families like his own to publicly insulting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Howard Stern, died on Tuesday night at his home in Las Vegas. He was 93.The death was announced in a statement by his wife, Emily Conner.For more than 50 years, Mr. Cooper, clad in a tuxedo and Clark Kent spectacles, ranted comedically about his background, his family, the people who he felt had wronged him and just about anything else that bothered him.He developed the act, laced with sound effects, in small clubs in Baltimore and New York in the 1950s, and it proved a novelty at the time, when there were far more Jewish than Italian American comedians making jokes about their families and their culture.He broke through with an appearance on “The Jackie Gleason Show” in 1963, then became a regular opening act for entertainers like Sinatra, Bobby Darin, Tony Bennett, Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr. at clubs and casinos, including the Copacabana in Manhattan and the Sands in Las Vegas. He appeared on television shows hosted by Merv Griffin, Dean Martin and Mike Douglas, and released several albums, most memorably “Spaghetti Sauce and Other Delights” (1966).The title of that album was a parody of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights” (1965), whose cover depicted a woman apparently clothed only in whipped cream. Mr. Cooper’s cover depicted him slathered in marinara sauce, apparently naked but for a mound of spaghetti.“I got a genuine Italian mother — four feet eleven,” Mr. Cooper said during a typical routine, included on his album “Our Hero” (1965). “She has a bun over here, knitting needle over here, gold tooth over here, mole over here.”“She says, ‘Put garlic around your neck, it keeps away the evil spirits,’” he continued. “I ain’t got no friends, what spirits?”Mr. Cooper’s 1966 album cover was a spoof of one put out by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass the year before.J.P. Roth CollectionAudiences laughed at the Italian stereotypes, but an Italian American anti-defamation group did not get the joke and threatened to sue him. (No suit was ever filed.)Mr. Cooper’s act had dire consequences in his personal life. He became estranged from his parents and siblings, then from his first wife, Dolores Nola, and his children. He said they could not stand his success.“The only way I can beat them, I made fun of them,” Mr. Cooper said in an interview for this obituary in 2014.Later in his career he let the world know when he thought that stars had wronged him. In “How Dare You Say How Dare Me!” (2011), a memoir he wrote with Rich Herschlag and Steve Garrin, he accused Paul Anka of never saying hello when they did more than 50 shows together and then firing him for bringing it up. He claimed that an inebriated Johnny Carson once urinated on his foot in a men’s room, and that after loudly objecting with an expletive, he was not invited back on Carson’s “Tonight Show.”Another time, opening onstage for Sinatra, Sinatra asked him to remove a joke from his set. As Mr. Cooper told The Daily News of New York in 1997, he replied, “Hey, Frank, do I tell you what songs to sing?” Sinatra fired him.During an interview with the talk show host Tom Snyder on NBC in 1981, Mr. Cooper castigated Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett and Lola Falana, saying they did not treat their opening acts respectfully. When Mr. Snyder asked whether Mr. Cooper might be jealous, he denied it. “I want to stop the nonsense of some of the stars in my business who think they own a Pat Cooper,” he said.“We’re comics,” he added. “We’re not dogs.”His agent called him afterward and told him that he was finished in show business. But Mr. Cooper disagreed, and the episode actually raised his profile.“Everybody thought I lost my career — I raised my price!” he said in the 2014 interview. “In those days that was a terrible thing to say, what I did. Now it’s a reality show!”Howard Stern, drawn to Mr. Cooper’s vitriol, invited him on his radio show in the mid-1980s. But perhaps predictably they had a falling-out. Mr. Stern put Mr. Cooper’s estranged son, Michael, and his former wife on the air, and Mr. Cooper refused to interact with them. Then Mr. Cooper began berating Mr. Stern. Mr. Stern stopped having him on the show.Mr. Cooper continued performing at clubs and casinos and at Friars Club roasts until he retired in 2012. And he continued to insist that the industry had treated him poorly. “They don’t want me because I say what’s on my mind,” he said, “and they punish it.”Mr. Cooper in Las Vegas, where he made his home, in 2005 at a screening of “The Aristocrats,” a popular documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke. He also appeared with Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” and its sequel, “Analyze That.” Bryan Haraway/Getty ImagesPasquale Vito Caputo was born on July 31, 1929, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and raised in the Midwood and Red Hook sections of the borough. His father, Michele, was a bricklayer, and his mother, Louise (Gargiulo) Caputo, was a homemaker. He did not have a happy childhood.“I think I broke a record in my neighborhood — I think I must have run away 14 times,” he said. “People don’t run away from good homes.”He tried to escape, seeking to join the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy, but he was rejected from each branch because of “hammerhead toes,” he wrote in his memoir. He was drafted into the Army in 1952 and stationed at Fort Jackson, S.C., but he was soon discharged, because of his disruptive behavior, according to Mr. Cooper.He then returned to New York, where he married Ms. Nola and had two children with her. He also began developing his act while supporting himself by driving a cab. “I was a stand-up comic who happened to be sitting down at the time,” he said.Mr. Cooper Americanized his name while performing in the Catskills in the early 1960s, a decision that further infuriated his family. The Oxford English Dictionary says that he coined the term “Bada-bing,” heard during a routine titled “An Italian Wedding” on the “Our Hero” album. (Mr. Cooper himself did not claim authorship.)He went on to appear alongside Robert De Niro as a mobster in the hit comedy “Analyze This” (1999) and its sequel, “Analyze That” (2002), which also starred Billy Crystal; and alongside many other comedians in “The Aristocrats” (2005), the acclaimed documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke.Mr. Cooper’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1961. He almost never saw his children, Michael and Louise Caputo, again. Michael Caputo wrote a book about their poor relationship and appeared on the talk show “Geraldo” in 1990 to discuss what he saw as his father’s neglect.Mr. Cooper called in to “Geraldo” to argue that he was not at fault, and to castigate his son.“Let me tell you something, I don’t have to be your father, you’re not that thrilling,” Mr. Cooper said, adding, “And I don’t want to be your father.”The show’s host, Geraldo Rivera, interrupted him, saying: “Pat, enough, enough. You’re upsetting me even.”Mr. Cooper’s second wife, the singer Patti Del Prince, died of cancer in 2005. He married Ms. Conner in 2018. In addition to her, he is survived by his children from his first marriage as well as a daughter from his second marriage, Patti Jo Weidenfeld; three sisters, Grace Ferrara, Carol Caputo and Marie Caputo Mangano; and five grandchildren.Mr. Cooper said his son Michael had tried to reconcile with him over the years. He remained uninterested.“He said, ‘Well, now I want’ — what’s it? — ‘closure,’” Mr. Cooper said. “I said, ‘Well, then get a closet.’” More

