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      ‘Country Gold’ Review: A Rising Star’s Wild(ish) Night With a Legend

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      The filmmaker Mickey Reece drags a certain Oklahoma-born singer named Troyal — but answers to “Garth” — into this oddball comedy.The filmmaker and actor Mickey Reece is an uncommonly prolific microbudget filmmaker, having cranked out over two dozen features since the early 2000s. “Country Gold,” his latest picture, is a not fully baked — or, in a certain sense, an over-baked — shaggy dog tale. Despite its homegrown surrealist touches, it’s ultimately a wheel-spinning exercise, though perhaps with its own odd integrity.Reece plays a slack-jawed country singer, Troyal Brux, pronounced Brooks: a fictional megastar based on a genuine one. Why a filmmaker would go to the trouble of slagging Garth Brooks (born Troyal Garth Brooks), whose days of stampeding the zeitgeist are long past, in the year 2023 is beyond me.Reece, like Brooks, is from Oklahoma, which may explain a longstanding grudge of sorts. In any event, in this story, Troyal gets a letter from the older country-western singing maestro George Jones (played by Ben Hall, who has practically no resemblance to Jones), inviting Troyal to Nashville for a meeting of the minds and night on the town.This movie’s George Jones is a labored contrivance. The real Jones has been described by the podcaster Tyler Mahan Coe as “a haunted house of a human being.” Here, Jones is an unusually voluble, quasi-avuncular figure who takes Troyal on a medium-wild night featuring booze, cocaine and massage.Shot mostly in black-and-white, with amusing bits of animation included (the scene in which Troyal is upbraided for ordering a steak well-done is a quirky comedic highlight), this movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.Country GoldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Fandor. More

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      ‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ Review: Girlhood, Interrupted

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      Lana Wilson’s documentary blossoms in moments of cultural commentary, where it builds a mood of reminiscence gone rancid.In the 1978 Louis Malle drama “Pretty Baby,” Brooke Shields plays a child whose virginity is auctioned off in a New Orleans brothel. She was 11 at the time of filming. That film’s title gets reappropriated in the director Lana Wilson’s absorbing documentary, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” which emulsifies its biography of Shields with lucid insights into the culture that shaped her.Posed before a calming gray backdrop, the 57-year-old Shields seems preternaturally well-adjusted and is an enthusiastic chronicler of her own career. But like many tidy celebrity portraits, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” (on Hulu) hits its stride when cinematic memoir takes a back seat to cultural commentary.Before Shields even hit puberty, the media had taken to framing her as either a Lolita or a demure darling — a Catch-22 that Wilson, through interviews with journalists and other actresses, positions within a history of Hollywood exploitation. Trapped in this binary, Shields failed to crystallize her identity until college, and the film’s second half traces her road to self-realization thereafter.The documentary’s most absorbing ingredient by far is its excellent collage of archival footage. “I knew it was going to be done in good taste,” a precocious preteen Shields is shown to say of Malle’s film in an interview around its release. Assembled alongside analysis, this clip and others build a mood of reminiscence gone rancid and suggest a generation of women transformed by the prototypes society boxed them into.Pretty Baby: Brooke ShieldsNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Netflix’s Approach Shifts, Pushing Content That Can ‘Pop’

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      The streaming service long thought spending on ads didn’t result in more viewers. That has subtly changed under the marketing chief Marian Lee.Netflix made sure viewers had ample opportunity to hear about “Wednesday,” its macabre hit starring Jenna Ortega.They could come across it in an airport security line when plopping their belongings into a tray that asked “What would Wednesday do?” Or see the title character in the Uber app when they ordered a ride. Or they could encounter it on TikTok, where seemingly everyone from Ukrainian soldiers to hip grannies were performing the title character’s arm-jolting, addictive dance set to the Lady Gaga song “Bloody Mary.”Either way, the marketing resources Netflix dedicated to the show helped to make it a global sensation. The push included Netflix shifting its social media resources from sites like Twitter and Instagram to TikTok after the amateur dance videos went viral. There was also a campaign in which local markets around the world adapted the slogan “What would Wednesday do?” to their country’s taste and culture. (Billboards in Los Angeles cheekily stated: “I read your screenplay. It’s time to rethink your writing career.”)The streaming service said the show’s eight episodes were viewed 1.24 billion hours in the first 28 days they were available, making it the second most-watched English-language series on the service, just behind the fourth season of “Stranger Things.”For the movie “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” there was a widely publicized (including TV commercials) one-week theatrical release on Thanksgiving that generated a reported $15 million in ticket sales. After that, a Los Angeles-based escape room and a handful of murder mystery dinners across the country — and more commercials — helped to keep the word of mouth alive until the expensive star-studded sequel debuted on the service at Christmas time. It racked up 279.7 million hours watched in the first 28 days, which Netflix said made it the fourth most-watched English-language film on the service.“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” received a one-week theatrical release at Thanksgiving and became available on Netflix at Christmas time.John Wilson/NetflixNetflix’s marketing tactics are indicative of an evolving strategy for a company that is facing a much more competitive streaming marketplace — and trying to serve an increasingly fickle audience. The new tactics also come as Netflix has introduced an advertising tier and is cracking down on password sharing as it contends with a maturing U.S. market. It has also essentially replaced its original creative team, opting for executives with broader tastes to serve a global marketplace. To sell this evolution of the world’s largest streaming service, the company is relying on Marian Lee, its third chief marketing officer in three years.