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      Bill Lee, Bassist and Composer of Son Spike Lee’s Films, Dies at 94

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      He accompanied a wide range of jazz and folk musicians and scored “She’s Gotta Have It,” “School Daze” “Do the Right Thing” and “Mo’ Better Blues.”Bill Lee, a jazz bassist and composer who scored the early films of his son Spike Lee, wrote folk-jazz operas, led an acclaimed ensemble of bassists and was a prolific sideman for Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and others, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 94. Spike Lee confirmed the death.Over six decades, in thousands of live performances and on more than 250 record albums, Mr. Lee’s mellow and ebullient string bass accompanied a pantheon of music stars, including as well Duke Ellington, Arlo Guthrie, Odetta, Simon and Garfunkel, Harry Belafonte, Ian & Sylvia, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary.Mr. Lee wrote the soundtracks for Spike Lee’s first four feature films, a musical challenge that called for capturing the independence of a romantic Black woman in “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), a satirical look at life at a Black college in “School Daze” (1988), racial violence in “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and the poignant hardships of a Black jazz musician in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990).Bill Lee had small parts in all but “Do the Right Thing,” and Spike Lee’s sister, Joie, had roles in all four. Bill Lee also scored an early Spike Lee short, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the first student film to be showcased at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films Festival, in 1983.The feature films won largely positive reviews and reaped sizable profits. Bill and Spike Lee had a falling-out in the early 1990s, over family matters, money and other issues, that ended their collaboration. Later Spike Lee films — he has directed more than 30, appearing in many of them himself — were scored by the trumpeter Terence Blanchard.Mr. Lee, right, on bass, at the Five Spot in New York in 1960 with the saxophonist John Handy’s quartet. Don Friedman was on piano and Joe Hunt on drums.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesBorn into an Alabama family of musicians and educators who instilled a passion for music in him and his siblings, Bill Lee learned drums, piano and flute early on. He attended segregated small-town public schools and studied music at historically Black Morehouse College in Atlanta.Inspired in his early 20s by listening to the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, Mr. Lee mastered the double bass, the largest and lowest-pitched stringed instrument, and performed with small jazz groups in Atlanta and Chicago before migrating to New York City in 1959.Over the next decade, Mr. Lee, who favored a battered straw hat and often recited his own poetry between numbers, performed often in piano-bass duos and piano-bass-drums trios in smoky clubs that served soul food with jazz, many on the western edge of Greenwich Village, squeezed among meatpacking houses and trucking depots on Manhattan’s Hudson River shoreline.He recorded extensively on Strata-East Records, a musician-owned label, and founded and directed the New York Bass Violin Choir, a troupe of seven basses, sometimes accompanied by piano or saxophone. Critics lauded the ensemble for weaving an agile harmony of pastel and harsh moods in performing Mr. Lee’s folk operas at Town Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival.His numerous operas, including “One Mile East,” “The Depot” and “Baby Sweets,” were based on people and events from his early life in the South. They sometimes drew on the singing talents of Mr. Lee and his two sisters, Consuela Lee Moorehead, a jazz pianist and music teacher at Hampton University in Virginia, and Grace Lee Mims, a librarian, whose voices lent grandiloquent color to the tales.In a review of a performance by the Violin Choir at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1971, John S. Wilson of The New York Times wrote: “Mr. Lee served as bassist, singer and narrator of his sketches of small-town life in Snow Hill, Ala., building both his stories and his music from a rich vein of folk sources. His team of bassists, bending over their unwieldy instruments, produced ensemble passages that were by turns gorgeously warm and singing or so surprisingly light and airy that one suspected a couple of flutes might be hiding among them.”Mr. Lee in an undated portrait. His numerous operas were based on people and events from his early life in the South.David LeeIn the 1970s, when the electric bass became an instrument of choice in many jazz ensembles because its thumping tones suited the commercial sounds of jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Lee, an acoustic bass purist, refused to go along and lost work as a result. “Some things you just can’t live with,” he told The Boston Globe in 1992. “Just thinking about doing it, my gut reaction hit me so hard in the stomach. I knew I could never live with myself.”Spike Lee explored the problem of commercialism, with its racial implications, in “Mo’ Better Blues,” which starred Denzel Washington as a jazz trumpeter who fights exploitation by white club owners.