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      ‘Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)’ Review: Indelible Images by Design

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      Anton Corbijn’s documentary shares anecdotes from the British design studio that devised some of the most famous album covers of the 1970s.The album cover for Pink Floyd’s “Animals” is a collage that shows a pig flying over Battersea Power Station in London. Originally, it was intended to be a photograph, but controlling an inflatable pig at that height was not easy (in fact, it floated into an area where flights approach Heathrow Airport). Nor was it easy to have a man stand still after he had been set on fire, something that was done to create an image for the band’s preceding album, “Wish You Were Here.” Nor was arranging for a restless sheep to lounge on a psychiatrist’s couch in the Hawaiian surf — a photograph that ultimately constituted only a small inset on the original cover for the 10cc album “Look Hear?”These are among the anecdotes shared in “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a documentary from Anton Corbijn (“Control”) on Hipgnosis, a British design studio that, over roughly 15 years starting in 1968, devised some of the strangest and most innovative art ever put on records. (The name is a portmanteau of “hip” and “gnostic” pronounced like “hypnosis.”)“Squaring the Circle” has the feel of an official portrait. Aubrey Powell, known as Po, who founded Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson, holds the center of gravity among the interviewees, who include many of his friends and colleagues. The visuals — sharp black-and-white present-day footage; lots of photographs from Hipgnosis’s heyday — are predictably striking.Structurally, this movie defaults to recounting the genesis of one idea and collaboration after another. (“When you get a call from a Beatle, it was a bit like a call from God,” Powell says of Paul McCartney.) “Squaring the Circle” is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares’ Review: The Man Behind Freddy Krueger

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      In a new documentary, Robert Englund wants you to know he’s more than the face of Freddy Krueger.Like a 10-page diner menu, an excessive determination is at play in “Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story,” a vexing documentary about Robert Englund, who even horror haters will recognize as the guy who played Freddy Krueger in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films.What the directors Gary Smart and Christopher Griffiths made is a documentary in spirit. But it’s really more of an annotated oral history of Englund’s entire, extensive IMDb page — almost film by film, in chronological order, for more than two hours. It’s exhausting.And it’s a shame, because Englund comes across as a dedicated professional and a total ham (and horndog) deserving of a meaty documentary. Watching Englund be such a goof in his early movies is a treat, like when he wrestles a fake alligator in Tobe Hooper’s “Eaten Alive” from 1976.Englund’s career skyrocketed when Wes Craven cast him as Freddy in 1984. As the horror director Eli Roth points out in the documentary, unlike actors who played Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Englund was called on to act by moving and speaking menacingly. Englund did so splendidly, one reason Freddy’s popularity endures.Hardcore “Nightmare on Elm Street” fans — and really, that’s the audience here — might think this movie’s a dream. But like a recent documentary about the Chucky franchise, the material would be more palatable re-edited as Blu-ray extras.Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund StoryNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Streaming on Screambox and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More