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      Folk Implosion Returns With ‘Music for Kids’

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      Lou Barlow and John Davis made tracks for the 1995 cultural flashpoint. They split after a 1999 LP, but reunited during the pandemic, and made plans to release more songs.By the early 1990s, Lou Barlow was used to getting some weird fan mail. The lyrics he wrote for his band Sebadoh seemed to excavate the loneliest and weirdest secrets of his inner world — subject matter that invited Barlow’s listeners to form an unusually close relationship to its singer. He didn’t think much of it when one of those fans, a teenager named Harmony Korine, sent him the full-length script for a pretty out-there movie he’d written called “Kids.”“It seemed kind of extreme, but I was used to it,” Barlow recalled in a video interview. He began corresponding with Korine, who wanted Barlow to write the music for his film, which was not some pipe dream but actually in an early state of production. Korine, he said, had a clear vision: “He obviously knew what he was talking about.”Directed by the photographer Larry Clark, “Kids” would indeed become a cultural flashpoint upon its 1995 release for its colorful, and arguably exploitative, depiction of wayward New York City teenagers caught up in drugs and sex. It would serve as a launching pad for Korine’s own directorial ambitions, and the careers of the actresses Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson. And for many viewers, the “Kids” soundtrack was an introduction to some of the stranger artists in then-contemporary American independent music: the outsider singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston; the mysterious post-rock practitioners Slint; and the Folk Implosion, Barlow’s eclectic band with John Davis, who ended up scoring a good chunk of the movie.An incomplete version of that soundtrack is available on some streaming platforms, but it cannot be heard as it was initially presented. (Multiple songs — different ones — are missing on Apple Music and Spotify; the LP isn’t on Tidal or Amazon Music.) A Domino publicist said in an email that Universal — the parent company of London Records, which first released the “Kids” soundtrack — no longer held the rights to any of the music, and that “a partial selection had become available erroneously.”But now, the Folk Implosion’s contributions to that soundtrack will be reissued on Sept. 8 via Domino Records as “Music for Kids.” It contains all the original compositions the band made for the movie, many of which have never been available on streaming, as well as a grab bag of sonically similar Folk Implosion recordings from subsequent albums. “Music for Kids” also doubles as a flagship release for the duo’s reunion. Davis left the band in 1999 on unfavorable terms; today, they’re working on new Folk Implosion recordings, and making plans to perform together.“There’s a core spark to it that feels almost genetic,” Davis said in a separate video interview.Their collaboration as the Folk Implosion was, in fact, inspired by a fan letter that a teenage Davis wrote to Barlow in the late ’80s, when Barlow was living in Westfield, Mass. At the time, Barlow was beginning to gain attention for his work in Sebadoh, following his stint as the bassist in the alternative rock band Dinosaur Jr. His experience with the indie music scene had made him acutely aware of its limitations, and in Davis, he found a cerebral collaborator who wasn’t afraid to talk freely about the creative process.“John, he’s an actual intellectual,” Barlow said. “Him being a fan of my work really made me feel safe — that I could just start talking.”Their mutual openness led the Folk Implosion in a very different direction. Contrary to Dinosaur Jr.’s grungy guitar heroics, or Sebadoh’s homespun singer-songwriter recordings, Davis was more comfortable pushing Barlow to experiment with rap and R&B production methods. Most of their songs originated as drum and bass compositions before they layered in samples, loops and nontraditional instrumentation.The Folk Implosion’s “Music for Kids” includes the group’s songs from the movie and additional tracks.Domino Records“We were trying to poke fun at the pieties of this very white indie-rock world, and be open to other influences,” Davis said. He described a dynamic in the underground scene where white musicians, fearing accusations of cultural appropriation, stayed away from historically Black genres altogether. The Folk Implosion was inspired by groups like Devo and Public Image Ltd., who freely combined disparate styles into their own creations. As Barlow put it, “we really felt like everything should be melded together.”Following a whirlwind trip to New York City, where Barlow got a firsthand look at the particular method of Korine and Clark’s madness, he and Davis convened at Boston’s Fort Apache Studios to work on the soundtrack. As the movie was being completed, they were mailed VHS tapes of scenes. The percussively frantic “Nasa Theme” was written for when Sevigny’s character, Jenny, ventures to N.A.S.A., an all-ages dance party at the once-thriving Club Shelter. The jaunty “Cabride” was meant to accompany Jenny as she rides in a taxi cab after learning she has tested positive for H.I.V.Not all of these compositions made it into the film: “Cabride” was cut in favor of a jazz song that Clark preferred. Others, like the haunting “Raise the Bells,” which plays over a lonesome montage of early morning New York City, were pulled right from Barlow’s existing discography. “A lot of things they chose to actually put in the movie, we recorded on a four-track at my house,” Davis noted, including the melancholy yet ascendant “Jenny’s Theme,” which appeared multiple times in the film.A scene from the 1995 film “Kids,” which would become a cultural flashpoint upon its release.MiramaxBut the two never seemed to encounter much resistance as they worked on the soundtrack, which they made without a restrictive budget. (They were paid a flat fee: “I know our lawyer thought it was low, whatever it was,” the band wrote in an email.) The lack of guardrails led to its biggest single, “Natural One.” Conceived for a scene where a group of teenage girls talk frankly about their sex lives, the song was ultimately left out of the final cut. (In its place, Korine inserted a Beastie Boys track.) Nonetheless, the Folk Implosion refused to consign it to the archives.“We didn’t know it would be popular, but we knew that we’d done something very good,” Davis said. After the movie was finished, they received some extra money from London Records that allowed them to add vocals and complete the song. Upon its release and promotion, “Natural One” reached an unlikely position of No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100.The surprise hit invited plenty of attention from curious labels, appropriate in a post-Nirvana era when plenty of big-money contracts were handed out to underground acts. The Folk Implosion signed with Interscope, but the ride wouldn’t last long. Barlow found himself in the untenable position of having to reassure his Sebadoh bandmates that his attentions weren’t divided, which became increasingly difficult.“For all the success I was having, I still had a pretty remarkable lack of confidence,” he said. And Davis became conflicted about participating in mainstream entertainment, which exacerbated his own anxiety about becoming a public figure.Barlow, left, and Davis in 1999. After the release of an album that year on a major label, Davis left the band.David Tonge/Getty ImagesSlowly, their relationship started to fray. Davis ended up quitting the band after the release of “One Part Lullaby” in 1999, their only record for Interscope. They would not speak for over 20 years. But near the start of the pandemic, they became Facebook friends. “I started thinking to myself, ‘What if Lou died, and we never talked to each other again?’” Davis said. After a handful of online interactions, they reconnected over the phone, where they hashed out some of those longstanding issues. They raised the possibility of collaborating again, which led to the “Kids” reissue and their upcoming plans for the Folk Implosion.In a joint interview, they displayed a lively and easygoing dynamic: lots of laughter, lots of smiles. Davis was a very deliberate and politically conscientious speaker on his own — he made frequent reference to writers such as bell hooks and Imani Perry — but he appeared lighter in Barlow’s company. The two freely completed each other’s thoughts, and made instant reference to what the other was more likely to remember about the past.“It’s virtually the same,” Barlow said, of their resumed friendship. As Davis listened on, he explained he was “happy to change the ending” of what had been a sad conclusion to an otherwise fruitful experience.“I don’t think anything’s actually finished until we’re gone,” he said. “I would like to think of us in terms of folk or jazz musicians — people who keep playing music until they dropped dead.” Working with Davis again, he said, had reminded him of the excitement of their initial collaboration. “I could never predict where those songs would end up,” he said. Now, as their new songs have taken shape, “they always surprise me.” More