“Musicians are low-priced slaves, whereas athletes and entertainers are high-priced slaves,” Spike Lee told The Times when the film opened. “It’s their music, but it’s not their nightclub, it’s not their record company. They have an understanding only of the music, not of the business, so they get treated any old way.”Despite other differences, Bill and Spike Lee agreed about integrity. “Everything I know about jazz I got from my father,” Spike Lee told The Times in 1990. “I saw his integrity, how he was not going to play just any kind of music, no matter how much money he could make.”Bill Lee in front of his brownstone across from Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn in 2013. The house was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night. Michael Nagle for The New York TimesWilliam James Edwards Lee was born in Snow Hill on July 23, 1928, to Arnold Lee, a cornet player and band director at Florida A&M University, and Alberta Grace (Edwards) Lee, a classical concert pianist and teacher. In addition to his sisters Consuela and Grace, he had four other siblings, Clifton, Arnold Jr., Leonard and Clarence.Their maternal grandfather, William J. Edwards, a graduate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, founded a log-cabin arts school for Black students in Snow Hill in 1893. By 1918, the Snow Hill Normal and Industrial Institute had 24 buildings and 300 to 400 students pursuing academic subjects and vocational training. Mr. Edwards died a few years later, but the institute survived as a segregated public school until 1973, when it closed. Bill Lee graduated from there in the mid-1940s.Mr. Lee and his first wife, Jacquelyn (Shelton) Lee, an art teacher, had five children: Shelton (Spike), Christopher, David, Joie and Cinque. After Jacquelyn’s death in 1976, Mr. Lee married Susan Kaplan. They had one son, Arnold. Christopher died in 2013. Mr. Lee’s sister Consuela died at 83 in 2009.In addition to Spike Lee, he is survived by his wife; his sons David, Cinque and Arnold; his daughter, Joie; a brother, A. Clifton Lee; and two grandchildren.After arriving in New York, Mr. Lee settled in Fort Greene, a Brooklyn neighborhood that became a magnet for Black musicians and other creative artists who took pride in their lifestyles and their art. The neighborhood was the setting for “She’s Gotta Have It.”Mr. Lee with his son Spike in 2009 for a 20th-anniversary screening of the Spike Lee movie “Do the Right Thing,” for which Bill Lee wrote the soundtrack.Jimi Celeste/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesThe Lee household, overlooking Fort Greene Park, all but banished television but was awash in music, often with jam sessions that went late into the night, prompting noise complaints from neighbors but spawning jazz artists who found their sounds in the heart of Brooklyn.During a 2008 interview with The Times at his home, Mr. Lee played piano and double bass. “His music has the complex harmonies of bebop and hard bop, but it also has a sincere, down-home, churchy feel,” the reporter Corey Kilgannon wrote. “His passages move in interesting and unexpected places, but they resolve before long in a way that is simple and sincere, earthy and somehow very satisfying.” More

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      ‘Victim/Suspect’ Review: When the Accuser Becomes the Accused

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      A reporter investigates cases in which sexual assault survivors were arrested on charges of false reporting in this cogent documentary.Considered against the expanding subgenre of trope-laden streaming documentaries about troubling true crime, “Victim/Suspect” seems, at first glance, to conform to type — particularly during its opening waterfall of lurid video and audio clips. But the film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.“Victim/Suspect” (on Netflix) takes the form of a real-time investigation, tracing the efforts of a young reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting named Rachel de Leon. Over the course of several years, she unearths a matrix of rape survivors who turned to the criminal justice system for help only to be doubted by officers and then manipulated into recanting their accounts.The director, Nancy Schwartzman, zeros in on a small handful of de Leon’s subjects and lets them tell their side of the story, some for the first time. By centering on de Leon’s journalism rather than the individual experiences, Schwartzman is able to extrapolate from these cases a broader pattern of sexism and police intimidation.The film’s biggest weakness ends up being its lack of access to the attending officers, who decline to participate. In their stead, de Leon interviews a former detective who explains that law enforcement diverts rape cases into false reporting charges because the latter are less work. Alongside the documentary’s deluge of nightmarish interrogation room footage — minute after minute of police bullying women until they crumble — the absence of a better explanation is infuriating, but perhaps that’s the point.Victim/SuspectRated R. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Ray Stevenson, Actor in ‘Thor’ and Other Films, Dies at 58

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      His wide-ranging roles included fantasy characters, a knight, a Roman soldier and a Punisher.Ray Stevenson, who in a 30-year career played a wide range of roles in television and films, among them a talkative soldier in the HBO historical drama “Rome,” the pirate Blackbeard in the Starz series “Black Sails” and the Asgardian warrior Volstagg in the “Thor” fantasy movies, died on Sunday. He was 58.His publicist, Nicki Fioravante, confirmed his death but provided no further details. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica said Mr. Stevenson died on the Italian island of Ischia, where he had been filming a movie.Mr. Stevenson was born on May 25, 1964, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, according to the Internet Movie Database. He had begun a career in interior design when, in his mid-20s, he decided to try acting. Seeing John Malkovich in the Lanford Wilson play “Burn This” in London’s West End in the early 1990s was the catalyst.“I was dumbstruck by John’s performance,” he told the California newspaper The Fresno Bee in 2008. “Everybody else disappeared. I knew at that moment there was something very valid about being an actor.”He studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England, where in 1993 he played the title role in a production of “Macbeth.” Before the year was over he had landed a recurring role in a British mini-series, “The Dwelling Place.” He had worked more or less steadily ever since.In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Stevenson appeared on various British TV series, including the crime drama “Band of Gold.” He landed his first significant film role in 2004, playing the knight Dagonet in “King Arthur,” with Clive Owen in the title role.Then came “Rome,” a breakthrough role in a big-budget HBO series about ancient Rome that was the network’s attempt to create the next buzz-generating series after “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.”Mr. Stevenson’s character, Titus Pullo, was, as Alessandra Stanley put it in a 2005 review in The New York Times, “a drunken, womanizing lout — a soccer hooligan in sandals.” Titus Pullo’s friendship with another Roman soldier, played by James Purefoy, was among the show’s most appealing subplots, and Mr. Stevenson, a large man at 6-foot-4, seemed on the verge of something big.