“I’m trying to enable creativity, because I want to bring all of this content to more people around the world,” Ms. Lee said in an interview at Netflix’s headquarters in Los Angeles. “I also want the rest of Netflix to understand what the marketing strategy is: We support the content organization.”She spent the previous night staying up late to finish the reality show “Full Swing,” saying she cried in her bathroom when it was over.“I’m watching everything, and I’m going to tell you where I think this is really going to pop,” she said.For all of Netflix’s success over the years, the company has never quite found its footing in marketing. That is primarily because of the company’s core tenet is that the streaming service itself is its greatest marketer, and spending on expensive commercials or advertisements does not always improve viewer engagement. In 2019, the marketing operation moved under Ted Sarandos, who was then the head of content and is now the company’s co-chief executive. He hired Jackie Lee-Joe from BBC Studios to be chief marketing officer. She departed after just 10 months, when Mr. Sarandos surprised many inside Netflix by appointing Bozoma Saint John as the new C.M.O. Ms. Saint John used her formidable social media presence — she has 424,000 followers on Instagram — to host her own lifestyle events under the moniker @badassboz while running the Netflix marketing team, but her impact on Netflix’s shows and movies proved less fruitful.Ms. Lee was the global co-head of music at Spotify when she was hired by Ms. Saint John in July 2021. She was promoted to chief marketing officer in March 2022 after Ms. Saint John left. In contrast with her predecessor, Ms. Lee’s Instagram account is private, and when she was offered Ms. Saint John’s office, she declined, opting to remain in the one she occupied that was closer to her staff.“Wednesday,” starring Jenna Ortega, was marketed heavily through TikTok.Vlad Cioplea/NetflixNetflix’s marketing budget has remained fairly consistent, increasing to $2.5 billion in 2022 from $2.2 billion in 2020. But Ms. Lee’s 400-plus global team has enacted a subtle change in strategy, in which many of those dollars have been shifted to focus on individual titles as opposed to the branding of the streaming service itself.Still, the amount of money set aside for marketing remains relatively small, considering Netflix spends $17 billion a year on its programming. And when filmmakers and showrunners grouse about working with Netflix, the complaints are often aimed at the marketing department, which they feel can be limited by its budget. It is an issue traditional studios have tried to capitalize on, arguing that they may pay less upfront for a project but that they will spend more in marketing to let people know when it’s coming out.“The legacy studios spend more on marketing,” said Tripp Vinson, a producer of the Netflix “Murder Mystery” films starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. The first movie came out in 2019 and the second became available to Netflix subscribers on Friday. “But as a producer, what do I care about? You’re implying that the more you spend, the greater chance you have of getting your audience in that legacy, traditional marketing way. Well, I know from ‘Murder Mystery’ 1, whatever Netflix did to market this movie, the amount of viewers that I got, that’s what I care about. And they were astounding numbers.”For “Murder Mystery 2,” the streaming service added a second premiere at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, international billboards and commercials during the National Football League’s divisional playoffs. It also partnered with the social media star Mr. Beast to offer an unwitting couple a surprise trip to the Paris premiere. The first movie landed back on Netflix’s Top 10 list a week ahead of the release, and expectations inside the company for the sequel are high.Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, pushes against the notion that the company had not aggressively marketed specific shows and movies in the past.“I think the tension may be with people feeling like there is only the traditional way to do it, and they don’t realize we market in so many different ways,” she said, noting the service’s social media channels reach 800 million people globally.Netflix held a premiere event for “Murder Mystery 2” at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.Scott Yamano/NetflixFilmmakers, though, have noticed a difference with Ms. Lee.“Right when she arrived, she came down to see what we were doing and visited the set often,” said Debbie Snyder, a producer of the $80 million sci-fi spectacle “Rebel Moon,” which is directed by her husband, Zack Snyder.The plan is for the film, scheduled to debut on Dec. 22, to be the first in a trilogy.Did Ms. Snyder receive the same personalized attention when the film “Army of the Dead” debuted in 2021? “No,” she said. “Not really at all.”Netflix’s film chairman, Scott Stuber, said the marketing department under Ms. Lee was more in tune with the content side of the company. He noted that he was particularly impressed by her nimble approach, like her ability to maintain buzz for “Glass Onion” after its theatrical release.“I like someone who actually knows the old playbook, but also is very interested in how to rewrite the rules for the new playbook,” he said.“I’m trying to enable creativity, because I want to bring all of this content to more people around the world,” Ms. Lee said.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesIn February, members of Ms. Lee’s brand marketing team crammed themselves into a conference room to discuss, among other topics, “The Marquee,” a handful of high-tech billboards with pithy messages that rotate weekly and appear in strategic locations around the world like Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, Times Square in New York and Les Halles in Paris. She listened intently to the presentation: The board at the Trevi Fountain will be moved to a different location in Rome, one that is less of a tourist spot and more of a place where local Netflix subscribers could connect with it; Times Square is going to get an innovative new billboard that is easier to program yet looks like the physical one on Sunset Boulevard. A marquee is coming soon to Warsaw.“The point of the board is to have fun, be edgy and push all the way to the edge,” she said.“I know it’s a lot of pressure because they have to come up with a new message every week,” she added, “but if they’re just using it for something lame, I’d rather not do it.” More

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      ‘Hot Ones’ Was a Slow Burn All Along