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      Venice Film Festival: Emma Stone Is a Bizarro Barbie in ‘Poor Things’

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      In the wild new comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”), Stone plays a sexually questing woman with the mind of an infant.“What was I made for?”Though that’s a lyric crooned by Billie Eilish during the climax of “Barbie,” it could just as easily be a question asked by Bella Baxter, the protagonist of “Poor Things.” Played by Emma Stone in this new movie from the director Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”), Bella’s back story is a doozy: She’s a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, saved after suicide when she’s discovered by a demented doctor (Willem Dafoe) who replaces her brain with the one of the unborn child growing inside her.And you thought Barbie’s creation myth was head-spinning!“Poor Things,” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, often plays like a wild, art-house remix of Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster doll opus. It, too, is about a sheltered, childlike woman whose quest for knowledge forces her to venture out into the real world, where the complicated politics of gender both appall and fascinate her.But this is no family film: As baby-brained Bella starts to come of age, her lack of inhibitions steers her toward sexual situations that had the Venice moviegoer next to me squirming in his seat.Based on the book by Alasdair Gray and adapted by Tony McNamara (who co-wrote “The Favourite” for Lanthimos and Stone), “Poor Things” introduces Bella shortly after her brain-swap surgery, when she’s still under close observation by Dafoe’s Dr. Godwin Baxter, who has given her his last name, and his mild-mannered assistant McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Quite literally a child in a woman’s body, Bella can barely string words together and is given to shocking outbursts. Even gaining control of her limbs is a challenge: Bella lurches through Baxter’s mansion like a zombie dressed in drag, which I suppose she kind of is.Still, the two men are each beguiled by her, even though the lovestruck McCandles is intimidated by Bella’s dawning self-awareness and erotic curiosity. That presents an opening for the caddish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), who promises to spring her from Baxter’s custody and smuggle her into the real world for a sexual education. But as Bella grows more independent and capable of sophisticated thoughts, all the men who initially spark to her free spirit become increasingly pathetic in their attempts to trap and keep her.Some Venice viewers have crowed that Stone’s go-for-broke character arc all but guarantees her a second Oscar, though I’d apply a lot of caveats to that prediction: This is a wild, eccentric movie full of explicit sex and violence, and older academy voters might bounce off “Poor Things” during the first 20 minutes.Still, the technical aspects of the film are absolutely worth rewarding. Like “Barbie,” it’s a marvel to look at, though the aesthetic is less “dream house” and more “naughty pop-up book.” Filmed with more fish-eye lenses than a Missy Elliott music video, it’s creatively costumed, too: Bella’s signature look — ruffed collar and Elizabethan sleeves on top, inappropriate bloomers on the bottom — is what you might get if you set a time-traveling Lena Dunham loose in the Renaissance.And for moviegoers who found the feminism of “Barbie” to be too introductory, “Poor Things” takes those themes to their R-rated extreme, interrogating gender dynamics and sexuality from nearly every angle (and since this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, you know those angles are canted). Bella’s quest for enlightenment will push her from plush suites to whorehouses, but the more hard-earned wisdom she accrues, the more the guys in her orbit will be found lacking. Why shouldn’t she try to remake society in her own image? After all, she’s Bella Baxter. They’re just Men. More

