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      Comedian’s Malaysia Joke Prompts Threats and a Diplomatic Incident

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      Jocelyn Chia’s line about the 2014 missing airliner was part of a Comedy Cellar set in April. But when video was posted this week, outrage poured in.At the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan this spring, the stand-up comedian Jocelyn Chia performed a routine that she had reliably included in her sets for more than a year, about the historical animosity between Singapore, the city-state in Southeast Asia where she was raised, and its neighbor Malaysia.But when Chia and the club posted a clip from the April 7 set to TikTok and Instagram this week, it provoked a heated backlash. The 89-second video showed the comedian bantering with an audience member who volunteered that he is Malaysian. And it concluded with Chia’s making light of the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 with 239 people onboard. Angry Malaysians flooded the comment sections on Chia’s social media accounts. The Comedy Cellar received 4,000 one-star reviews on Google almost overnight and its website was hacked, its owner said. TikTok removed a clip of the joke from Chia’s account, flagging it as “hateful behavior” and a violation of its community guidelines, according to a screenshot Chia shared with The New York Times.Even Singapore’s minister for foreign affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, weighed in, condemning Chia and apologizing for her “horrendous comments” in a tweet noting, “She certainly does not speak for Singaporeans.”The incident demonstrated the fraught line toed by comedians when edgy routines are removed from their natural habitats in dark, late-night, alcohol-lubricated clubs and posted to social media for all to see. Managers of the Comedy Cellar and the West Side Comedy Club, where Chia has performed, said they had received or been threatened with negative reviews as part of the backlash. Chia said that her family and friends had received hate messages.At a club, “you can get away with saying stuff that’s kind of outrageous,” said Noam Dworman, the Comedy Cellar’s owner. “You can’t put that same moment into a small screen that you’re watching over morning coffee.”But Chia, who performed this week in New York and has future gigs planned, said in an interview on Friday that the fallout had not damaged her career. “I’m in no way canceled in America, in any sense of the word,” she said. “Now people want to come see me.”Chia, who was born in Boston and held joint American-Singaporean citizenship until adulthood, was a lawyer who decided her true calling lay in stand-up comedy.Her extended routine, which the clip abbreviated, mentions the former Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew and how he appeared to tear up in 1965 when the city-state was expelled from Malaysia “because he thought we were not going to survive,” Chia says in the video. “But then 40 years later, we became a first-world country. And you guys, Malaysia, what are you now? Still a developing country. Awww.”Likening the 1965 rupture to a breakup, she imagined Malaysia trying to woo Singapore back and explaining it hadn’t visited because “my airplanes cannot fly.” Then she added, to laughter, “What? Malaysia Airlines going missing not funny?”The complete routine has been one of her most successful recent bits, she said. “It gets raucous,” she said. “The full bit is well set up — I build up emotion.”The set seemed to set off an international incident only after its appearance this week on social media. Following the backlash, Chia removed the clip at the Comedy Cellar’s request, then reposted it to TikTok without the club’s logo. That’s when TikTok removed it.“I didn’t want the haters to think they had won and got me to back down,” she said. “Audiences at the Comedy Cellar see the best comedians and they love it, so how can I be embarrassed by it?”Felicia Madison, the managing partner and talent booker at the West Side Comedy Club in Manhattan, said she had been threatened with negative reviews by fans who figured out that Chia had appeared there. “We’re a pretty new club,” she said. “When people want to see if they should go, they look at reviews.”Dworman argued that the spate of negative reviews — which dragged down the Comedy Cellar’s overall rating before Google restored it — went beyond people exercising their right to be offended.“You’re entitled to dislike it and complain about it, but they’re trying to make it too risky for me to allow this woman to speak onstage,” he said. “That’s not a refutation of what she said, or a thoughtful appeal to the fact that this is something she should consider was too hurtful. This is essentially using brute force to make the other side say ‘uncle.’” More

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      How It Takes an Old ‘Beast Wars’ to Make a New ‘Transformers’