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      This YouTube talk show’s premise is simple: Disarm celebrities with deep-cut questions and scorchingly spicy wings. Nearly 300 episodes later, the recipe still works.Bob Odenkirk was dubious when he walked onto the set of the long-running YouTube interview show “Hot Ones” last month. He was, after all, about to take on the “wings of death,” as the lineup of treacherously spicy chicken is called.“I’ve heard such good things about the show,” Odenkirk told Sean Evans, its even-keeled host, once cameras were rolling, but “I think I’m perfectly capable of talking without having a part of my body injured.”Despite peppering the interview with a couple of F-bombs, Odenkirk, the Emmy-nominated actor from “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad,” underwent a familiar shift: He’d warmed up — emotionally. Particularly after wing three, when Evans, quoting a 1989 Chicago Tribune article, asked him about his one-man show “Half My Face Is a Clown.”“That was far more entertaining and fun than I thought it would be,” Odenkirk said in the closing credits through spice-induced coughs.“Hot Ones” — a breakthrough pop-culture phenomenon in which stars eat 10 progressively fiery wings (or, increasingly, a vegan substitute) while being asked 10 deeply researched questions — has built itself into an online pillar, holding steady amid the shifting tides of digital media.Since 2015, First We Feast, the food culture site that produces “Hot Ones,” has aired nearly 300 episodes, almost all of which have amassed millions of views. Guests this season, its 20th, include Pedro Pascal, Bryan Cranston, Jenna Ortega and Florence Pugh. In the early days of the show, guests were mostly rappers, comedians and athletes. Now Oscar winners like Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett often occupy the hot seat, as do headliners like Dave Grohl and Lizzo. The two most watched episodes, with Gordon Ramsay and Billie Eilish, both in 2019, have a combined 165 million views. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson popped in to discuss our place in the universe, and its place in us.Bob Odenkirk, the star of “Better Call Saul,” conquered the “wings of death” in March, during Season 20 of the show. Peter Fisher for The New York TimesEvans uses his affable, unassuming approach to his advantage, with his deep-cut questions disarming guests, as the wings set them ablaze. Often visibly suffering, the guests are swiftly won over by Evans’s knowledge of their careers and his uncanny ability to keep conversations on track, even when they come dangerously close to going sideways.When he asked Josh Brolin why the Geva Theater Center in Rochester, N.Y., was special to him, Brolin responded, “Literally the greatest questions I’ve ever been asked. Seriously. I’m blown away. I don’t know who’s working for you, but don’t fire them.” (Turns out, it’s the small theater where he earned his stripes as a character actor.)In recent years, “Hot Ones” has edged itself into the big leagues: with spoofs on “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” and Daytime Emmy nominations for Evans and the show. Its influence seems to have rippled down into the bevy of late-night or online segments that test celebrities one way or another: “Seth Meyers Goes Day Drinking” or Vanity Fair’s lie-detector series.Since its start, Evans said, “We’ve lived through like four different new media generations over that time, and we’ve been able to ride those rocky waters just in like the smoothest way.”The show could have easily been pigeonholed as a novelty or gimmick, but Evans and Chris Schonberger, the co-creator and executive producer of “Hot Ones,” say its steady ascent is a product of their dedication to the craft of interviewing and, perhaps unexpectedly, to linear TV: New 20-30 minute episodes drop on Thursdays. “‘Hot Ones’ is a little bit of like a sitcom from the ’80s or ’90s,” Evans said, comparing its cozy watchability with “The Office” or “Friends.”Schonberger calls “Hot Ones” a “true Venn diagram,” where today’s emphasis on viral formats overlaps with time-tested journalism. “It’s rooted in doing the research, trying to be factually accurate, trying to be broader than the gossip of the day,” he said. Its North Star has always been to answer the classic question, “What would it be like to have a beer with that person?”Peter Fisher for The New York TimesDomonique Burroughs, now a senior producer for “Hot Ones,” has been with the show since the start.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThis is all so much more than Evans, 36, and Schonberger, 39, could have fathomed when the idea was born almost a decade ago.First We Feast, started by Complex Networks in 2012 and led by Schonberger, was struggling to catch up to legacy food brands like Gourmet Magazine or Bon Appétit, with their thousands of recipes or restaurant listings. Then, in 2014, digital brands pivoted hard to video. “It was this amazing flattening of the landscape,” Schonberger said. “Suddenly we were not way behind the starting line, and we also had this brand that could credibly speak to pop culture and not just food.”And with platforms like YouTube evolving, Schonberger said, “People were looking for something to puncture the veneer of celebrity — how interviews were becoming more experiential and gamified.”“‘Hot Ones’ was just the dumbest idea of all time,” Schonberger said, only half-joking. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?”“It’s like, well, we can’t just have people get drunk or high,” he went on, “but I think we can get people to eat spicy food, which might just be hilarious.”“Hot Ones” started selling its own hot sauces in 2016, and in 2022, it sold more than two million bottles.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesPeter Fisher for The New York TimesThe N.B.A. star Shaquille O’Neal was a guest on the show in 2019.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesCasting someone formally was not in the budget, Schonberger said, so he went hunting for onscreen talent “down at the end of the hallway.” And there was Evans, who had been hosting segments for Complex News, playing golf with Stephen Curry, for example, or eating Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson’s diet.In the beginning, the show had a more contentious, unhinged quality (like a “Wild West U.F.C. barroom,” as Schonberger put it). Publicists, Evans said, would bring in their client, “half apologizing for it in front of us.” Conversations that Evans had during Season 1 (which didn’t feature any women) — like when he used numerous expletives during a question to Machine Gun Kelly about his relationship with Amber Rose — would not fly today.In 2018, Charlize Theron’s episode kicked open the door for top-tier female guests, like Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry, previously difficult to book in part because of the show’s unconventional, unproven concept, which hadn’t quite broken out of its bro-centric box.Evans, left, with the creator of “Hot Ones,” Chris Schonberger. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?” Schonberger has asked himself over the years.