“He’s kind of George Clooney on steroids,” Chase Squires of The St. Petersburg Times of Florida wrote in 2005. “By the time ‘Rome’ completes its run, the Irish-born English actor will probably be a star, and a very real candidate to replace Russell Crowe when Hollywood gets tired of that actor’s notoriously bad behavior.”But “Rome” flamed out after two seasons, and Mr. Stevenson never quite achieved Clooneyesque stature. He did, however, land a number of meaty roles in lavish projects, including three movies from the Marvel Comics universe: “Thor” (2011), “Thor: The Dark World” (2013) and “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017). All three were box-office smashes.He often referred to the “Thor” stories as “Vikings in space,” and in 2020 he got a taste of the earthbound version of that life when he joined the cast of the long-running History channel series “Vikings.” He appeared throughout its sixth season.His other roles included a gangster in the 2011 movie “Kill the Irishman” and a British colonial official in the Indian film “RRR” (2022). He also played the vigilante Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, another character based on a comic book. He took on that role in 2008 in “Punisher: War Zone,” after Dolph Lundgren had played Castle in a 1989 movie and Thomas Jane had taken his turn in 2004.The 2008 movie was an orgy of violence, as A.O. Scott noted in his review in The Times.“Guys get their heads blown off, or severed, or pierced with chair legs, or pulverized with fists,” he wrote, “because that’s what they have coming and that’s what the fan base will pay money to see.”His character, Mr. Stevenson told The Oklahoman, was supposed to be not a hero but an antihero.“He really is on a one-way path and in his own hell,” he said. “You don’t want to be Frank Castle.”Mr. Stevenson’s marriage to the actress Ruth Gemmell ended in divorce. He and his partner, Elisabetta Caraccia, had three children. More

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      Leon Ichaso, Whose Films Explored Latino Identity, Dies at 74

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      His first feature, “El Super,” was critically acclaimed. He continued to examine culture and exile in “Crossover Dreams,” “El Cantante” and “Piñero.”Leon Ichaso, a Cuban American filmmaker who in “El Super,” “Crossover Dreams,” “Piñero,” “El Cantante” and other movies examined themes of Latino assimilation and cultural identity, died on Sunday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 74.His sister, the journalist Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Ichaso, who came to the United States as a teenager, was writing advertising copy and making television commercials in New York in 1977 when he saw an Off Broadway play called “El Super,” written by Ivan Acosta, and decided to try a new career.“I remember he went to see it and said to me, ‘I’m going to make that movie,’” his sister said.He proceeded to do just that, on a shoestring budget.“I paid for the production car,” she added. “My father paid for the catering.”The movie, released in 1979 and directed by Mr. Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, is about a Cuban man (played by Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) living in exile in New York who works as the superintendent of an Upper West Side tenement, resisting assimilation. Critics were impressed.“It’s a funny, even-tempered, unsentimental drama about people in particular transit,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review in The New York Times. Decades later, The Miami Herald, assessing Mr. Ichaso’s career, called “El Super” “the quintessential Cuban-exile film.”He followed “El Super” in 1985 with “Crossover Dreams,” about a salsa star on the rise who hopes to break out of Spanish Harlem and into the mainstream. The film, which Mr. Canby called “a sagely funny comedy, both heartfelt and sophisticated,” gave the singer Rubén Blades his breakout acting role.The singer Rubén Blades played a salsa star who hopes to break and into the mainstream in Mr. Ichaso’s “Crossover Dreams” (1985).Miramax, via Everett CollectionAfter “Crossover Dreams,” Mr. Ichaso moved away from Latino-themed films for a time and worked steadily directing television movies and episodes of “The Equalizer,” “Miami Vice” and other series. But he returned to that territory in 1996 with “Bitter Sugar,” a movie set in contemporary Cuba.“Bitter Sugar” went against the romanticized view of life in Havana that was popular in some artistic circles at the time, painting an ugly picture of the city that included drugs and prostitution. Its protagonist starts out pro-Communist but ends up so disillusioned that he tries to assassinate Fidel Castro.Mr. Ichaso resented that many festivals did not pick up the movie — a result, he said, not only of the film world’s leftist leanings but also of festival officials’ desire not to offend the organizers of the Havana Film Festival.“They don’t want to lose the Cuba account,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “Part of the film community very much flirts with a dictator and a country and says it’s cute to travel, have a daiquiri and ignore what’s going on just 50 yards outside the Hotel Nacional.”Mr. Ichaso’s next major project would become perhaps his most acclaimed film: “Piñero” (2001), about Miguel Piñero, a former prison inmate turned playwright whose “Short Eyes” made it to Broadway in 1974, but who died young in 1988.Benjamin Bratt, who was familiar to TV audiences from “Law & Order,” played Mr. Piñero, a Nuyorican, in what Stephen Holden, reviewing the movie in The Times, called “a career-defining performance.” Mr. Bratt attributed much of his success in the role to Mr. Ichaso.