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      The Canadian-made computer animated series “Beast Wars: Transformers” serves as the unlikely basis for the latest film in the popular franchise.This summer’s “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” is the latest of seven films in the long-running series of live-action films based on Hasbro’s hugely popular toy franchise; the first since the critically acclaimed 2018 spinoff, “Bumblebee”; and the first mainline installment since the Michael Bay-directed “Transformers: The Last Knight” (2017). Like all of the films in the series to date, “Rise of the Beasts” is based on characters first designed in 1984 as a line of children’s action figures, much like Mattel’s Masters of the Universe or Hasbro’s own G.I. Joe. But this new chapter also pulls from an unusual source: “Beast Wars: Transformers,” a somewhat obscure Canadian television show that ran from 1996 to 1999.A scene from “Beast Wars: Transformers.”Alliance Atlantis Communications“Rise of the Beasts” takes place largely in New York in the 1990s, and follows the action-packed exploits of a race of powerful robots who live in disguise as cars and trucks, including the series hero Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, reprising his role as voice actor from all of the previous films). This time around, Prime and his allies are joined by the Maximals, time-traveling Transformers from the distant future who turn into animals rather than vehicles: They include the rhinoceros Rhinox (David Sobolov), the falcon Airazor (Michelle Yeoh), the cheetah Cheetor (Tongayi Chirisa) and the gorilla Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman), a descendant of Prime. All of the new animal Transformers have been faithfully lifted from “Beast Wars,” which featured these characters living on a barren alien planet and doing battle with the nefarious Blackarachnia (a spider) and Scorponok (a scorpion), among other foes with similarly literal names.“Beast Wars” was produced in Vancouver, British Columbia, by the animation company Mainframe Studios, which had previously developed “ReBoot,” a pioneering computer-animated series from the ’90s, for the popular Canadian children’s entertainment network YTV. Also fully computer-animated — at a time when that technology was still in its infancy — “Beast Wars” looked a little like a starker, more rudimentary version of “Toy Story,” with colorful, bulbous character models moving simply around sparse environments. The series ran for three seasons on YTV (under the more kid-friendly title “Beasties”) and in syndication across the United States, winning a Daytime Emmy for outstanding achievement in animation in 1998 and inspiring a TV sequel, several comic books and two video games — and now, almost three decades after its debut, a feature film (sort of).Were it not for some of its characters and designs resurfacing this month in “Rise of the Beasts,” it seems likely that “Beast Wars” would have continued to recede into a lasting obsolescence, forgotten to all but the most nostalgic ’90s kids and most dedicated “Transformers” fans. And while the somewhat tangential connection to the source material may prevent the movie from kicking off a sudden torrent of interest in the Canadian series — “Rise of the Beasts” has not been especially billed as a “Beast Wars” movie, and the show has scarcely come up during press for the film — it’s still a good occasion to give the series its long-awaited due. Happily, the entire original run of “Beast Wars” was released on home video by Shout Factory in 2011 and is now available for purchase on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Who Created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos? A New Movie Seeks Answers