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesIf you’ve pictured Evans going into hiding for a week before each interview to consume every part of his upcoming guest’s career, you wouldn’t be wrong. But he also gets a lot of help from his brother, Gavin Evans, the show’s researcher, who compiles a dossier on each celebrity that might be 50 pages long — no magazine profile, podcast interview, IMDb entry, Wikipedia page or archived local news story is left unplumbed.Sean Evans, a Chicago native who grew up admiring Howard Stern, David Letterman and Adam Carolla, turns out to have a knack for demystifying celebrity. Near the end of his interview, the Oscar nominee Austin Butler, who told a touching story about riding roller coasters with his late mother, hugged Evans, saying, “I’ve made a new friend that I hope stays in my life for a long time.” The night after Grohl’s episode, in which the two drank an entire bottle of Crown Royal whisky, Evans attended a friends-and-family Foo Fighters show.Despite consistently trending on YouTube, the show has managed to maintain some level of underdog appeal. Maybe it’s that a team of around 10 people has worked on it since its inception. This includes a hot sauce curator: Noah Chaimberg, the founder of the Brooklyn-based small-batch hot-sauce shop Heatonist. The lineup of sauces changes every season, but a mainstay is the brutal Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity, a turning point in nearly every interview. The final wing tops two million on the Scoville scale.Or maybe it’s the unchanging bare-bones set: an all-black liminal space akin to the Looney Tunes void.The set was “a byproduct of us being broke,” Evans said, but it’s been a boon to the show. Though it often films in New York or Los Angeles, “we can pop that set up wherever,” Evans said, as when they traveled to Hawaii to interview Kevin Hart or London for Idris Elba. “The restrictions of the show became a superpower,” Schonberger said.The bare-bones “Hot Ones” set was originally “a byproduct of us being broke,” Evan said.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesSchonberger and Evans said that cable networks and other platforms have expressed interest in buying the “Hot Ones” brand, but they have prioritized their control over it, staying with YouTube and expanding their reach by creating and selling hot sauces (first conceived as a keepsake for superfans, then broadened exponentially to meet demand). They have had collaborations with Shake Shack, Reebok and Champion sportswear. And in 2021, Hot Ones started selling chicken bites in the freezer aisles of Walmart.And while “Hot Ones” wasn’t created with social media in mind, it is “made for it,” Schonberger said, with each wing being its own two- to three-minute segment designed to have a beginning, middle and end. Then come the reaction GIFs and compilations, which rack up millions of views on TikTok, along with videos of fans trying the sauces themselves.“We’ve just continued to focus on making the whole as good as possible and having faith that once it’s out in the world,” Schonberger said, “it belongs to the internet, and they’re going to find their ways to have fun with it and amplify it.” For the duo, who are admittedly bullheaded about their vision, the future will look a lot like the present.“I don’t really have these world takeover plans or aspirations. I think I’m just happier being a duke or being a baron on my little corner of the internet,” said Evans, who has eaten thousands of wings onscreen. “Hopefully I can just sustain this as long as my stomach will allow.”Peter Fisher for The New York Times More

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto, Oscar-Winning Japanese Composer, Dies at 71

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      Mr. Sakamoto, whose work with Yellow Magic Orchestra influenced electronic music, composed scores for “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant.”Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Japan’s most prominent composers and a founder of the influential Yellow Magic Orchestra techno-pop band who scored films including “The Last Emperor,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Revenant,” died on Tuesday. He was 71.His Instagram page announced the date of his death, but it did not provide further details. Mr. Sakamoto said in January 2021 that he had received a diagnosis of rectal cancer and was undergoing treatment.Equally comfortable in futuristic techno, orchestral works, video game tracks and intimate piano solos, Mr. Sakamoto created music that was catchy, emotive and deeply attuned to the sounds around him. Along with issuing numerous solo albums, he collaborated with a wide range of musicians across genres, and received an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and two Golden Globes.His Yellow Magic Orchestra, which swept the charts in the late 1970s and early ’80s, produced catchy hits like “Computer Game” on synthesizers and sequencers, while also satirizing Western ideas of Japanese music.“The big theme of him is curiosity,” the musician Carsten Nicolai, a longtime collaborator, said in a phone interview in 2021. “Ryuichi understood, very early, that not necessarily one specific genre will be the future of music — that the conversation between different styles, and unusual styles, may be the future.”Mr. Sakamoto was beginning to achieve wide recognition in the early 1980s when the director Nagisa Oshima asked him to co-star, alongside David Bowie, in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a Japanese P.O.W. camp. Mr. Sakamoto, having no background in acting, agreed under the condition that he could also score the film.The movie’s synth-heavy title track remained one of Mr. Sakamoto’s most famous compositions. He often adapted it, including for “Forbidden Colors,” a vocal version with the singer David Sylvian, as well as piano renditions and sweeping orchestral arrangements.Mr. Sakamoto in 1988. He won an Oscar for his work on “The Last Emperor.” Kyodo News, via Associated PressThen came music for films by the director Bernardo Bertolucci, including “The Last Emperor” (1987) “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) and “Little Buddha (1993). Mr. Bertolucci was demanding — he would shout “More emotional, more emotional!” at the composer, and made him rewrite music on the fly during recording sessions with a 40-person orchestra — but “The Last Emperor” won Mr. Sakamoto an Oscar in 1988. Mr. Sakamoto returned to his classical roots in the late 1990s with the album “BTTB,” or “Back to the Basics,” a collection of sentimental, delicate piano arrangements that evoked Claude Debussy, alongside more experimental wanderings into the innards of the piano in the spirit of John Cage.That release included “Energy Flow,” originally written for a commercial for a vitamin drink and released as a single after television viewers called in en masse to ask how they could find of the music. Amid Japan’s Lost Decade — a term for the economic stagnation that followed years of technology-driven growth — the tender piano ballad seemed to offer solace. “Perhaps it’s because people are looking for healing, for some answer to the stress of their country’s recession,” Mr. Sakamoto speculated, when “Energy Flow” became the first instrumental track to reach No. 1, in 1999, on Japan’s