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      Venice Film Festival: Why David Fincher Wanted Michael Fassbender to Look ‘Dorky’

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      Movies are full of glamorous hit men. For “The Killer,” the director put his star in a bucket hat: “The $3,000 suit seems like it’s played out.”It’s been 24 years since David Fincher brought one of his movies to the Venice Film Festival, and the last time, things didn’t go so well.“I came here with a little film called ‘Fight Club’” in 1999, he told me during an interview on the Lido this week. “We were fairly run out of town for being fascists.” Even before the premiere of that controversial Brad Pitt flick, the director could sense trouble. “I looked down and the youngest person in our row was Giorgio Armani,” Fincher said. “I was like, ‘I’m not sure the guest list is the right guest list for this.’”So what makes lofty Venice the right place to premiere “The Killer,” Fincher’s new thriller and his first film since the Oscar-winning Hollywood drama “Mank”?“Nothing,” cracked Fincher. “Venice seems like it’s very highbrow — important movies about important subjects — and then there’s our skeevy little movie.”Still, Fincher has always enjoyed toying with people’s expectations. He does it even within the world of “The Killer,” which premiered in Venice on Sunday and stars Fassbender as a hired gun who has to improvise after a fatal assignment goes awry.Based on a French graphic novel and adapted by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the film at first feels like a high-end take on the usual genre tropes: There’s the assassin with no name, the innocent woman in the way and the methodical list of revenge targets to be pursued. But then our protagonist’s constant patter of narration starts to show cracks, as the Killer often thinks one thing and does another. By the end, you’ll wonder if we know this guy at all, or whether he’s ever really known himself.And then there’s what he’s wearing. Though Hollywood would have us believe that assassins always look impossibly chic and well-tailored, Fincher puts his protagonist in Skechers, a zip-up fleece and a bucket hat.“He’s totally dorky!” the director said. “We were never intending for it to look glamorous.”Inspiration struck when Fincher flipped through reference photos and landed on a German tourist snapped wearing those nondescript items on the streets of Paris. “I was like, ‘All of this stuff could be purchased in an airport,’” said Fincher, who sent the photo to his costume designer, Cate Adams. “I said, ‘This is what he needs to be, a guy who can get off a plane and buy a whole wardrobe on his way from the gate to the rental car.’”Fincher found no complaints from his leading man, who wasn’t in Venice because of the SAG-AFTRA strike: “Michael’s cool. He was not freaked out about having to look a little dorky.” And that aesthetic extends even to the Killer’s escape from a botched job, which takes place not via high-speed car chase but with a zippy little motor scooter, though Fincher considered taking that sequence in an even dweebier direction. “At one point, we even debated the Razor scooter,” he said, nixing that only because it wouldn’t perform well during a stair stunt.So though the Killer remains a mystery to himself, at least one thing can be said for sure of this indifferently dressed man: He ain’t exactly John Wick.“The $3,000 suit seems like it’s played out,” Fincher said. Still, he was surprised to find someone wearing his protagonist’s silly headwear in another recent assassin movie: “It’s funny because when Pitt told me he had selected a bucket hat for ‘Bullet Train,’ I was like, ‘OK, dude, you’re stepping into our sandbox.’”Though Fincher has a skill for image-making that extends back to the music videos he directed for the likes of Madonna, with “The Killer,” he was more interested in dismantling that sort of cinematic iconography. Instead of a glamorous lair, Fassbender’s character keeps his weapons in a mundane storage locker, and instead of using high-tech gadgets to break into targets’ homes, he orders key-duplication tools off Amazon.“I was like, ‘I want James Bond by way of Home Depot,’” Fincher said. “By the end of this, you should be like, who’s the guy in the rental car line with you, and why is he wearing that outdated hat? You ignore the German tourist at your peril.”And while the movies would have us believe that the world is full of clever, high-flying assassins, Fincher sought to ground his character’s tunnel vision in a more mundane reality. “I love the idea of a Charles Bronson character who’s maybe misdiagnosed adult autistic,” he said. “And before 2023, I’m not sure anybody would have gone, ‘Oh, that makes sense.’”So if the Killer’s fashion choices or inner motivations sometimes stump you, just know that’s by design.“He seems to have a hard time reading the room,” Fincher said. “And any room that he goes into, eventually, he’s the only guy in it.” More

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      From ‘The Idol’ to ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Nudity Summer Report Card