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      The film, now streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus, was adapted from a debunked memoir, but it does reveal how food brands want to be seen.Like Oscar Isaac, I occasionally use chopsticks to eat hot Cheetos, a technique that keeps their red dust from sticking to my fingers. It’s the neatest way to keep pace with a perfectly engineered snack, designed both to satisfy the desire for its prickly heat and violent crunch, its convincing tang and mellow sweetness, and to fuel an immediate need to revisit it.There are films this year celebrating (and satirizing) the invention of all kinds of consumer products, including the BlackBerry, Air Jordans and Tetris, but I never imagined that this spicy little snack produced by a multinational corporation could be the hero of a late-capitalist uplift saga.“Flamin’ Hot,” directed by Eva Longoria and streaming now on Hulu and Disney Plus, is a frothy, optimistic, very American film about Richard Montañez, a Mexican American kid from San Bernardino County who grows up to work at a Frito-Lay plant and dreams up a billion-dollar idea: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.Through Montañez, the rise of the fingertip-staining, habit-forming, spicy corn-based snack becomes a story of the American dream — a ’90s-style janitor-to-executive tale fueled by pure grit and guts. Is it Montañez’s biopic, or the snack’s? In the film, there’s no difference, and success is a blurry, feverish longing. Montañez imagines his personal triumph as tangled up with the product’s, and seems convinced that corporate approval of hot Cheetos will somehow translate to respect and representation for working-class Mexican Americans. If that all seems a bit too tidy, a bit too good to be true, well, it’s because it is.“Flamin’ Hot” was adapted from the memoir-ish self-help book of the real-life Richard Montañez. (One example of its guidance: “You can start your journey by putting your hunger to work for you so you can move past your fears.”). Though Mr. Montañez did work his way up from janitor to marketing executive at Frito-Lay, a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2021 thoroughly debunked the story of his inventing hot Cheetos.Jesse Garcia plays Mr. Montañez as a charming and somewhat unreliable narrator of his own story.Searchlight Pictures/20th Century StudiosIn fact, in the late 1980s, Frito-Lay was losing on small-bag snack sales and getting desperate. Testing a spicy flavor line was a coordinated corporate strategy, and hot Cheetos were first released to the company’s test markets in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Houston, not Southern California, where the film is set.Mr. Montañez’s version was admittedly way more fun than the truth, but adapting it was also an opportunity to revise, reshape and ultimately align the story of hot Cheetos with consumers.In the film, getting ready for his pitch to the executives, he practices his lines with a co-worker at the factory: “The Hispanic market will not be ignored!” But in the big meeting, he softens, admitting both his strategy and his vulnerability: “I want to know that I matter to you, to this company, to the world.”In the years since they were introduced, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos have become a billion-dollar product for Frito-Lay.The Image Party/ShutterstockHot Cheetos are great, but I don’t know — does anyone think a snack can do all that? Gushers can tweet about #BlackLivesMatter, M&M’s green mascot can switch from heels to flats and Skittles can print new packaging for Pride, but we all know that gestures from food brands tend to be hollow.In “Flamin’ Hot,” the PepsiCo chief executive Roger Enrico gives away the game: “You still think I’m investing in a janitor?” he says. “The Hispanic market is the future and this man is going to lead us there.”It sounds like a betrayal, but it’s not. It’s exactly what Montañez, who would later become known as the “godfather of Hispanic marketing” has been fighting for from the start — not for people, but for consumers — and the film exalts it.A murky and heartbreaking impulse drives Montañez from the start of the film, when he realizes that the elementary school bullies making fun of his lunch actually kind of like it. He starts charging them 25 cents per foil-wrapped bean burrito, converting his humiliation into cold, hard cash. Maybe he can’t get his haters to like him, but at least they like his food. Later, at the Frito-Lay factory, Montañez and his co-workers “fight” corporate, which refuses to invest in marketing hot Cheetos properly, setting up the product — and by extension, Montañez and his crew — to fail. They find their own ingenious, dodgy ways to get the product off the shelves in Rancho Cucamonga. And Enrico, ultimately impressed by the numbers, calls Montañez to say he’d like the factory to produce five million cases.Mr. Garcia, left, and the director, Eva Longoria, on the set of “Flamin’ Hot.”Searchlight Pictures/20th Century StudiosThe demand for more hot Cheetos is framed as our hero’s great victory, but the terms of the battle are a little flimsy, and its setup is insincere. Let’s rewind: Factory workers faced up against corporate suits to … do what exactly? To help those suits. To help Frito-Lay claim the Hispanic market in Southern California and to make the company more money.Though that isn’t how things went down, the Flamin’ Hot flavor line is in fact a wild success story tied to its fans, who constantly expand on the brand’s reach with viral recipes like hot Cheetos salads, elotes and fried chicken, until the dishes become canon. In an interview, Ms. Longoria emphasized the sense of collective ownership over the snack: “I like to say, this isn’t PepsiCo’s product, this is our product. The Hispanic community made this product popular, we made it a pop-culture phenomenon.”Much like the “Flamin’ Hot” origin story, that’s not entirely true. Though the film romanticizes labor on the production line, factories that produce hot Cheetos also employ underage migrant workers, mostly from Central America, whose lungs sting from all the spicy dust in the air. The billion-dollar brand belongs totally and patently to PepsiCo, not the people who buy or make the snacks.What “Flamin’ Hot” does get right, in a glossy fictional origin story, is showing us exactly how food brands wish we would see them — wholesome and harmless and completely essential to our lives, their wins and successes so tangled up with our own, it’s impossible to tell the difference.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      ‘American Pain’ Review: When the Pills and the Money Kept On Flowing

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      Darren Foster’s documentary offers an energetic profile of twin brothers who operated a slick drug trafficking operation in South Florida.Beginning around 2008, a chain of shady pain clinics popped up in South Florida. The storefronts administered opioids on a sweeping scale; users and dealers alike would travel hundreds of miles to load up. The pill mills were run by Jeff and Chris George, twin brothers whose desire to get rich quick fueled the operation.The story of the Georges receives a dynamic retelling in “American Pain” (on Max), named with heavy irony after one of their clinics. The director, Darren Foster, frames the film almost as a profile, beginning with the twins’ upbringing before zipping to the launch of their venture. In interviews, past associates of the brothers — and the brothers themselves, speaking by phone from prison — talk openly about the slickness of the enterprise, the efficiency with which they moved visitors in and out. Foster pairs the testimonials with footage from TV news reporters and, eventually, from undercover missions by federal agents.As suffering carried on around them, Jeff and Chris made millions. Foster casts a clear eye on this cruelty, but the film also revels in the rollicking nature of the men’s venture. Plenty of time is spent on the nuttier details of their enterprise: the excessive workplace drinking, the money transported in trash bags, the receptionists hired for looks alone. Given only a cursory look is the broken system that enabled the men to conduct their dealings. At the time, Florida laws were beyond lax. And even as the orders grew unwieldy, pharmaceutical suppliers continued to ship the clinics pills.The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.American PainNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Blue Jean’ Review: No Privacy in the Girls’ Locker Room

