Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      In ‘The Innocents,’ Kids Behaving Deadly

      by

      Eskil Vogt, the Oscar-nominated co-writer of “The Worst Person in the World,” explores a childhood paradox in his new horror movie: how kids can be both innocent and cruel.It’s no biggie for horror movie villains to be rabid grannies or killer Santas. But what kind of monster kills a cat?In the new supernatural horror film “The Innocents,” that monster is a preteen named Ben (Sam Ashraf), and his gasp-inducing act early in the film is a hint of the sins to come by his, and other, little hands.“We still like to think that kids are pure angels,” Eskil Vogt, the film’s writer-director, said in a recent interview over video. “I think we need to face that the opposite is true.”Ben, who lives in a towering Oslo apartment complex, isn’t the only kid there with psychic powers. When young Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), her autistic older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), and their mother and father move into the building, Anna miraculously regains her ability to speak. Anna and a neighbor girl named Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who can hear thoughts, team up to call on their powers for (mostly) peaceful ends, flying under the radar of their clueless parents.But Ben, a bullied boy raised by a distant mom, struggles with a far more sinister power he’s not equipped to handle, and the consequences are deadly and heartbreaking.Rakel Lenora Flottum as Ida and Sam Ashraf as Ben in “The Innocents.”IFC MidnightA movie of icy dread, “The Innocents” unnervingly explores how children can be both uncorrupted and cruel, a paradox that can have deep emotional repercussions that linger well past the playground years. The young characters don’t question their otherworldly powers, nor do they fully comprehend the responsibility that comes with them. But they know enough not to tell their parents.Vogt was no different. On vacation as a kid, he remembers using an air gun to shoot a sea gull in flight; he saw the bullet make impact, but the bird didn’t fall. He kept it from his parents.“I remember walking around that day and going to bed that night thinking that this sea gull was dying slowly in agony somewhere because of me,” he said.Vogt said he drew on that and other fraught childhood decisions as he made “The Innocents.” The film (in theaters and on demand) arrives just months after he and his friend and longtime collaborator, the director Joachim Trier, shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay for their humanist dramedy “The Worst Person in the World.”In a separate video interview, Trier said if there’s a through line between both films, it’s how Vogt uses “form and visuality to make something that’s worth showing on a big screen.” If the terrors in “The Innocents” are more pernicious than sensational, Trier said it’s the product of Vogt’s deep affection for the films of Alain Resnais (“Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and other formalist cinema of the ’60s. “He’s hard core about that,” Trier said.Slow-burn horror, too. In 2014, Vogt wrote and directed the moody thriller “Blind,” about a paranoid sightless woman. Three years later he and Trier co-wrote Trier’s film “Thelma,” about a college student with telekinetic powers.A horror movie fan, Vogt said he was drawn to the films of David Cronenberg, especially the devilish man-child movie “The Brood” (1979), but also to Wolf Rilla’s “Village of the Damned” (1960), with what he called its “weird and special” youngsters.