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      From “The Idol” to “Oppenheimer,” women’s bodies were on display on our screens the past few months. Some executions succeeded with humor, others felt misguided.This has been a summer of women being liberated — from their wardrobes, mostly. The nudity on our screens has been a topic of constant conversation for months, from the provoking premiere of “The Idol” in June to the left-field nudity in “Oppenheimer” (and the interpersonal havoc it wreaked on some relationships, as one viral TikTok can attest to). In each instance the theme, in one respect or another, seems to be liberation: not necessarily of the de Beauvoir variety, but a female character’s liberation from some kind of enclosure, whether societal, cultural or personal, and her nudity is meant to reflect that.Depending on the context of the story, the director’s intention, the work’s perspective or the execution of the shot, a nude scene may serve as shorthand for a character’s newfound physical or spiritual freedom, or even an emotional or psychological breakthrough. Or it may be another case of entertainment using a woman’s body for shock value. What follows is a spoiler-filled survey of the most gratuitous, unforgettable scenes of nudity this summer — and an analysis of which ones succeeded in showcasing the female form with reason and intention, as more than just eye candy.Constant nudity means an unsatisfying night of television.The setup: On “The Idol,” a young pop star named Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), feeling artistically frustrated and in the midst of a nervous breakdown, thrives under the tutelage of a mysterious club owner named Tedros (Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. The Weeknd) who is fostering a cult of skilled wannabe stars.The scene: It’s tough to pick just one nude scene in this disaster of a television show because Jocelyn is perennially stuck in a state of partial undress. In the first few minutes of the first episode we see Jocelyn in an open silky red robe at a photo shoot, arguing with the intimacy coordinator about her choice to do the shoot with her breasts visible.By belittling the job of the intimacy coordinator, the scene appears to be less about building Jocelyn as a character than it is about the series planting a flag in the bedraggled land of lurid television. Jocelyn’s insistence on doing the shoot without covering up is meant to illustrate that she’s a liberated woman, fully in charge of her sexuality, her body, her image. But “The Idol” never figures out what it thinks of its own characters, nor what they want or what to do with them.One of the prevailing questions about the show among viewers was: Are we meant to think Jocelyn is actually talented? It’s unclear whether the show considers its protagonist a true artist or an inept yet deluded peddler of mass-market schlock. Similarly, we don’t know how much control Jocelyn actually has. Her submissiveness to Tedros seems to indicate that she’s being manipulated. So Jocelyn’s daily wardrobe choices — which don’t ever seem to include baggy house clothes for bloated days or cotton pajamas for comfy lounging — seem to be less about her own self-image and freedom than they are about her being trapped in a 24/7 prison of objectification by her public and those around her.But the show makes a messy concluding three-point-turn near the end, proposing that perhaps Jocelyn was the evil mastermind after all. Just like the show can’t have both its earnest, docile starlet and cunning undercover operator, it can’t have a celebrity with both total agency and an obsession with appeasing everyone in their ideas of what she should look like and what she represents as an artist. Either way, with the show’s cancellation, it seems Jocelyn’s career is forever dead, with no Tedros to revive it.Andrew Barth Feldman as Percy and Jennifer Lawrence as Maddie in “No Hard Feelings.”Macall Polay/Columbia Pictures – Sony PicturesFisticuffs in the buff make sexuality besides the point.The setup: In “No Hard Feelings,” Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence), a crude and awkward 30-something with commitment issues who’s strapped for cash, responds to an ad from a rich couple seeking a woman to date and deflower their unknowing 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). Maddie’s attempts at seducing the neurotic and insecure teenager are repeatedly thwarted in the most ridiculous ways, but in the process Maddie and Percy build a real connection.The scene: One night, as Maddie and a reluctant Percy go skinny-dipping at the beach, some bullies try to steal their stuff. Maddie steps out of the water in a full-frontal reveal, which then leads to a very NSFW fight sequence.Here “No Hard Feelings” takes a classic romance trope — the sexy, impromptu post-date dip — and wrings out all of the seduction, instead opting for absurd physical comedy. The scene, which includes an impressive crotch punch, succeeds for Lawrence’s dedication to this juvenile (and creepy) entry into the “raunchy sex comedy” category of forgettable B-movies.The camerawork is respectful, matter-of-fact, with no hint of a lingering eye. Lawrence’s body is not the point of the scene, but the vehicle of the comedy. Her sexuality is incidental; she pummels the beach interlopers so thoroughly that the violence purposely undermines her attempt to appear desirous to Percy.Cynthia Nixon, left, and Sara Ramirez in Season 2 of “And Just Like That…”Craig Blankenhorn/MaxMiranda deserves better.The setup: In the second season of this “Sex and the City” sequel, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) struggles to maintain her frayed relationships with her family while figuring out how she defines her sexual identity.The scene: Despite the show’s revolutionary, daring precursor, “And Just Like That…” can’t seem to figure out how to write its characters into a new world of sex, relationships and dating. AJLT also takes a more demure approach to its depictions of sex — which makes Miranda’s two full-frontal nude scenes in Episode 1 especially surprising.A beloved character that many SATC fans read to be coded gay — as did Nixon herself, who has been outspoken about her own coming out journey — Miranda discovers a new dimension to her sexuality once she meets Che (Sara Ramirez), a queer nonbinary comedian. In the first nude scene, part of a season-opening sex montage, Miranda is the only one of the cast members who is exposed, shown