Oricon charts.After the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Mr. Sakamoto became an activist in Japan’s antinuclear movement, organizing a No Nukes concert in 2012 at which a reunited Yellow Magic Orchestra, and the band Kraftwerk, one of Yellow Magic’s major influences, performed. The day before the concert, he spoke at a protest outside the residence of Japan’s prime minister. “I come here as a citizen,” he said. “It’s important that we all do what we can and raise our voices.”Mr. Sakamoto learned he had throat cancer in 2014. During treatment, he halted work but made an exception when the director Alejandro G. Iñárritu asked him to write music for his film “The Revenant.” With Mr. Nicolai, who performs under the name Alva Noto, Mr. Sakamoto produced a score of luminous dread that was widely acclaimed.He conceived a new project in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, one of his abiding influences, which became the 2017 “async,” his first solo album in eight years and a summation of his career, with haunting chorales, ethereally synthesized soundscapes, and a recording of the writer Paul Bowles reciting a passage on mortality from “The Sheltering Sky.”Mr. Sakamoto, second from left, had a role in the film “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” and also wrote the music. With him, from left, are Jack Thomas, the film’s. producer; David Bowie, who starred, and Nagisa Oshima, the director.Jacques Langevin/Associated PressIn later years, Mr. Sakamoto’s music became increasingly spacious and ambient, attuned to the flow of time. In an interview with The Creative Independent website, he described why he played his older music so much slower than he used to. “I wanted to hear the resonance,” he said. “I want to have less notes and more spaces. Spaces, not silence. Space is resonant, is still ringing. I want to enjoy that resonance, to hear it growing.”Ryuichi Sakamoto was born on Jan. 17, 1952, in Tokyo. His father, Kazuki Sakamoto, was a well-known literary editor, and his mother, Keiko (Shimomura) Sakamoto, designed women’s hats. He began piano lessons at age 6, and started to compose soon after. Early influences included Bach and Debussy — whom he once called “the door to all 20th century music” — and he discovered modern jazz as he fell in with a crowd of hipster rebels as a teenager. (At the height of the student protest movement, he and his classmates shut down their high school for several weeks.)Mr. Sakamoto was drawn to modern art and especially the avant-garde work of Cage. He studied composition and ethnomusicology at Tokyo University of the Arts and began playing around with synthesizers and performing in the local pop scene.In 1978, Mr. Sakamoto released his debut solo album, “Thousand Knives,” a trippy amalgam that opens with the musician reciting a poem by Mao through a vocoder, followed by a reggae beat and a procession of Herbie Hancock-inspired improvisations. That year, the bassist Haruomi Hosono invited him and the drummer Yukihiro Takahashi to form a trio that became Yellow Magic Orchestra. (Mr. Takahashi died in January.)The band’s self-titled 1978 album was a huge hit, and influenced numerous electronic music genres, from synth pop to techno. The group broke up in 1984, in part because Mr. Sakamoto wanted to pursue solo work. (They have periodically reunited since the 1990s.) Mr. Sakamoto continued tinkering with outré, high-tech approaches in his 1980 album “B-2 Unit,” which included the otherworldly electro single “Riot in Lagos.”Mr. Sakamoto performing in Rome in 2009.Domenico Stinellis/Associated PressAfter the Bertolucci films, Mr. Sakamoto was seemingly everywhere — appearing in a Madonna music video, modeling for Gap, and writing music for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. His collaborators for the eclectic albums “Neo Geo” (1987) and “Beauty” (1989) included Iggy Pop, Youssou N’Dour, and Brian Wilson, and he toured with a world-fusion band from five continents. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Sakamoto had refashioned himself as a classical composer, touring arrangements of his earlier music in a piano trio. His work simultaneously became grandiose in scale and themes: he wrote a symphony, “Discord,” exploring grief and salvation (with spoken word contributions by David Byrne and Patti Smith), and an opera, “LIFE,” a meditation on 20th century history that received mixed reviews.Along with writing music for video games and designing ringtones for the Nokia 8800 phone, Mr. Sakamoto oversaw live streams of his concerts that featured a “remote clap” function, in which online viewers could press their keyboard’s F key to applaud. The strokes would be registered on a screen in the auditorium.In the 21st century, he began to focus again on more experimental work, inspired by a new generation of collaborators including the producer Fennesz and Mr. Nicolai, who layered glitchy electronics over Mr. Sakamoto’s piano.“He taught me that I should not be afraid of melody,” Mr. Nicolai said, “that melody has the possibility of experimentation as well.”Mr. Sakamoto became outspoken as an environmentalist, recording the sounds of a melting glacier for his 2009 record “Out of Noise.” For portions of “async,” he performed on an out-of-tune piano that had been partly submerged in the 2011 Tohoku tsunami. He recorded what became his final album, “12,” as a kind of diary of sketches, following a lengthy hospitalization, through 2021 and 2022. “I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said of the record. “I had a feeling that it’d have a small healing effect on my damaged body and soul.” In December, he gave a career-spanning, livestreamed solo piano concert at Tokyo’s 509 Studio.Mr. Sakamoto married Natsuko Sakamoto in 1972, and they divorced 10 years later. His second marriage, to the musician Akiko Yano in 1982, ended in divorce in 2006. His partner was Norika Sora, who served as his manager. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Sakamoto greets fans after a performance in New York in 2010.Hiroko Masuike for The New York TimesMr. Sakamoto’s attention to sound suffused his daily life. After many years of eating at the Manhattan restaurant Kajitsu, he recalled in a 2018 interview with The New York Times, he wrote an email to the chef saying, “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music.” Then, without fanfare or pay, he designed subtle, tasteful playlists for the restaurant.He simply wanted better sounds to accompany his meals. More

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      The Bizarro Worlds of Quentin Dupieux’s Comedy