“I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid,” Vogt said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesVogt said he also looked no further than his living room and his two children, ages 9 and 11, who “can be the best kids in the world and in an instant they can become raging lunatics.” He said it was because of open casting, not an intentional choice, that the kids in “The Innocents” are outsiders beyond their powers: Anna has autism, Aisha has vitiligo and Ben is a boy of color (Ashraf was born in Norway and is of Persian and Pakistani descent).“It wasn’t like they are magical because they’re special,” he added.What Vogt hasn’t made, he stressed, is an evil-kids movie.“It’s a story about basic humanity,” he said.“The Innocents” joins other recent projects about children on the dark side, including the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Firestarter” and the HBO dark comedy series “The Baby.”T.S. Kord, the author of “Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt” (2016), said in an email that ​​diabolic kids have featured in horror with increasing frequency in recent decades as horror “wants to point out all the ways in which the human race is screwing up.”“We’ve devastated children and childhood for practically ever, now they’re striking back,” said Kord, who teaches German, film studies and comparative literature at University College London. Yet we have a societal stake in claiming that children are innocent, she added, “because their innocence defines us as a humane society.”What may unsettle viewers most about “The Innocents” is Vogt’s daring choice to assign villainy to tweens with at least some agency in their actions. In horror, kids are usually bad because of external forces (“The Exorcist”), or they’re teenagers who’ve already been messed up (“Eden Lake”). Of course, there are also fiendish fetuses (“The Unborn”) and blackhearted babies (“Grace”), but their consciousness is still unshaped and therefore particularly susceptible to outside diabolical forces.Flottum’s character goes for a swing in “The Innocents.”IFC Midnight“The Innocents” is closer in spirit to “The Bad Seed” and other horror films in the far more frightening middle, where kids do bad things because they haven’t totally figured out that other people have feelings.“During childhood we have to create our own set of values and morals and not rely on what our parents told us,” Vogt said. Eventually, he continued, “you have to do some of the stuff your mother said you shouldn’t do, and figure out if she was right or not.”It remains to be seen how kids behaving deadly in “The Innocents” will land with audiences. One critic wished that Vogt had focused “more on the harmless side of the children’s powers,” an indication of how strong the desire is to affirm childhood as a time of incorruptible purity.But “kids with powers have consequences,” Vogt said. So does just being a kid.“I remember lying in bed and hearing sounds and imagining the worst thing and how that would become part of my reality because I had no way of distinguishing between what’s real and not,” he said. “I would be completely and totally scared out of my mind. I don’t think I’ve been as scared as an adult as I was as a kid.” More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Joanna Barnes, Actress in ‘The Parent Trap’ and Its Remake, Dies at 87