nude from the belly up in a pool with Che. At first the montage seems to place the queer romance on equal terms with the cis heterosexual ones, but the moment of nudity does seem as though “And Just Like That…” is calling special, almost self-congratulatory, attention to Miranda and Che.But Miranda struggles to adjust to a new relationship, a new sexuality and a new lifestyle, exemplified by the second scene, where Miranda tries Che’s sensory deprivation tank. Unable to relax, Miranda panics and stumbles her way out of the tank, floundering in the nude. It’s a depiction of the fish-out-of-water metaphor that extends to another scene in the episode that shows her in the bedroom with Che struggling to use a sex toy. Here Miranda serves as a comic aside.Miranda’s arc has been the least forgiving in the series, given how her journey of self-discovery comes at the cost of her relationships and, in these nude scenes and others, her dignity. Miranda’s nascent sexual liberation is graphically defined by gaffes and naïveté. For a show that aims to represent women — and, particularly, middle-aged women, with more diverse bodies and backgrounds and sexual orientations than “SATC” included in its series — “And Just Like That…” unfortunately uses an older woman’s body as a punchline.Stephanie Hsu as Kat, from left, Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Ashley Park as Audrey, and Sherry Cola as Lolo in a scene from the film “Joy Ride.”Ed Araquel/Lionsgate, via Associated PressA well-placed tattoo can create comedy gold.The setup: In “Joy Ride” Audrey (Ashley Park), an Asian American lawyer raised by white parents, travels to China for a business trip that, thanks to her friends Lolo (Sherry Cola), Kat (Stephanie Hsu) and Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), transforms into a crazy vacation full of sex, drugs and misadventures. In one such outing Audrey finds herself in the middle of a threesome with two handsome basketball players. In another, a wardrobe malfunction reveals Kat’s secret genital tattoo.The scene: The movie’s charm lies largely in its dedication to its tried-but-true girlfriends-gone-wild genre of comedy. So even the formulaic setups and telegraphed emotional resolution are entertaining given how much free rein the characters — and the actors playing them — are offered to showcase the film’s absurdity. One of the reoccurring themes in the movie is the importance of being true to yourself, and the nude scenes fall perfectly in line with this idea.Audrey’s emotional journey hinges on her unwillingness to find her birth mother and connect with her culture. Her friends mock her for her uptightness and for her unchecked internalized racism — the knee-jerk trust she shows for a blond white woman over someone who looks like her, her obliviousness to her culture’s food and traditions, her infamously poor track record for dating Asian men. So when she sleeps with two attractive Asian athletes, it’s her liberating moment, when she can let loose sexually and feel open to embracing — literally and figuratively — Asianness.Likewise, Kat’s nude moment — revealing the giant demon head encompassing her full vulva — is the punchline to a classic, tidy setup that traces back to the early scenes of the movie, when Audrey lets slip to Lolo that Kat has a genital tattoo. Lolo’s vulgar line of questioning and theories about Kat’s private art, paired with the reveal that Kat pretends to be a chaste virgin in her relationship with her very Christian fiancé, build up the comedic tension. When her embellished nethers make an appearance, it’s a surprise, but not a sexy one. The garish detail of the demon face — and the pivot to an “internal” view, the camera showing the other three friends peeking into her vagina — rockets the movie’s comedy up to absurd heights without seeming unnecessarily sexualized or exploitative.Florence Pugh is Jean Tatlock and Cillian Murphy is J. Robert Oppenheimer in the film “Oppenheimer.”Universal PicturesOne man gets to be brilliant, while a brilliant woman gets to be naked.The setup: In “Oppenheimer,” the eponymous father of the atomic bomb (Cillian Murphy) is seen through the lens of his research, shifting politics and personal affairs — including a romance with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) — from his school days to his role as scientific director of the Manhattan Project to his public discrediting in the wake of a 1954 security hearing.The scene: For all of the ways “Oppenheimer” succeeds as a film, from its cinematography and performances to its storytelling, it also commits a cardinal cinematic sin: not just underusing a great actress like Florence Pugh, but also blatantly objectifying her character in gratuitous nude scenes.In Pugh’s first scene, Jean and Oppenheimer meet and banter, as if to show that she’s a worthy intellectual adversary, and therefore a worthy lover for the man-genius. After a meager couple of lines of dialogue Jean is naked, straddling Oppenheimer while instructing him to translate a copy of the “Bhagavad Gita” in his room. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” he translates, immediately transforming the scene into a misogynistic trope so often used in stories about male genius. Jean is not a brilliant thinker with daring politics; she’s not a character with her own story and agency. She is reduced to a body and a brilliant man’s inspiration.In Pugh’s second nude scene, when Tatlock persuades Oppenheimer to take a short leave of the Manhattan Project to spend the night with her in a hotel, she’s the stand-in for temptation. Her passion for him, and his ultimate refusal to continue their affair, helps the film craft an image of a man who is desired not just for his brain, but also his body.But the most unforgivable is Jean’s final nude appearance, imagined by Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), during Oppenheimer’s hearing. The only new information the scene is meant to convey is Kitty’s reaction to the council’s line of questioning about Oppenheimer’s affair with Jean. But Blunt’s acting — the hardness in her eyes, the clear expression of disdain and embarrassment — tells us all we need to know about her emotional response. Here the film yet again erases Jean’s personhood; she exists almost purely within the imagination of Oppenheimer and that of his wife, who like Jean, is similarly underwritten. She’s an underdressed footnote in a story about a smart guy she slept with a few times. What woman would envy that? More