“His utter faith in my ability never faltered even when mine did,” Mr. Bratt said by email. “He loved his actors, understood our delicate temperament and nurtured a trust that would embolden you to walk out on a wire with no net. He was the net, and it was very easy to love him back for this.”Benjamin Bratt starred as the prison inmate turned playwright Miguel Piñero in Mr. Ichaso’s “Piñero” (2001). “His utter faith in my ability never faltered,” Mr. Bratt said of Mr. Ichaso, “even when mine did.” Abbot Genser/MiramaxIn “El Cantante” (2006), Mr. Ichaso told the story of the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. The singer Marc Anthony, portrayed Mr. Lavoe with Jennifer Lopez (Mr. Anthony’s wife at the time) as Mr. Lavoe’s wife.In Mr. Ichaso’s movies, “you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony told The New York Times in 2007. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”Although Mr. Ichaso continued to direct for television until recently, his last Latino-themed film was “Paraiso” in 2009. Considered the third film in his trilogy about the Cuban exile experience (following “El Super” and “Bitter Sugar”), it tells the story of a man who arrives in Miami by raft and proceeds to wreak his own brand of havoc. It was, Mr. Ichaso acknowledged in a 2009 interview with The Miami Herald, evidence of his ever-darkening view of Castro’s government.“I do think of the three films as a trilogy, and this one is the end,” he said, “exploring the new arrivals, these new little Cuban Frankensteins that Castro makes and sets loose on the world.”Leon Rodriguez Ichaso was born on Aug. 3, 1948, in Havana. His father, Justo Rodriguez Santos, was a poet and writer, and his mother, Antonia Ichaso, wrote for Cuban radio.When Leon was 14, he left Cuba for Miami with his mother and his sister; his father joined them there in 1968. By then, Mr. Ichaso had tried college briefly but dropped out. The family soon moved to New York, and there Mr. Ichaso learned about filmmaking by shooting commercials for Goya Foods and other clients.Mr. Ichaso’s marriages to Karen Willinger and Amanda Barber ended in divorce. His sister survives him.Though Mr. Ichaso’s films were generally well regarded, he never quite ascended to the directorial A list.“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life; that’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso said in a 2007 interview with The Times. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one.’ But then nothing happens.”Mr. Bratt, who met his wife, the actress Talisa Soto, while they were working on “Piñero,” said he admired Mr. Ichaso’s risk-taking.“There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it,” Mr. Bratt said. “He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.” More

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      ‘Monsoon Wedding’ Review: Marriage of Musical Styles, With Mixed Results

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      Mira Nair’s 2001 movie about a couple brought together by their families becomes a song-filled pageant, with mixed results.In musicals, the marriage of elements is everything. A story that’s too thin will dissolve when mixed with the songs. A story that’s too heavy won’t let the songs lift off. To get the right fizzy blend, the balance must be perfect.That is not yet the case with Mira Nair’s “Monsoon Wedding,” which opened Monday in an always busy, sometimes touching, but strangely mild production at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Its shambolic plot lines (drawn from Nair’s 2001 film of the same name) and Indian-pop-meets-marching-band songs, though full of interest individually, fail to build on themselves or one another, leaving the intertwined tale of love and obligation to unravel as fast as it spins.Not that the movie was a landmark of pith. The arranged marriage of the rich “South Delhi girl” Aditi Verma (played here by Salena Qureshi) and the U.S.-raised Hemant Rai (Deven Kolluri) was but one strand of a multifamily, multigenerational tale arranged in a riotous collage of small, colorful scenes. It didn’t matter how many went nowhere; the editing was all.The musical tries to maintain that quick-cut effect while also squeezing the material into a traditional musical theater format. Nair told The New York Times she’d been inspired by the example of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a classic that, like “Monsoon Wedding,” encompasses one family’s marital chaos as part of a community’s encounter with tradition and change.But “Fiddler” was adapted from a collection of short stories about a strong central character, not from a movie about many. The difference shows. The musical’s book, by Arpita Mukherjee and Sabrina Dhawan, is all over the place, and as staged by Nair on an abstract courtyard set by Jason Ardizzone-West, you rarely know where that is. The production seems to think in camera terms, as if a lens were still directing the audience’s attention when in fact nothing is.From left, Rhea Yadav, Sharvari Deshpande and Salena Qureshi in the production, directed by Mira Nair.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesI’m not sure anything could. Along with the frenzy of assembling the enormous celebration, the musical, like the film, encompasses a secondary comic romance between Dubey, the wedding planner, and Alice, the Vermas’s put-upon maid. The marriage of Aditi’s parents (Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh) also gets a look, as do the romantic ideas of a tweenish cousin and a gayish brother, would-be in-laws, other relatives, local workers and (it sometimes seems) all of Delhi.Nair does create musical-like texture by pulling some of these stories forward while pushing others back. The problem that threatens Aditi’s marriage — she is not yet over her affair with a married man — is recessed so far it essentially disappears upstage, depriving the crisis of serious tension. In its place we get the milder problem of deracination, since she will have to move to Hemant’s home in the States: Can she learn to love New Jersey?The