      by

      In 1961, she played a vixenish fortune hunter. In 1998, she played the character’s mother. In between, she kept busy on TV and also wrote novels.Joanna Barnes, whose many screen roles included the conniving fiancée of a divorced father in the 1961 film “The Parent Trap” and, 37 years later, the character’s mother in the remake — and who, while still enjoying success as an actress, embarked on a successful second career as a writer — died on April 29 at her home in The Sea Ranch, Calif. She was 87.The cause was cancer, her friend Sally Jackson said.Ms. Barnes’s role in the hit Disney movie “The Parent Trap” was part of her busy first five years in Hollywood, which began in television on series including “Playhouse 90” and “Cheyenne” and then advanced to supporting roles in “Auntie Mame” (1958), opposite Rosalind Russell, and “Tarzan, the Ape Man” (1959), which starred Denny Miller in the title role.Ms. Barnes, as Jane, in the 1959 film “Tarzan, the Ape Man,” with Denny Miller, left, in the title role and Cesare Danova.FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty ImagesLife magazine featured Ms. Barnes in a photo spread that promoted “Tarzan.”“The silk-clad debutante, above, and the barelegged tree climber at right are the same — Miss Joanna Barnes of Boston and Hollywood,” the article said in part. “She is the latest and, MGM insists, the brainiest of the 20 girls who have played Jane, the genteel Englishwoman in the Tarzan films.”In “The Parent Trap” (1961), starring Hayley Mills in the dual role of long-separated twin sisters who meet and conspire to reunite their divorced parents, Ms. Barnes played the vixenish fortune hunter dating the girls’ father, played by Brian Keith. When the film was remade 37 years later with Lindsay Lohan as its star, Ms. Barnes played the mother of her former character, who was portrayed by Elaine Hendrix.“She had no judgment about being in a remake,” Nancy Meyers, the director of the film, said in a phone interview. “And she was one of those people who, after you say, ‘Cut!’ you want to keep talking to her.”Ms. Barnes never became a major star, and in the 1960s she began to find diversions from acting.In 1967 she hosted the ABC television series “Dateline: Hollywood,” on which she took viewers behind the scenes on studio tours and interviewed stars. She wrote a syndicated column, Touching Home, and a book, “Starting From Scratch” (1968), about interior decorating.Her first novel, “The Deceivers” (1970), was a sexy Hollywood exposé that swirled around a former child actress and the powerful people in her orbit.Ms. Barnes’s first novel, published in 1970, was a sexy Hollywood exposé. She went on to write three others.“Joanna Barnes is Jacqueline Susann with a brain,” the critic John Leonard wrote in The New York Times, referring to the author of the saucy 1966 saga “Valley of the Dolls.” He added, “A few of the characters in ‘The Deceivers’ seem to have been stamped out of stale Saltines; the sex grows like grass between each block of plot; and, as in too many first novels, everything gets resolved at a big party. But Miss Barnes is an excellent guide for tourists in the land of the plastic cactus.”She also wrote the novels “Who Is Carla Hart?” (1973); “Pastora” (1980), about a 19th-century woman’s rise in San Francisco society, which was a New York Times paperback best seller; and “Silverwood” (1985).“Acting and writing feed each other,” she told The Associated Press, adding, “When I’m beginning to feel confined at writing, I take time out for acting.”And socializing. In 1971, she briefly dated Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard M. Nixon’s national security adviser at the time. When Maxine Cheshire of The Washington Post reported that she and Mr. Kissinger had attended a party in Hollywood together, she noted that Ms. Barnes had written “The Deceivers,” “which Kissinger hasn’t read.”Ms. Barnes was born in Boston on Nov. 15, 1934, and raised in Hingham, Mass. Her father, John, was an insurance executive, and her mother, Alice (Mutch) Barnes, was a homemaker. She studied English at Smith College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1956 — the year she earned her first screen credit in the TV series “Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers.”In 1961, she was booted from the Boston Social Register, which, she told The St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times, did not approve of actors. She had just been in the hit movie “Spartacus,” starring Kirk Douglas.“Played a degenerate Roman lady,” she said. “Delicious part.”Over the next three decades she was seen on many TV series, including “Bachelor Father,” “77 Sunset Strip,” “Love American Style,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Trapper John, M.D.” In the 1965-66 season she was a regular on “The Trials of O’Brien,” a short-lived series about a defense lawyer, played by Peter Falk. She played his ex-wife.She is survived by her stepdaughters, Laura and Louise Warner; her stepson, John Warner; and her sisters, Lally Barnes Freeman and Judith Barnes Wood. Her marriages to Richard Herndon and Lawrence Dobkin ended in divorce; her marriage to Jack Lionel Warner ended with his death in 2012.For all her success on the screen, her interest in acting had faded — until the remake of “The Parent Trap” came along.“Her part was small but memorable, and I definitely didn’t need to tell her how to play it,” Ms. Meyers wrote in an email. “She knew exactly what to do and played it to the hilt.” More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Keanu Reeves Will Be Your Mirror