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      The French director, whose latest film is “Smoking Causes Coughing,” spoke about five comedy clips that have inspired his work.Quentin Dupieux’s offbeat comedies put people into bonkers situations and watch them do their best. And their best — God bless us — is often pretty hopeless. In “Mandibles,” a couple of guys find a dog-size fly and try to hide it in their car trunk. In “Deerskin,” a man (the Oscar winner Jean Dujardin) gets fixated on soft leather jackets and goes to murderous lengths to acquire one.The genius of these what-on-earth scenarios is that the actors play it all straight. That makes for laughs, but there’s also a general circuit-frying glee at Dupieux’s unpredictable left turns. (Also fun: He casts French stars like Adèle Exarchopoulos and Benoît Magimel, happily going rogue.)The director’s latest, “Smoking Causes Coughing” (in theaters), has a plot best described as “superheroes on vacation.” This Power Rangers-style squad usually battles (very lo-fi) monsters, but they’re taking some time to regroup. (Their name? The Tobacco Force.)On a recent video call, Dupieux talked about clips from five movies that inspired him — and crack him up. Below are his thoughts, condensed and edited.‘The Phantom of Liberty’ (1974)Director: Luis BuñuelIt’s just amazing that a brain can come up with this idea. It’s so smart and silly at the same time. The toilets around the table is already something, but then the final gag is that he locks himself in another room to eat! When you’re a filmmaker, this movie is the dream: You start a story, you finish it quickly, you open the door and there’s a new story. Sometimes movies tend to be too scripted, and I love that in this movie you flip the rules and just tell the story exactly how you want.When I was making my first short films, my friend gave me a VHS tape of this movie, and it was a shock because it’s exactly what I was trying to do. But I don’t like the word “surreal” [for my films]. When these guys were making these types of movies, and when Salvador Dalí was making his art, surrealism meant something strong. It was a concept. Today, I have a feeling the word has lost its magic meaning. At the same time, I have no other word! But why do we need a label?‘Top Secret!’ (1984)Directors: Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry ZuckerOh my God, I don’t need to click to watch because I’ve watched this scene so many times. This is just the ultimate gag. I saw this in a movie theater when I was a teenager — I liked the poster, the cow with the boots — and I was amazed. So many creative visual ideas, just to make you laugh. These guys were geniuses.Sometimes you have an idea like this and you realize it’s a nightmare to shoot. Like, come on — we’re not going to build a rolling train station. And they did it! When they were doing “Airplane!,” “Top Secret!” and “Police Squad!” they were at their best. Everything is played straight, like it’s a serious movie. Val Kilmer is perfect for the part because he’s not supposed to be funny. It cracks me up every time.I just finished my new movie, which is actually about Salvador Dalí. And the reverse scene [in the bookstore in “Top Secret!”] was in my mind. So we shot a few scenes reversed. Which is hilarious to shoot — it’s so much fun to do. And I know it came from “Top Secret!” because I’ve been obsessed for many years: Why would they do that? Why is it so good? Why?!‘10’ (1979)Director: Blake EdwardsI have a passion for Blake Edwards, for this era especially. He has a very specific comedic timing. Nobody ever did the same pace of humor. And that’s in this scene: the old woman trying to bring a tray. If I do it or if someone else does it, it will not be half as funny.It’s well-crafted. It’s not something they shot just like that. For me the most important thing when I focus on a scene is the way the dialogue sounds, the music of the words. That’s how I build my comedy timing. When a scene works well between actors, I don’t chop it to make it faster or whatever. I keep the human pace. When it sounds like dialogue, like it’s written, then it’s not good enough. Even if they’re saying stupid stuff, it has to sound like it’s real.‘Raising Arizona’ (1987)Director: Joel CoenI’ve been in love with this movie. This one is more for the brilliant filmmaking: the way it’s shot, the way it’s cut, the way they use the music, the way they use the crane, the Steadicam. Every technique! Hand-held cameras, wide angles. The Coen brothers at this period had crazy filmmaking. I saw this on TV when I was a kid and it killed me.For example, when Nicolas Cage exits the store and hears the cop, the camera does something. I think it’s someone running in with the camera, hand-held. And it’s amazing, the feeling you get, just by the fact that it’s shaky. I tried to do this many times without success, because it’s not my thing. I love “Fargo,” too. A masterpiece. It’s a nightmare when you look at the main character’s point of view. And for some reason, that’s enjoyable to watch!‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ (1975)Directors: Terry Gilliam and Terry JonesMy mind exploded. What the hell — is it possible to film this? Probably my taste for gory scenes and blood — stupid blood — comes from Monty Python. They became popular in France through the movies. I have to say [the French TV show] “Les Nuls” was the first bible for us as kids. We realized later that they were highly influenced by Monty Python, the Zucker brothers and stuff like that. But we didn’t know and it was amazing to discover this crazy new comedy. They were basically translating these English-speaking codes to a French audience. They did a five-hour parody program called “TVN 595” — crazy TV! It was freedom. You could tell they had no rules. More

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      A Beginner’s Guide to Dungeons & Dragons

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      The filmmakers behind “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” help explain the characters, monsters and spells that make up their new film.“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,” a comedy-fantasy movie from the directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, is a loose adaptation of the tabletop role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, more commonly known among fans as D&D. A social game of chance, strategy and a kind of improvisational storytelling, D&D is hugely complex and deeply immersive, demanding of its players an almost scholarly commitment to learning its history, its rules and its mythology — all of it chronicled in a series of exhaustive, encyclopedic official rule books that are the foundation of the game.With so much advanced knowledge and folklore out there, it might seem daunting to approach this “Dungeons & Dragons” film (now in theaters) as a newcomer to D&D. But the movie has in fact been made with novices in mind.