problem that threatens the marriage of Dubey (Namit Das) and Alice (Anisha Nagarajan) has on the other hand been upgraded from almost indecipherable in the movie to very serious indeed: In a country born in bitter partition, ethnic or religious divides of any sort — he’s Hindu and she’s Christian — can be harrowing. The resolution is facile (“the heart never tells a lie”) but at least it’s in a song.That song, sung by Dubey’s mother (Sargam Ipshita Bali) to her overwrought son, is lovely, one of the few with a clear personality among 22 in a score that too often feels like a collection of snippets. In one, the gorgeous “Madhaniyan,” Aditi’s father bids her farewell on the eve of the marriage, pulling the same strings as “Far From the Home I Love” in “Fiddler.” (Well, not quite the same strings; the excellent eight-person band is highlighted by a sitar.)But gorgeous or not, the score (music by Vishal Bhardwaj, lyrics by Masi Asare and Susan Birkenhead) is, like the script, all over the place. When the style, whether American or Indian, occasionally matches the characters and situation, the alignment makes the moment pop. An absurd production number called “Chuk Chuk” (for the sound a train makes as Dubey chases one to win Alice) sounds straight out of Bollywood, and with its cinematic projections (by David Bengali) and frenetic choreography (by Shampa Gopikrishna) it fits the dramatic moment in a way that excuses its utter lack of logic. A white horse is involved.Namit Das and Anisha Nagarajan as the lovers in a secondary romance in the show.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesOtherwise, the musicalization feels both too assertive and too inconclusive, like a parade passing by. (There are rarely buttons on the songs to tell you they’re done, leaving the audience wondering whether to applaud.) Only in one song is there a concerted approach to the dramatic experience. The song involves Aditi’s orphaned cousin Ria, raised with her as a sister. Serious and studious, Ria (Sharvari Deshpande) plans to attend New York University, mostly as a way of escaping the marital expectations that Aditi, a pampered princess — “even your panties are ironed” — is all too willing to meet.That Ria is also escaping a social atmosphere that tolerates the sexual abuse of girls is a theme that Nair emphasizes much more strongly here than in the film. But powerful as this is, especially in Deshpande’s performance, it is also destabilizing. It’s hard to make the leap from her late-Act II outcry, “Be a Good Girl,” to the happy ending, complete with exquisite saris (by Arjun Bhasin), a celebratory remix and the requisite double wedding.How Ria became the central figure here — hers is the only solo number in the show — is a bit of a mystery, as if “Fiddler” decided to put Chava, the disowned daughter, above the title. Longer scenes (some are just three lines) might have helped explain the change, or shift our expectations in a show called “Monsoon Wedding” to the character who specifically doesn’t want to get married.Still, you have to be grateful that Ria has elicited from the authors their most powerful writing. In “Leaving Means Returning,” sung to her by her stepfather, a lyric encapsulates in a beautiful phrase the tempting if ambivalent embrace of family: “We are your comfort and your courtyard.” Just so, genre is a place of safety but also a kind of prison. “Monsoon Wedding” does not quite escape either.Monsoon WeddingThrough June 25 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn; stannswarehouse.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      The Campy Masculine Pleasures of Gerard Butler and ‘Kandahar’

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      The action-flick Everyman limps nobly on in “Kandahar.”Midway through Gerard Butler’s new movie, “Kandahar,” is maybe the coolest sequence I have ever seen in a Gerard Butler movie. It’s the middle of the night in the middle of a desert, and Butler’s C.I.A.-operative character is racing with his Afghan translator to a distant extraction point. Because they are trying to avoid Pakistani, Iranian and Taliban bad guys who are pursuing them, their lights are off, and Butler’s character is wearing a pair of very stupid-looking infrared goggles. Suddenly there is a sound, one we only learn is a helicopter when those loopy goggles alight on it. The lengthy firefight that ensues is mostly just flashes in the darkness with occasional infrared — a beautiful tableau, like a Vija Celmins painting, that feels weird to enjoy only if you look too closely.Butler’s movies are best when you don’t look too closely. This is already the second one gifted to us this year. I say “gifted” because it truly is a gift, in 2023, to receive such films — throwbacks not only to late-1980s action movies but to their stars, actors like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. In a market saturated by superheroes, Butler has been making nostalgic, midbudget action films so steadily, for so long, that he has perfected his own formula. A middle-aged Everyman (made of “bourbon and poor choices,” per his character in one series), often with military training, goes rogue against a system that is failing to protect his family or his translator or the president. These movies may be, like much of their genre, unseasonably macho, riddled with casual brutality and kind of misogynistic; they have also been accused of varying degrees of racism, jingoism and xenophobia. But their appeal is broader than you might think. Butler’s main concern is not necessarily ideological. He’s interested in nobility, loyalty, courage and strength — qualities that, in Hollywood, often manifest in martial form. And it’s through this faithful portrayal of a rumpled-but-honorable masculinity, in rotating all-American settings, that a Scottish dude has become a kind of heartland hero.His breakthrough was “300,” Zack Snyder’s live-action adaptation of Frank Miller’s own graphic retelling of the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, in which a meager Greek army fought to the death against a Persian onslaught. This 2006 movie birthed not only the archetypal Butler action hero, his Spartan King Leonidas, but also