      by

      Elyssa Dudley and Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicHe’s an unknowable icon, the internet’s adorably tragic boyfriend, a prolific actor who never seems to be acting. Wesley Morris wants to get to the bottom of Keanu Reeves — and to understand “why we get so much out of a movie star who appears to give us so little.”He turns to Alex Pappademas — the writer, podcast host and author of “Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon” — to try to solve this mystery.Keanu has had a three-decade acting career, through which he is arguably just playing different versions of himself. And he is conscious of his audience knowing this: “He knows that we’re there, and he wonders if we’ve figured out that it’s just Keanu Reeves once again playing a character,” says Alex.Wesley and Alex discuss the most memorable examples of Keanu being Keanu (including the time he literally played himself) — and why we are seeing ourselves whenever we look at the actor.Keanu Reeves.Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionHosted by: Wesley Morris and Jenna WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley and Hans BuetowEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy Dorr More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Our Father’ Review: A Doctor’s God Complex Revealed

      by

      A new documentary tells the story of siblings who unite to bring to justice the fertility specialist who impregnated their mothers with his sperm without consent.At the beginning of the gripping Netflix documentary “Our Father,” the camera creeps through a hallway toward a door with a doctor’s nameplate on it and into an examination room decorated with embroidered Bible verses, gynecological charts and baby photos. A foreboding score plays.There are no jump scares in Lucie Jourdan’s debut feature, about the biological children of Dr. Donald Cline, an Indiana fertility specialist, who for nearly a decade inseminated patients with his own sperm without their knowledge. But make no mistake, “Our Father” is a horror movie. Cline’s deception upends the lives of his unsuspecting patients’ children, and the film is rife with harrowing insights about medical malfeasance and God complexes.At the center of it is an unflinching protagonist. An only child, Jacoba Ballard was stunned when, after taking a DNA test, she received notifications of several half siblings from a genealogy website. Cline had assured hopeful parents that the clinic he operated never used a donor more than three times. We learn from the film that Ballard, who’s now in her 40s, is Sibling No. 0. The last sibling interviewed in “Our Father” is No. 61.Jourdan makes potent — and, at times, speculative — use of re-enactments. In a scene reminiscent of cinema’s version of a detective hunting a suspect, Ballard sits at a desk, evidence papering the wall. Except she is wearing a bright red hoodie, as if to declare, “This is what it looks like to take down the Big Bad Wolf.”There are interviews with Cline’s partner in the clinic and a nurse who assisted him, as well as a sit-down with a former Indiana prosecutor as the documentary tries to address the plaint, “How could this have happened?” “Our Father” also looks into Cline’s possible connection to QuiverFull, a conservative Christian movement that champions procreation. But it is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.Our FatherNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Kamikaze Hearts’ Review: Truth or Fiction

      by

      Juliet Bashore’s porn-world quasi documentary is a delirious and distressing portrait of two women’s tempestuous relationship.Juliet Bashore’s “Kamikaze Hearts” is a porn-world quasi-documentary about the underground scene in 1980s San Francisco that shivers spit and cold sweat. Originally released in 1986, it is now receiving a national rollout courtesy of a new 2K restoration.A prism of ideas about performance, sex, identity, addiction, labor and much more, the film also plays like a bout of frenzied, opioid-induced delirium. It’s not exactly pleasurable — and it’s filled with disorienting longueurs — but it really sticks.The apparent drama centers on the tempestuous relationship between the unhinged porn star Sharon Mitchell and her hapless lover Tigr. We follow these women over the course of a few days working on the set of a new adult film based on the opera “Carmen.”That project will never be completed, because there is no adult “Carmen” film. The entire work — the tensions on set between the women performers and their sleazy male bosses, Mitchell and Tigr’s increasingly intense spats — was scripted and storyboarded, with the performers, many of them actual adult film professionals, improvising and playing versions of themselves.Much like porn, in which real sex acts are performed in fake contexts, this self-referential haze of a film blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. Perhaps the technology-inundated audiences of today, numb to the unstable realities and meta-universes that characterize the online experience (and franchise films, for that matter), won’t feel as impressed. Yet Tigr and Mitchell feel as alive as a fresh fever. And when we see the two women, who are actual heroin addicts, shoot up on camera, what could be more real?Kamikaze HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Montana Story’ Review: A Domestic Drama in Big Sky Country