“The intention was for nothing in the film to have to be explained prior to seeing it,” said Daley, who co-wrote the screenplay with Goldstein and Michael Gilio, in a recent video interview. “We knew that was of the utmost importance, so that we’re not alienating an audience that doesn’t know D&D.” Although the film contains more than enough Easter eggs and references to satisfy die-hard fans, “none of that is a requirement,” said Goldstein. “You don’t have to know how to fly an F-18 to enjoy ‘Top Gun.’”To help answer any lingering D&D questions you might still have going into “Honor Among Thieves,” Daley and Goldstein explained some of the movie’s more arcane nods and allusions.Who are the good guys and the bad guys?Broadly speaking, the film features two competing factions: the Harpers and the Red Wizards of Thay. (For much of the running time, our heroes are caught in the battle between them.) The Harpers are “a benevolent faction of essentially spies, who work in conjunction with good-aligned characters and places to help root out evil entities,” Daley said. One of their primary adversaries is Szass Tam, the leader of the Red Wizards, who rules as a dictator of the nation of Thay.Daisy Head, left, as Sofina in the film.Paramount PicturesWhat’s a class, and what classes are our heroes?One of the first steps in a game of “Dungeons & Dragons” is the choosing of a character class: It defines your identity based upon set skills and abilities, and limits what you can and can’t do in the game. Standard classes include monks, fighters, wizards and warlocks.The characters in the film were written with these classes in mind. Edgin (Chris Pine) is a bard. Holga (Michelle Rodriguez) is a barbarian. We also see sorcerers (Justice Smith’s Simon), paladins (Regé-Jean Page’s Xenk) and a rare tiefling druid (Sophia Lillis’s Doric). Goldstein said that they wanted there to be “a clear distinction between each of the classes that was immediately recognizable to people who were aware of the game,” but they didn’t want the characters actually describing their types out loud. “Nobody ever says, ‘I’m a barbarian, what do you want from me?’ or anything like that.”Who’s aligned with what?One of D&D’s most enduring contributions is the idea of alignment — a moral category determined along the axes of good versus evil and law versus chaos. (If you have ever heard of someone being described as lawful good or chaotic evil, that’s where it comes from.)It’s easy enough to determine the alignment of each of the characters in “Honor Among Thieves,” as D&D fans will no doubt be glad to do. But Daley said that the alignments were less expressly conceived for the film than “coincidentally obvious” based on the way all fictional characters tend to be written.What are all these monsters?“Honor Among Thieves” is rife with curious creatures — all of them taken from the original game. Some are considered beasts, which are animals that could exist in the real world, and others are monstrosities, which Goldstein described as more “fantastical.”There are Mimic Chests (huge carnivorous mouths disguised as treasure chests) and the fan-favorite Gelatinous Cubes (more or less what it sounds like: huge cubes of goo that trap people inside).“There are also deeper cuts, like the Intellect Devourer, a brain-shaped creature with legs that takes control of your mind and kills you,” Goldstein said.A Gelatinous Cube traps one character in the film.Paramount PicturesAnd that … owl … bear … thing?… is an Owlbear, actually. It’s a big owl-bear hybrid that the druid, Doric, transforms into a couple of times in the film. Large and powerful, it’s one of the film’s more striking creatures.“The traditional Owlbear design often is more of a grizzly bear, but we thought it would look more beautiful if it looked like a snowy owl,” Goldstein said.Where does the movie take place?“Honor Among Thieves” isn’t set in a generic fantasy land. In fact, its globe-trotting adventures are situated in clearly delineated spaces based on pre-existing “Dungeons” maps and settings. “While writing the movie, we consulted the map,” Goldstein said. “We treated it like it was a movie about a real place with a real history.”The film largely takes place within an area called the Sword Coast, of the Forgotten Realms, along the western side of the continent of Faerun. We see such cities as Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, glimpse the Arctic tundra of the northern Icewind Dale, and much more. The filmmakers took pains to make the geography game-accurate, being mindful of relative positions, travel times and how different areas relate. “If they go from Triboar to the Evermoors by horseback, we know that it’s a certain distance and that it would be possible,” Goldstein said.The film uses various locations from the game, like the ice prison Revel’s End.Paramount PicturesSo all of these places were already in the game?Not exactly. As the film opens, Edgin and Holga are serving a life sentence in the remote ice prison of Revel’s End, having been busted during a botched heist. Daley and Goldstein always knew they wanted to begin the movie this way — but when they reached out to the game’s manufacturer, Wizards of the Coast (now a subsidiary of Hasbro), to ask if such a prison existed in the wintry region of Icewind Dale, they were informed that none did.Fortunately, Wizards worked their magic: A new “Dungeons” book released in the fall of 2020, “Rime of the Frostmaiden,” added Revel’s End and its parole board, the Absolution Council, to the official D&D canon. “That was one of the most gratifying parts of this whole process: seeing our names in a D&D book,” Daley said. “More so even than seeing our names on the poster for the movie.”What’s all that weird writing?As in “Star Wars,” “Honor Among Thieves” contains no written English. Instead, any of the script you see throughout the film is written in Thorass, a well-known in-game “Dungeons” language with its own established alphabet. Much as Trekkies can speak Klingon, many D&D obsessives will know the text by sight — and will no doubt be taking notes on what it means. “It was all very deliberate,” Goldstein said. “Anything you see in the film has meaning and can be translated.” More

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      Adam Sandler Grows Up (Mostly)

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      At 56, the formerly juvenile funnyman has matured into a subtler, more nuanced comedy performer. It’s why the “Murder Mystery” films work so well.“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’m so sad,” wails Howard Ratner, voice choked up, tears streaming down his cheeks, a wad of tissue stuffed inside his bloody nose. “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Everything I do is not going right.”Howard, played with frazzled, manic intensity by Adam Sandler, is at the end of his rope. At this point in the gambling drama “Uncut Gems,” the Diamond District jeweler is in leagues of debt, and his one final, desperate hope to raise cash — a gem auction — has just failed spectacularly. Roughed up by the guys he owes, he turns to his mistress, Julia (Julia Fox), for consolation.“Unzip my skirt,” she tells him consolingly. Turning around, she reveals that she’s had his name tattooed in cursive on her backside. “It says ‘Howie’!” she exclaims.