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      Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

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      Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. It doesn’t just happen.” More

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      Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78

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      She won Emmy and Peabody Awards for “The Loving Story,” about a Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage.Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.The cause had not yet been determined, her sister and only immediate survivor, Judith Cohen, said.After founding the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 1998 at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and directing it for a decade, Ms. Buirski (pronounced BURR-skee) made her own first documentary, “The Loving Story,” in 2011.The film explored the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, who faced imprisonment because their interracial marriage in 1958 was illegal in Virginia. (She was part-Black and part-Native American, and he was white.)Their challenge to the law resulted in a landmark civil rights ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1967 that voided state anti-miscegenation laws.The documentary, directed by Ms. Buirski, won an Emmy for outstanding historical programming, long form, and a Peabody Award. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and made its television debut on HBO during Black History Month in 2012.“Drawing from a wealth of stunning archival footage,” Dave Itzkoff wrote in The New York Times. “‘The Loving Story’ recreates a seminal moment in history in uncommon style, anchoring a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.”Richard and Mildred Loving in “The Loving Story,” Ms. Buirski’s documentary about that Virginia couple’s successful challenge to a ban on interracial marriage during the Civil Rights era.Grey Villet, via Barbara Villet/Icarus FilmsMs. Buirski went on to seek more stories to tell, drawing on a wide range of voices and experiences.“Nancy was a completely original thinker and a visionary,” her frequent collaborator and producer, Susan Margolin, said in an email. “With every film she pushed the limits of the art form with her kaleidoscopic, unique approach to storytelling.”Ms. Buirski directed, co-produced and wrote “Afternoon of a Faun” (2013), about the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, who contracted polio while on tour in 1956; and “By Sidney Lumet” (2015), about the acclaimed filmmaker, both of which were broadcast by PBS on “American Masters.”She also directed, co-produced and wrote “The Rape of Recy Taylor” (2017), about the 1944 kidnapping of a Black woman by seven white men. Despite their confessions, they were never charged, although in 2011 the Alabama Legislature apologized for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.The critic Roger Ebert called the film “a stiffing, infuriating marvel,” and it was awarded a human rights prize at the 74th Venice International Film Festival.Ms. Buirski went on to direct, co-produce and write “A Crime on the Bayou” (2021) about a 1966 altercation sparked by school integration, and “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” (2023), which explores John Schlesinger’s 1969 film starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman.She was also a special adviser to “Summer of Soul” (2021), Questlove’s Academy Award-winning concert-film documentary, based on rediscovered footage, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival.Years earlier, as a picture editor on the international desk at The New York Times, Ms. Buirski was credited with choosing the image that won the newspaper its first Pulitzer Prize for photography, in 1994.After seeking a photograph to accompany an article on war and famine in southern Sudan, she choose one by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist, of an emaciated toddler collapsing on the way to a United Nations feeding center as a covetous vulture lurked in the background.Ms. Buirski commended the photo to Nancy Lee, The Times’ picture editor at the time. She then proposed it, strongly, for the front page, because, she recalled telling another editor, “This is going to win the paper’s first-ever Pulitzer Prize for photography.”The photograph ended up appearing on an inside page in the issue of March 26, 1993, but the reaction from readers, concerned about the child’s fate, was so strong that The Times published an unusual editors’ note afterward explaining that the child had continued to the feeding center after Mr. Carter chased away the vulture.The picture won the Pulitzer in the feature photography category. (Mr. Carter died by suicide a few months later at 33.)Ms. Buirski was born Nancy Florence Cohen on June 24, 1945, in Manhattan to Daniel and Helen (Hochstein) Cohen. Her father was a paper manufacturer.After graduating from New Rochelle High School in Westchester County, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., in 1967.She worked as an editor for the Magnum photo agency before joining The Times.As a photographer she produced a book of 150 images titled “Earth Angels: Migrant Children in America” (1994), which vividly captured the children of migrant farmworkers at work during the day and attending school at night and dramatized the hazards they faced from poor housing, harsh working conditions and exposure to pesticides.Her marriages to Peter Buirski and Kenneth Friedlein ended in divorce. More

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      The Grueling Process of Making the Horror Movie ‘Beaten to Death’