      by

      Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s new film follows two adult siblings as they grapple with their terminally ill father.In the deft genre rethink “Montana Story,” the American flag doesn’t just flutter and wave, it also sends a warning. It looks so unassuming. Clean and neat, without frayed edges or faded colors, it flies from a tall pole planted in front of a handsome two-story home. There, on 200 acres in southwestern Montana, in a glorious area girdled by mountains known as Paradise Valley, nature beckons and soothes. It looks like heaven; it takes a while to see the rot.The directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel don’t linger on the flag. Instead, they gently nose you into a classic western milieu while simultaneously pulling you into a simmering family melodrama about two adult children grappling with each other and their terminally ill father. He’s the one who bought the family ranch years earlier and — with plenty of help, pretty horses and unethically lined pockets — took up the quintessential American role of the cowboy. That archetype is critical to both his legacy and the movie’s larger ambitions, which draw a line between one man’s patrimony and the country’s fraught bequest.It’s nearing winter when the youngest, Cal (Owen Teague), rolls up to the ranch in his truck. Lanky and in his early 20s, he has the loose limbs of a man who hasn’t settled into his body and a name that evokes “East of Eden,” another domestic drama. Here, the family’s history emerges with discretion, with visual cues and tense talks involving red-alert words like bankruptcy. Cal’s father, Wade (Rob Story), has had a stroke. Comatose and hooked to a machine that keeps his heart pumping, he now languishes in the study, cared for by a nurse, Ace (Gilbert Owuor), and a housekeeper, Valentina (Kimberly Guerrero).Despite the bad news and Cal’s furrowed brow over the unpaid bills, there is an inviting, relaxed quality to this narrative table setting, to the introductions, the carefully arranged genre elements and the casual way the parts begin sliding into place. Part of what’s appealing, even lulling, is that you think you’ve seen this before, if not necessarily in person. With its vistas, small town, lonely ranch and dusty roads, the Montana here looks pretty much like what you’d expect. It’s beautiful, isolated, rugged; it’s also a world that in image and in ethos was partly invented by Hollywood (and currently available to rent through Airbnb).Everything changes with the arrival of Erin (Haley Lu Richardson), Cal’s estranged older sister. She enters like a storm, disrupting the calm; as Cal later jokes, if you don’t like the weather in Montana, just wait five minutes. With brusque, hurried impatience, Erin explains she has flown in from the East Coast to see their father, whom she hasn’t seen since she left seven years ago. She plans to leave again right after. Instead, she stays, and that decision by this angry, wounded, defensive woman — Richardson tightly coils the character’s body inward, as if in hiding — sets a brutal reckoning in motion and this story on its course.What emerges next is by turns hot and cold, elliptical and obvious, effective and sometimes less so. As filmmakers, McGehee and Siegel like to engage with traditional genres, though at a discreet, distinctly self-aware remove. (Their movies include “The Deep End” and “What Maisie Knew.”) This creates a kind of doubled vision (theirs, yours), which isn’t a novel strategy, certainly, but can be tough to pull off. When “Montana Story” works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.While Cal frets and cautiously approaches Erin, attempting to reconnect, she pushes back, her face by turns opaque and knotted in rage. They keep circling, and the story progresses — there’s a beloved old horse in the barn and an interested party surveying the property — allowing each sibling to emerge with clarity and reveal the family’s relationships and pathologies. Even in dying, Wade remains as much a powerful gravitational force as the canned ideal he once embodied. As the story ticks on, the filmmakers put Cal and Erin’s unhappiness into play with ideas about identity, power, patriarchy and the myth of the west.There’s much to like in “Montana Story,” including Teague and Richardson, who, whether together or alone, retain an emotional integrity. Richardson has the better role, even if her character has to butcher a sacrificial chicken. Teague is burdened with some confessional speeches that, in length and density, feel at odds with the otherwise naturalistic dialogue. More provocative than persuasive, these near-soliloquies add buckets of information, but you can hear the writing in every phrase and weighted pause. And, unlike the fade-outs that punctuate the movie like chapter breaks, they unproductively disrupt the flow.In the main, Cal’s speeches seem contrived to push the story into another storytelling register, away from grounded psychological realism and into something approaching the mythic. It doesn’t always work. There are too many explanations and awkward good intentions; Dante’s “Inferno” puts in a dubious appearance, and the supporting characters, almost all played by people of color, skew homogeneously nice. Even so, when Erin rides the family’s old horse under the sheltering sky, and Cal, in plaintive voice-over, speaks about what they once had and what they lost, “Montana Story” opens a world of meaning that can pierce the heart.Montana StoryRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      After Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle Attacks, Comedy Venues Increase Security