“I don’t deserve it!” Howard moans. After a pause, the Jewish New Yorker thinks to add, “You can’t even get buried with me now!”Recent Sandler films, including “Murder Mystery” and its new sequel, “Murder Mystery 2,” have this same familiar intensity. They may have less serious ambitions, but they have also been greatly bolstered by the depth and nuance he has lately seemed to harness.In many ways this is much the same Sandler that we have seen onscreen since the early 1990s, as the star of often juvenile feature comedies and as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live”: an oversize man-baby in the throes of an antic tantrum. In films like “Billy Madison” and “Happy Gilmore,” Sandler specialized in a kind of galvanic caricature of Gen X arrested development, oscillating wildly between boyish puppy-dog charm and explosive, bratty anger. His shtick was the interplay of two distinct types: bashful, vaguely pathetic one moment, utterly rabid the next.But there’s a depth of feeling evident in Sandler’s “Gems” performance that wasn’t on view in those earlier roles. From his tense shoulders to the way he grinds his teeth in moments of stress, Howard embodies a world-weariness that borders on exhaustion, looking harried and bedraggled even at his most well-rested and upbeat. All of the childish vigor Sandler is known for is still there, but filtered through several decades of indelible experience. He’s no longer a man-child. He’s an old man-child — and the effect of all that time on earth shows in every gesture and every pore.Sandler opposite Julia Fox in “Uncut Gems,” which marries the actor’s childish persona with decades of experience.A24This weariness isn’t exclusive to his work in “Gems” (available to rent on major platforms). While he’s regularly met the challenge of demanding roles under the direction of auteurs — giving complex, acclaimed performances in James L. Brooks’s “Spanglish” (2004), Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” (2009) and especially Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love” (2004) — over the past several years he’s brought subtler and more thoughtful shading to broader, lighthearted comedies. He’s drawing on his art-house gifts even in farcical contexts, and the result is some of the most rewarding work of his career.In “Murder Mystery” and the new sequel “Murder Mystery 2,” streaming on Netflix, Sandler plays Nick Spitz, a New York City police detective longing for a promotion (more to the point, a raise). In the first film, Nick and his wife, Audrey (Jennifer Aniston), are celebrating their 15th anniversary with a long-overdue trip across Europe. On the plane, Nick spots Audrey chatting with Charles (Luke Evans), a dashing, titled billionaire, and can barely contain his envy.“I know I’m not a duke,” Nick tells Audrey sheepishly, when they have a moment alone.“He’s a viscount,” Audrey corrects him.“I don’t even know what that is,” Nick replies.This exchange is typical of the couple’s banter, which ranges in the films from tender to acrimonious to protective, sometimes in the span of a single line. Sandler plays the devoted but put-upon husband with a delicate balance of compassion and aloofness, and in moments like this, a wounded candor comes through that is oddly touching. While there’s humor in Nick’s jealousy of his rich and handsome competitor, Sandler laces it with a feeling of threatened ego and husbandly pridefulness. You get a real sense that Nick loves Audrey, and an equally clear impression of how 15 years of husband-and-wife routine have calcified their partnership.“Murder Mystery 2” picks up where the first film left off, with Nick and Audrey having parlayed their crime-solving success into a career as professional gumshoes. As with the original, this sequel works because it remains grounded in the mundane rhythms of a longtime marriage. And again, Sandler channels a hangdog torpor, almost a melancholic air, in a performance that bristles with comic realism. When he has to carry the ransom to a hostage exchange, he grouses about the weight of the briefcase (then gets defensive about the size of his hands); moments after a murder, he bickers with his wife about appropriate before-bed snack portions. This is a man with more down-to-earth concerns than the mystery he is ostensibly solving. Sandler, with surly charisma, makes those concerns palpable.Even the broadest of Sandler’s recent comedies benefit from this maturation. “Hubie Halloween” (2020, on Netflix), a goofy horror parody very much in the style of vintage Happy Madison productions, stars Sandler as Hubie Dubois, a sweet-natured simpleton reminiscent of the characters he played in “Little Nicky” and “The Waterboy.” (As in those films, Sandler speaks entirely in a squeaky, abrasive voice.) The difference is that “Hubie” leans into Sandler’s latent sweetness, counterbalancing the raunchy lowbrow humor with a heartfelt — perhaps even sentimental — touch. There’s always been a deep-seated earnestness in his work: Consider the Frank Capra-esque ending of his mawkish (and underappreciated) farce “Click” (2006). Lately, alongside the weariness, that warmth has come to the fore.Sandler, opposite Juancho Hernangómez, gives a sad, moving performance in “Hustle.”Scott Yamano/NetflixThe subtler, more mature Sandler of recent years is most fully showcased in “Hustle,” the sports comedy-drama by Jeremiah Zagar that was released to glowing reviews on Netflix last summer. Sandler stars as Stanley Sugerman, an international scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Well-respected in his field, Stanley longs for a position on the bench: In his mid-50s and with a wife and teenage daughter he rarely sees, he badly wants to spend less time on the road and more time at home.Sandler plays Stanley as a man who is grateful for what he has but desperate for a little bit more. A hot basketball prospect in college with a shot at a championship, he squandered his one opportunity to make it as a player in the N.B.A.: After a night of partying, Stanley got into a drunk-driving accident that sent him to jail for six months and instantly derailed his career. Now he carries the guilt of that choice in his every movement.As Sandler capably plays him, he’s haunted — doomed to work in a kind of karmic penance, incapable of forgetting what might have been. It’s a sad and moving performance of remarkable emotional depth. It’s also the kind of performance that hints at where Sandler might go from here. As he continues to grow older, we might see him further hone this melancholy, perhaps eventually taking on roles like the one an aging Jerry Lewis played in Martin Scorsese’s great “The King of Comedy.”At one point in “Hustle,” asked about the dreams he still hopes to follow, Stanley offers a rebuke meant only semi-ironically. “Guys in their 50s don’t have dreams,” he insists. “They have nightmares and eczema.” Clearly Sandler — whether he personally agrees with the sentiment or not — has been channeling that feeling into his work. Onscreen now, at 56, he’s the guy who’s no longer dreaming: He’s only got nightmares and eczema, and whatever jokes he can muster to make about them. More