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      The director Sam Curtain and the actor Thomas Roach discuss making a new ultraviolent horror movie so grueling that it left its lead hospitalized at the end of the shoot.From “Slumber Party Massacre” to “It Follows,” some of the most memorable horror movie titles double as pint-size plot summaries. That’s the case for Sam Curtain’s “Beaten to Death,” a mercilessly violent new movie that has critics dog-earing their thesauruses for superlatives to describe its savagery. So far, there’s “gauntlet of extreme horror” and “non-stop nightmare.”Now in theaters, “Beaten to Death” is high on depravity and low on plot. It’s about a man, Jack (Thomas Roach), who travels to a desolate stretch of Tasmania and encounters deranged locals who kick, punch, slice and, in the film’s most horrific scene, blind him and leave him to roam the landscape alone. In an interview, Roach said the role’s physical demands were “very challenging”; near the end of the 30-day shoot, he was hospitalized overnight for an inflamed kidney.Roach said he would consider it a badge of honor if there were walkouts at American theaters. “Hopefully we’re going to make a few people squeamish,” he said.Curtain and Roach recently spoke over Zoom from Tasmania about their love of gross-out horror and what’s so Australian about extreme cinema. (The film is a nonunion Australian project, and not impacted by the SAG-AFTRA strike.) The interview has been edited and condensed.Sam, why did you make this film?SAM CURTAIN Horror’s just fun. Even if it’s the most disturbing thing, it’s still enjoyable.Would you describe this film as enjoyable?CURTAIN [Laughs] No. Even though it’s shockingly violent, there’s a bit of playfulness to it. This onslaught that Jack receives, it’s like oh no, not again. Oh no, not again. Because it’s our friend, Tom, playing the role, it’s like, what could we do to Tom?That blinding scene is tough to watch.CURTAIN It was a lot of fun. What excited us was what we referred to as “the black” — after Jack has had his eyes gouged out, you get his blinded point of view, and what you hear can be creepier than what you see. In a cinema, that’s the one I’ve been waiting for, to see how people respond to that couple of minutes of pure black on the screen with just sound design. The sound you hear in that scene is Thomas vomiting. Our poor sound guy listening to [makes a retching sound] is hard to forget.Roach in a scene from “Beaten to Death.”Welcome Villain FilmsWhy make it so violent?CURTAIN We thought it was an opportunity to create a scene that’s really quite shocking. We were being strategic as well. If we can create a scene that gets people talking, that can only help the movie.Was there a film that inspired you?CURTAIN The “Hills Have Eyes” remake. That’s a really nasty little movie, but also it’s quite beautifully shot. It’s out in the desert and the gore is really good and there’s action to it. Besides that, it was classics like “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” — what I think they call hicksploitation.Thomas, why did you take this role?THOMAS ROACH Sam and I were out having drinks when he pitched me the idea. As soon as he said “lead,” he had me. [Laughs] I was concerned with the extreme nature of the role and what it would take to get it done. I probably did underestimate that, because it was quite demanding in the end, physically and emotionally.It was as grueling as it looks?ROACH Yeah. I spent a large portion of the shoot with these big, heavy appliances over my eyes and I couldn’t see at all. That was quite isolating. Between takes you’re just sitting in darkness and you don’t know what’s going on around you. It’s strange how quickly you withdraw into yourself. I found myself not really contributing to conversations around me because I didn’t know where anyone was. I just sat there. I had to be taken like a toddler to the toilet.I wanted to spend the movie acting like I was in a state of shock. I was shivering and tensed up and hyperventilating for a lot of it. Before we’d start rolling, to the chagrin of everyone on set, I’d go into a coughing fit and get to the edge of where I would vomit and then be like, ready to roll. You end the day sore all over.Is there something uniquely Australian about the film?CURTAIN The Australian characters, these big burly blokey-blokes with thick Aussie accents.ROACH The whole “Crocodile Dundee” bloke — maybe outside of Australia they think everybody’s like that. We wanted to turn that on its head. The archetypal characters we have in our movie are quite toxic. The landscape is also a character. The real antagonists are the elements, specifically Tasmanian.Thomas, would you be in a movie like this again?ROACH Would I do it tomorrow? No. I’m either a glutton for punishment or an idiot, but I would do it again. More

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      Sci-fi Movies to Stream: ‘Shin Ultraman,’ ‘Dry Ground Burning’ and More