the type of film that would contain him. “300” had the velveteen look of a Caravaggio, but all the depth of a soup can. It leaned into religious and mythic iconography — Leonidas succumbs, at the end, surrounded by his soldiers, riddled with arrows like some mash-up of St. Sebastian and the Sistine Chapel’s “The Last Judgment.” Butler, in baby bangs and sprayed-on abs and a brogue reminiscent of Tony Curtis in “Spartacus,” sold the display like a pro. No matter how savage he got, there was always some puckish humanity flickering across his face — like the scene in “Point Break” in which Keanu Reeves catches a glimpse of Patrick Swayze’s gentle eyes behind his mask and doesn’t shoot.Butler has been making nostalgic, midbudget action films so steadily, for so long, that he has perfected his own formula.Images and themes from “300” recur across Butler’s films. There’s loyalty to the homeland and its defenders, the passing of “respect and honor” from father to son, soft homophobia toward “philosophers and boy-lovers” by half-naked alpha males, stoicism, nurturing women, “no mercy” conflicts with foreigners, heroic sacrifice, David-and-Goliath battles. “I’m just a law-abiding citizen — I’m just a regular guy,” Butler says in “Law-Abiding Citizen,” which came out three years after “300.” In that one, an engineer named Clyde Shelton sees his wife and daughter killed in front of him, but the biggest wound comes from the justice system, via a prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx. Clyde responds with a bit of a killing spree, pledging to bring the whole “diseased corrupt temple” down on the lawyer’s head — “It’s gonna be biblical.”It’s the trilogy of “Olympus Has Fallen,” “London Has Fallen” and “Angel Has Fallen,” with their combined box office of $522 million, that consolidated Butler’s brand as the kind of modest action star who has largely gone missing from theaters. In these movies, the Secret Service agent Mike Banning, growing increasingly broken down over time, protects the president from various disposable terrorists. He runs on steaks, and later on painkillers, and always ends up battered, emerging into the light propping up a commander in chief who says something like: “They came to desecrate our way of life. To foul our beliefs. Trample our freedom. And in this, not only did they fail, they granted us the greatest gift — a chance at our rebirth.”If this sounds as if it springs from a conservative imagination, well, the franchise’s multicultural goons and deep-state conspiracies would certainly be familiar to that audience. But while Butler is the kind of guy who gets invited to the Pentagon to promote a thriller about Navy SEALs, his stance on these films is more rough and ready. Facing criticism for “London Has Fallen,” he argued at the premiere that “It’s about us winning” and “It’s based on heroism and the good guys kicking ass.” This generalized machismo maintains its appeal even when his films veer more mainstream — dropping the jingoism for “Angel Has Fallen” or, in 2017’s “Geostorm,” taking a cuckoo disaster-movie ride. In 2018’s “Den of Thieves,” where the masculinity is just dense enough to dilute the toxicity, he plays a leather-clad cop who swigs Pepto like whiskey and works to bring down some ex-Marines who aim to rob the Federal Reserve. In “Greenland,” he’s another engineer in another disaster, racing to get his family to a bunker (and refusing, in individualist American fashion, to help his neighbors). This January’s “Plane” was positively communist by comparison, with the tagline “survive together or die alone.” In that one, he’s a commercial pilot with an Air Force background whose jet crashes on a Filipino island held by separatists. There remain the obvious conservative themes — untrustworthy superiors, renegade saviors, barbaric foreigners — but it’s perfect all-audiences Butler, a propulsive popcorn flick with a righteous core.Maybe it’s inevitable that the same guy who keeps revolting onscreen would do the same off it. Butler hasn’t appeared on a mainstream magazine cover since 2018. He seems to have smarted a little when, in a January interview, Inverse called him “the King of the B-movie” to his face. He knows he has a large audience, but I wonder if he knows quite how much good will he has accumulated. In “Kandahar,” he plays an undercover operative exposed by a leak “bigger than Snowden and WikiLeaks combined,” in a script packed with “free world” jokes and aphorisms like “you have to return home to know what you are fighting for.” But I genuinely felt chills at the ending, a lachrymose montage in which the blue-eyed soul of Tom Rhodes’s “Low Tide” plays over shots of Butler and his translator, finally safe, intercut with sentimental scenes of their loved ones. It’s cheap, but there’s a good heart in there, and that’s hard to come by these days.Source photographs: Open Road Films; Focus Features; Lionsgate; FilmDistrict. More

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      Helmut Berger, Actor Known for His Work With Visconti, Dies at 78

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      He first made his mark in “The Damned” as a character one critic said personified “the outright perversion” of Nazism. He went on to have a long career, mostly in Europe.Helmut Berger, a handsome Austrian movie star who was best known for appearing in three feature films by the Italian neorealist director Luchino Visconti, his lover for a dozen years, died on Thursday at his home in Salzburg. He was 78.His death was announced by his agent, Helmut Werner, who did not give a cause.“Many years ago,” Mr. Werner said in a statement, “Helmut Berger told me, ‘I have lived three lives. And in four languages! Je ne regrette rien.’”Mr. Berger was studying Italian in Perugia in 1964 when a friend introduced him to Mr. Visconti, who was on location directing a film that starred Claudia Cardinale.