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      School bullying rattles the life of a closeted lesbian teacher in this accomplished period drama.In 1987, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, addressed public panic over children’s library books, stating at the Conservative Party conference, “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” Thatcher’s views were quickly adopted into the British legal code, and in 1988, the government prohibited the promotion of homosexuality in school. The film “Blue Jean” sets its story in this repressive period. Broadcasts of Thatcher’s proclamations blare in the background as the movie’s protagonist, Jean (Rosy McEwen), traverses between her life as a lesbian and her life as a high school gym teacher.When the film begins, Jean has already gone to the trouble of getting divorced and of coming out to her barely tolerant family. Her hair is bleached and her clothes are masculine, but she is still establishing a life for herself as a queer person. By contrast, Jean is in love with Viv (Kerrie Hayes), an out lesbian with a buzz cut and punk clothes. Viv is at ease with herself and other gay people. Viv’s many friends cast a slightly suspicious eye on Jean, as a jumpy newcomer to the lesbian club.Jean appears more confident in the classroom. As a teacher, her demeanor is as cheekily frosty as her hair color. She maintains firm boundaries with her adolescent charges, insisting on promptness in the locker room and easily shrugging off any youthful insubordination.But Jean’s equilibrium is disturbed when a new student, Lois (Lucy Halliday), enters the class. Lois becomes a target for Jean’s star student, who bullies Lois by suggesting to the class that she might be a lesbian. At first, Lois tries to halfheartedly deny the accusations, but she soon finds that her fists provide a better defense.It is Jean’s professional responsibility to resolve fights between students. But as someone who has been on the receiving end of discrimination, Jean feels a communal obligation to get involved and to use what authority she has to prevent younger people from becoming both victims and perpetrators of homophobia. This responsibility rattles Jean, disturbing even her life with Viv, and the film uses her terror to draw out genuine feeling and dramatic conflict. In some scenes, conversations about lesbian aggression appear to make Jean spontaneously break out in hives — a credit to the film’s makeup team and to McEwen’s committed performance.The film’s writer and director, Georgia Oakley, has made an accomplished movie in many ways. “Blue Jean” looks fantastic, and the period details are pitch perfect, from the moppish 1980s haircuts to the New Order music choices, all the way down to the neon gender symbols at the lesbian bar. Yet the film’s most impressive quality is its nuanced understanding of how political circumstances create different spheres of life. Jean is a character who moves both discreetly and discretely between worlds that cannot acknowledge each other. Her public and private lives are stacked, and Jean carries both like fragile cargo. One dish too many, and the whole tray could come crashing down.Blue JeanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Persian Lessons’ Review: An Improbable Holocaust Drama

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      A Jewish Frenchman posing as a Persian eludes death by teaching a fictional form of the Persian language to a Nazi commandant in this improbable Holocaust drama.In the outlandish Holocaust drama “Persian Lessons,” the director Vadim Perelman (“House of Sand and Fog”) performs a wobbly balancing act of horror, humor, romance and self-glorifying sentimentality against a grim backdrop of forced labor and human squalor.At the beginning of the film, Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a Jewish Frenchman captured by the Nazis, trades his sandwich with a fellow prisoner for an antique tome written in Persian. Condemned to death by firing squad, Gilles manages to dodge the bullets, pleading mercy as he desperately waves the book in his captors’ faces. “I’m Persian!” he screams.Miraculously, Klaus Koch (Lars Eidinger), a commandant, needs just that — a Persian. The Nazi dreams of opening a restaurant in Tehran after the war, and recruits Gilles — who pretends to be Reza — to teach him the language. Gilles improvises; not knowing a lick of Persian, he invents words, eventually using the names of prisoners kept in a logbook as mnemonic devices to develop his fictional tongue. It’s a wild conceit, and one can’t help but laugh, albeit nervously, as Koch takes in the mumbo-jumbo with studious severity.Eidinger, an expert prima donna, brings out the tragic absurdity of men who blindly follow orders. His performance anchors the film’s otherwise clumsy tonal shifts.High tensions are built into Ilya Zofin’s script as Gilles struggles to keep up the act — a fumbled word could mean his head, and a brown-nosing section leader, Max (Jonas Nay), has his eyes peeled. Pointless, lackluster detours into petty sexual dramas between the Nazis are sprinkled throughout, and, more effectively, suspicions of an erotic liaison between Gilles and Koch tease out their bond’s derangement.Less kooky and gratingly precious than “Jojo Rabbit” or “Life Is Beautiful,” the film nevertheless also taps history with a movie-magic wand. When Perelman’s saccharine sensibilities take over, the film, as if by obligation, becomes a story about the power of human resilience and compassion — or some similar platitude.Persian LessonsNot rated. In German, French, Italian, English and Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’ Review: Death Transforms Her