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      This month’s picks include cute-robot charm and alien abduction angst.‘Shin Ultraman’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.From the start, it’s obvious that this is not a regular Kaiju movie. The genre, in which gigantic beasts à la Godzilla lay waste to cities and swaths of countryside, is not known for restraint, but “Shin Ultraman” is completely, unpredictably off the wall.Captain Tamura (Hidetoshi Nishijima, from the radically different “Drive My Car”) leads a task force dedicated to fighting the big monsters that turn up with clockwork regularity. “For some reason, Kaiju only appear in Japan,” someone quips about the creatures’s absence elsewhere in the world. But even this elite squad is flabbergasted when a mysterious helmeted giant clad in a superhero-like red and silver bodysuit shows up. Called Ultraman (a popular character who has been the subject of many iterations since its introduction in 1966), the newcomer helps the overwhelmed team battle aliens like Mefilas (Koji Yamamoto).Both a reboot and a riff, “Shin Ultraman,” which was directed by Shinji Higuchi and written by Hideaki Anno (the pair also collaborated on “Shin Godzilla” in 2016), is a surreal trip. It’s hard to oversell the eye-popping invention and droll humor on display here, but it’s Higuchi’s mise en scène that stands out, packed with odd angles and seemingly arbitrary shots, as when a character opens a computer file and the movie cuts to her feet under her desk. Shiro Sagisu’s score is equally bonkers and disruptive, incorporating 1960s pop, thrash riffs, chamber suites and jazzy noodlings. It all amounts to pure joy.‘Tang and Me’Stream it on Amazon.Chances are you haven’t heard of Deborah Install’s “A Robot in the Garden” (2015), unless you live in Japan, where the novel has been adapted into a radio play, a stage musical and now this charming kid-friendly movie.Ken (Kazunari Ninomiya) has a terminal case of arrested development, whiling away his days playing elaborate virtual-reality games and avoiding any hint of household work. One day, a rusty, taped-up robot turns up in the garden, offering its name as Tang. Shortly thereafter, Ken’s fed-up wife, Emi (Hikari Mitsushima), kicks him out of their house. So he sets out for Atobit Systems, the company that manufactured Tang, to trade that old model for a brand-new one, which he will then give to Emi to get back in her graces.The latest from the prolific director Takahiro Miki (“The Door Into Summer”) does not revolutionize the cute-robot genre, but it is very effective. Naturally, Ken will change for the best, thanks to Tang — whose mysterious origin and initial purpose are at the heart of the story — but this utter predictability is a feature, not a bug, and is embraced as such by the film. Young viewers are likely to clamor for a toy version of the adorable bot, while their parents are more likely to be interested in the movie’s awfully believable near-future, in which delivery drones crisscross the sky and robots are absolutely everywhere in our daily life.‘Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.When the Levan family moves to a quaint Western town, the teenage Itsy (the excellent Emma Tremblay) is not especially pleased: She is now living in the middle of nowhere, plus being singled out as the new kid is never fun. Maybe that’s why she immediately connects with her new classmate Calvin (Jacob Buster, a charmer bound to resurface in bigger-budget projects), who is ostracized as the local weirdo. Calvin is a heartthrob in nerd clothing — more specifically in a spacesuit, which he is prone to wear to school — and is on a quest to find the parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) he hasn’t seen in 10 years. He is convinced they were taken by aliens one fateful night and has been searching the skies ever since. Itsy pretends to befriend him for a journalism project, though it’s clear she’s actually taken by Calvin’s quirky sincerity, and perhaps even by his far-fetched story about extraterrestrial creatures secretly visiting Earth whenever a certain comet gets close.Jake Van Wagoner’s film is a throwback to 1980s family-friendly fare, and it nicely captures the formula’s basic elements, down to the presence of a smart-aleck little boy (Itsy’s brother, Evan, played by Kenneth Cummins), an unironic embrace of the cutesy and the cheesy in equal proportions and, perhaps most important, a general good nature.‘Life Cycle’Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Carl (Adam Weber) lives in his grandparents’ rec-room-like basement, seems to survive on power bars and takeout, and watches old black-and-white movies on an ancient-looking TV set. The only other living presence in that den is Vetro (voiced by Kory Karam), an animatronic head with enormous blue eyes sitting on Carl’s desk. A computer programmer, Carl is ambitious: “You are to become human,” he informs his creation. To that end, Vetro has been endowed with the ability to generate “new expansions.” In other words, he is sentient and can upgrade himself. One of his first moves is to give himself a new “multilayered emotional matrix,” and it doesn’t take long for Vetro to exhibit somewhat cunning traits — he can be both obsequious and creepy.The writer-director Christopher Morvant’s most distinctive spin on the thriving A.I. genre was to make Vetro a cartoonish animatronic/puppet character that looks goofy yet comes across as unsettling, especially since Morvant often shows him in startling close-ups. The movie is, admittedly, overlong, especially since it’s essentially a talkathon between Carl and Vetro, and the writing is not quite strong enough to sustain the more complex philosophical issues it raises. But “Life Cycle” does have a few surprises in store, and Morvant’s sui generis world nimbly juxtaposes technologies that feel pulled from completely different eras. Pretty good for a movie shot in a garage in a month.‘Dry Ground Burning’Rent or buy it on Amazon.Set in an impoverished Sol Nascente, in Brazil, Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’s film is tough to categorize. “Dry Ground Burning” follows the activities of a women’s gang, led by Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado), that steals oil and resells it as gas to groups of bikers. Add to that mix the re-entry into society of Chitara’s half sister, Léa (Léa Alves da Silva), who is newly released from prison. In conventional hands, these could be an action-packed thriller’s starting point. Pimenta and Queirós go down a completely different road, both in form and in content.We are in a dystopian pamphlet targeting the far-right policies of Brazil’s authoritarian former president Jair Bolsonaro, which were devastating for the poor, the minorities and the outcasts at the movie’s heart. All of this is put together with a documentarylike matter-of-factness, increased by the fact that the cast is made up of non- or semiprofessional actors. When scenes set during, say, a raucous bus trip or a religious ceremony hypnotically go on and on as if in real time, you might wonder if Frederick Wiseman had suddenly gone to Brazil. Tip: Go with the flow — you can’t rush life, politics or this film. More