“I was there watching, I was fascinated,” he told the website Europe of Cultures in 1988. “I wanted to see how they shot a film.”They began a relationship soon after that, personal as well as professional. Mr. Visconti cast Mr. Berger in “The Damned” (1969), the story of a German steel family, inspired by the Krupps, in the early years of the Third Reich. As Martin, the grandson of the family’s patriarch, Mr. Berger imitates Marlene Dietrich in full costume during a party for his grandfather, which ends with word of a fire at the Reichstag. Martin later molests younger relatives and rapes his mother (Ingrid Thulin).Ann Guarino, reviewing the movie for The Daily News of New York, said Mr. Berger personified the “outright perversion” of Nazism. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Berger “gives, I think, the performance of the year.” He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for most promising male newcomer.Mr. Berger said that working with Mr. Visconti was like being onstage.“You don’t do 10-minute, five-minute takes but whole scenes, sometimes 20 minutes long,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “He uses three cameras so you never know which one is on you. You get really into it, the whole atmosphere. He doesn’t limit you, he wants you to be free.”Mr. Berger appeared in two more feature films directed by Mr. Visconti: “Ludwig” (1973), in which he played the mad 19th-century king of Bavaria, for which he won a David di Donatello Award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar; and “Conversation Piece” (1974), which starred Burt Lancaster as an art historian living quietly in Rome whose life is changed by several people, including a pushy marchesa and her gigolo lover, played by Mr. Berger.Mr. Canby had a radically different assessment of Mr. Berger’s work this time, calling him “a lightweight” who “can function no more than as an ideogram for decadence.”By then, Mr. Berger and Mr. Visconti had been living together for some time.“During the 12 years with Luchino Visconti, I was faithful,” he told Gala magazine in 2012.“But were you dating model Marisa Berenson at the time?” the magazine’s interviewer asked.“Of course, I’m bisexual,” he said. “This is not a problem.”Mr. Berger fell into a deep depression after Mr. Visconti’s death in 1976.“At first I drank a lot, gluckgluckgluck, and then the pills came,” he told Gala. “My housekeeper wasn’t supposed to come until 5 p.m. but happened to drop by at 10 a.m. and saved me.”Mr. Berger on the set of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969).Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHelmut Berger was born Helmut Steinberger on May 29, 1944, in Bad Ischl, Austria. His parents, Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, ran a hotel.Fleeing his father, who he said was brutal to him, Helmut moved first to England and then to Italy, where he made his film debut in “The Witches” (1967), an anthology movie consisting of five stories, each made by a different director. He played a hotel page in the segment directed by Mr. Visconti.After a few other films, including “The Damned,” Mr. Berger was cast in the title role of Massimo Dallamano’s “Dorian Gray” (1970), which billed itself as a “modern allegory” based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” set in sexy present-day London. He was one of a reported 500 actors who auditioned.Mr. Berger “gives a trance-like performance, looking simply beautiful — if you like the type,” Ms. Guarino wrote.He continued to work, mostly in Europe, until a few years ago. He notably played the sickly son of a rich Jewish family facing Fascism in Italy in Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, and the playboy who seduces Elizabeth Taylor’s character after she undergoes cosmetic surgery in “Ash Wednesday” (1973).He also portrayed the millionaire boyfriend of Fallon Carrington (Pamela Sue Martin) on “Dynasty,” the prime-time soap, in a story arc from 1983 to 1984, and the Vatican’s chief accountant, who tries to swindle Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather III” (1990).Information about survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Berger was known for his jet-setting lifestyle, for being photographed by Andy Warhol, for being linked to women like Bianca Jagger, and for being called “the most beautiful man in the world” in the German media.But when Gala interviewed him after the publication of the book “Helmut Berger: A Life in Pictures,” he said he was no longer seeking his earlier life’s social hustle and bustle.“I’ve experienced everything,” he said. “I don’t feel like Helmut Berger, either; I’m not him. It’s a stage name. My name is Helmut Steinberger. And that’s what I’ll be until I’m dead.” More

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      Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Joel Edgerton on Paul Schrader Films

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      Joel Edgerton, Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke explain how they worked with the writer-director, known for solitary characters grappling with sin and redemption.The writer-director Paul Schrader has a metaphor he likes to use with his leading men.In his view, actors tend to think of themselves as trees in the wind fighting to stay upright when they perform. But Schrader tells his stars, “Get that image out of your head and replace it with the image of a cliff on a seacoast. And you’re there and the waves are pounding against you. They are going to come and they are going to hit you and then they are going to go away.” In this metaphor the waves can be day players sharing a scene or plot points in a narrative. But no matter what crashes against them, these men must remain stoic, hardened against the world.Joel Edgerton heard a version of this from Schrader in their first conversation about “Master Gardener,” which opened Friday. The drama is the final installment in Schrader’s recent and lauded “Man in a Room” trilogy, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke, and includes “The Card Counter” (2021), starring Oscar Isaac.“I think I probably got the same speech that Ethan got and the same speech that Oscar got,” Edgerton said, explaining, “It wasn’t the place for an actor to explore their bag of tricks and create flourish within character but rather reduce themselves to sort of a conduit of stillness to everything moving and swirling around them.”And, indeed, Isaac and Hawke both have their own descriptions of similar dialogues with Schrader. In interviews, the actors who played these proverbial men in rooms explained what it was like to inhabit tortured but oddly serene personas in works that grapple with typical Shrader questions of sin and redemption.