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      A teenage girl handles her grief in an enterprising way in this horror film from Bomani J. Story.At the helm of Bomani J. Story’s feature directing debut, somewhat deceptively titled “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” is the young Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes), a sharp-witted teenager mired in grief. Routine gun violence has snatched the lives of her mother and Chris, her older brother (Edem Atsu-Swanzy), while her father, Donald (Chad Coleman) — woeful collateral — recovers from drug addiction in the wake of their deaths.Vicaria’s genius inspires the neighborhood kids to christen her “mad scientist” and later, “body snatcher,” for she labors under the conviction that “death is a disease.” In the dim light of a cluttered storage unit, she stoops over her brother’s lifeless body — sewing bloody flesh together — determined to coax him back from the dead.Fitting that Story should make his first feature a rendition of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein,” a famously fluid text that refuses classical genre divisions: It has all at once been deemed science fiction, gothic horror and women’s fiction. But Shelley’s monster always possessed a racial dimension that only a smattering of scholars have dared to confront. Consider the hardly clandestine, popular imagery of the Black Other lurking in the monster’s description: his staggering frame, destructive strength, and the ever-present threat of sexual deviance. Predictably perhaps; the novel arrived in the throes of the antislavery debate, after the nominal end of the international slave trade and amid ongoing revolts in the United States and the Caribbean.The struggle, then, of cinema that concerns itself in any material way with the social conditions of Black life, is that it must account, too, for mass death. But fixing horror in the Black body is a tricky business, and “The Angry Black Girl” stumbles in the same way its ancestor, “Candyman” (1992), did. Fundamentally, Vicaria and her neighbors are terrorized by a freakish Black man: what glimpses we catch of his bloated fingers and disfigured face transform him into a fearsome predator. It is difficult to challenge the character’s monstrousness when we know so little about Chris, the man.The film invokes Emmett Till, clumsily at that, in a tale that principally concerns itself with community violence (a phenomenon hardly exclusive to Black people). When Mamie Till displayed her son’s mangled body for the public, it was because she wanted to reflect the monstrosity of the people (and the nation that widely sanctioned it) who could do such violence to a child. “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster” struggles to manage the same complexity, despite compelling performances from Hayes and Coleman.The Angry Black Girl and Her MonsterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘A Woman Escapes’ Review: Screen Sharing

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      In this moody epistolary film, a woman in Paris works through a close friend’s death with the help of video correspondences.The title of “A Woman Escapes” references Robert Bresson’s 1956 classic “A Man Escaped” about a French Resistance fighter in a Nazi prison in Lyon. This intimate yet sometimes reserved epistolary film centers on a more contemporary moment in Paris as a woman named Audrey processes the death of a close friend. During what feels like a pandemic, she takes up correspondences that become lifelines out of the grief and creative block she’s feeling.Her video and audio exchanges were made by the film’s co-directors, a supergroup of experimental filmmakers: Sofia Bohdanowicz, Burak Cevik and Blake Williams. The medium is partly the message here too, as the visual textures vary according to the directors’ predilections — 16-millimeter film, high-definition video, even 3-D.The result joins a long lineage of personal-correspondence films, this one tinged with the “stuck” feeling of the isolating, screen-heavy stretches of the pandemic. Audrey (Deragh Campbell) putters about the apartment and pecks at work on her laptop, but the video letters can fling us outside — into the environs of Istanbul, for example, through Cevik’s missives — and include Williams’s exploration of Audrey’s neighborhood on Google Maps.Campbell, unforgettable in the Canadian indie “Anne at 13,000 Ft.,” gives a more interior performance that evokes the thoughtful focus she brings to her collaborations with Bohdanowicz (“MS Slavic 7”), but tempered here by a stay-in-bed mood of withdrawal. Her Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.A Woman EscapesNot rated. In English and Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More