“Master Gardener” casts Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who harbors a disturbing secret: He’s a former white nationalist in witness protection. Underneath his turtleneck and overalls, his body is covered in racist tattoos. In “The Card Counter,” Isaac is William Tell, a proficient gambler who was once an Abu Ghraib torturer. And in “First Reformed,” Hawke is the Rev. Ernst Toller, a holy man filled with despair over climate change.Oscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.” Though Schrader specializes in bleak tales, “he’s not a nihilist,” the actor said. Courtesy Of Focus Features/Focus Features, via Associated PressAll three write in journals, and their entries, offering windows into their preoccupations, are delivered in voice-over narration. These beats are part of the language of a Schrader movie. “It’s like his version of a sonnet,” Isaac said. “He has his forms that he likes to use to explore different things.”In these films Schrader echoes both the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, with deliberate references to “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” and himself. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) scribbled in one of these notebooks in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), which Schrader wrote. So did Willem Dafoe’s drug dealer in “Light Sleeper” (1992), which Schrader wrote and directed.“Even when you’re shooting it, you’re aware there’s a meta thing happening where you realize like, right, this is like Travis Bickle, this is like Willem,” Hawke said. “You feel like, right, I’m part of this lineage of this human being’s work.”It’s work that Hawke is happy Schrader, now 76, is continuing. “I had the feeling that when we finished ‘First Reformed’ — he never said this to me, it was just a feeling — that he might not make another movie,” Hawke said.When Hawke saw “The Card Counter,” he said, he was proud of Schrader for “going back to war.”Schrader didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and only after someone suggested it as such did he acknowledge that’s what he was doing. All three movies concern troubled men reaching for forgiveness and transcendence, and all three trade in metaphors. “‘First Reformed’ really is not about global warming and ‘Card Counter’ is not about gambling and this one really isn’t about racism or gardening,” he said over coffee at the senior-living apartment complex in Hudson Yards where he now lives. “It’s about evolution of the soul of these people who are locked off in their rooms and can’t reach out and touch anyone.”These dramas not only ask their stars to wrestle with the misdeeds and troubles of their characters, but also require them to operate within Schrader’s precise style. He said he cast performers both on instinct and on a sense of whether they can “hold the mystery.”“There were several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding, a willingness to ask the audience to work with us, to not tap dance and try to entertain them, to not reveal too much, to invite mystery,” Hawke said, explaining that there is a freedom in that direction.Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor in “First Reformed.” The actor said he and Schrader had “several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding.”A24At the same time, there is difficulty in achieving the stillness that Schrader asks. “In some ways it was like being asked to go to work with a straitjacket on,” Edgerton said. “But I didn’t feel like that was too daunting a proposition. My feeling always is that the director is captain, and if you go to work with someone, you put yourself in their capable hands.”Recognizing the internality Schrader was asking him to portray, Isaac recruited one of his teachers from Juilliard, Moni Yakim, and did mask work. “I was like, well, my face is going to literally be a mask, so how can I tell the story just through the body and through energy,” Isaac said.And then there’s the writing. Schrader asked each actor to copy out his character’s journal in his own hand. Isaac believed that William would write in cursive, so he took a penmanship course. For Edgerton the task was in line with his usual approach: “I always want my own handwriting to be my own handwriting” onscreen, he said, even before “Master Gardener.” All described the process as meditative, in a way.“You know in Acting 101 they tell you to write your character’s biography, try to write a journal in character,” Hawke said. “Those are very challenging exercises to do that help find the voice of the character and help integrate yourself with the person. For me it was literally delivered to me in a box with an assignment of what to do, so I loved it.”Isaac noted that Schrader, for all of his hard edges and tough themes, has a soft side as well. While “Master Gardener” ends in a different way, a number of Schrader’s films, including “The Card Counter” and “Light Sleeper,” conclude with the hero in prison reaching out to a woman he loves. “He believes in the truth and purity of what love is and what love can do,” Isaac said. “So no matter how dark and grueling things can get, he has that spark in him, too. He’s not a nihilist.”Edgerton has not yet had the opportunity to discuss his time in Schraderland with Hawke or Isaac, but the latter two have swapped stories. Schrader pulled out his phone to show me a photo he received of them alongside another one of his actors, Dafoe, huddled together with middle fingers raised. He suggested it should accompany this article.Hawke and Isaac worked together on a Marvel Cinematic Universe television show, “Moon Knight,” but Isaac, in conversation, thought of another potential franchise. “It’s an incredible badge of honor to be part of Paul Schrader’s extended universe, the PCU,” he said, laughing. “It’d be one hell of a convention of all those characters coming together. We could do a team movie. I’m going to pitch him on that.” More