      by

      Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars. Dave Chappelle was tackled at the Hollywood Bowl. Now some venues are increasing security to protect comedians.It was a joke about a mother, cocaine and Walmart that set the man off.He had been sitting with a woman at the Laugh Factory in Chicago this winter, shouting enthusiastically in response to a joke about drugs when, after being needled about his relationship with the woman, he said that she was his mother.So when Joe Kilgallon, the next comedian, took the microphone, a joke popped into his head.“That’s healthy — cocaine with your mom on a Monday,” Mr. Kilgallon recalled quipping. “Getting some real Walmart vibes here.”The man leaped from his chair, cursed and made a beeline for the stage, club officials and Mr. Kilgallon recalled. A security guard grabbed the man before he could climb onstage and hustled him out of the club through an emergency exit.It wound up nothing more than a minor confrontation, the kind that comedians have had to deal with for years, given that making fun of people and mixing it up with hecklers is basically part of the job description. But a couple of recent high-profile physical attacks on comedians — Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars in March and a man tackling Dave Chappelle as he performed at the Hollywood Bowl last week — has left some comics wondering if the stage is becoming less safe, and has led some clubs and venues to take steps to beef up their security at comedy shows.Laugh Factory officials say that as a result of the recent unrest, they have added cameras and metal detectors and increased the number of security guards at some of their locations. They have made a few additions — “This is not a U.F.C. match!” “We do not care about your political affiliation!”— to the standard monologue about two-drink minimums people hear as they walk in the door. The Uptown Comedy Corner in Atlanta last weekend hired an off-duty police officer to bolster its security, moved one of its guards closer to the stage and began using metal detecting wands to check patrons and their bags at the door. And the Hollywood Bowl said it had implemented its own “additional security measures” after the attack on Mr. Chappelle.Garrett Baney was searched this week as he entered The Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“When a comedian gets onstage, what is their only goal?” asked Judy Gold, the comedian and author of “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.” “To make you laugh. That’s it.”“When you take the comedian’s intent out of the formula and you decide ‘I am going to take this joke the way I perceive it, instead of the way the comedian intended it,’ ” she said, “and then say ‘I didn’t like that joke, I want that person canceled or silenced or beat up,’ I mean, it’s just devastatingly sad.”In interviews, comedy club owners and comedians themselves expressed varying degrees of concern over the recent events. While some spoke of a worrisome uptick in audience outbursts that predates the Oscars, others cautioned against conflating what happened to Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle and drawing overly broad conclusions.Trevor Noah addressed the situation with comedy last week, when he warily walked out onto the stage of his Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” under the watchful eye of a man in a black windbreaker that said “Security” who appeared to murmur into a Secret Service-style earpiece as Mr. Noah opened the show.Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar in New York, said he viewed the Smith-Rock confrontation as a highly specific “one-off” in which Mr. Smith seemed to be trying to embarrass Mr. Rock more than physically hurt him. Seeing an audience member tackling Mr. Chappelle was concerning, he said, but might be part of a broader trend.“It just seems like violence is creeping up on us,” Mr. Dworman said, citing recent riots and protests that have turned violent. “We have a lot of people equating words with violence. And the logical extension of equating words with violence is to say that it’s reasonable to answer words with violence.”Some comedians brushed off concern about their personal safety, noting that they are not, for the most part, big names like Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle. Several made clear they did not plan to soften their material. But some worried that societal forces, including the bitter debates of the Trump years and the difficulties many faced during the pandemic, may have left people increasingly on edge — and less willing to take a joke.After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and was allowed to stay at the ceremony, some comedians feared it might embolden copy cat attacks. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesJamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, said he had been counseling his comedians to take into account that some audience members have spent much of the last two years inside their apartments during a grueling pandemic. Mr. Kilgallon said he believed that after so much time alone, “people don’t know how to act in public” — whether it be in comedy clubs, bars or sporting events.Comedy clubs have long employed bouncers and security guards to deal with the occasional patron who has been overserved, or who is heckling a tad too much. And long before Mr. Smith strode onto the Academy Awards stage to slap Mr. Rock as retribution for a joke about his wife, there have been scattered instances of people confronting comedians during their sets, or in some cases, physically assaulting them.In the aftermath of the Oscars slap, some comics warned of the potential for copy cats. Mr. Smith was not only not removed from the Dolby Theater after hitting Mr. Rock but was given a standing ovation soon afterward when he was awarded the Oscar for best actor. (He was later banned from the Oscars for 10 years.)“These people gave him a standing ovation and no punishment,” Ms. Gold said of Mr. Smith. “We all said there will be copycat assaults. And there was.”The attack on Mr. Chappelle was murkier. A man carrying a weapon tackled Mr. Chappelle onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was appearing as part of “Netflix Is a Joke: The Festival.” The Los Angeles city attorney charged Isaiah Lee, 23, with four misdemeanors in connection with the attack, including battery and possession of a weapon with intent to assault; Mr. Lee has pleaded not guilty.The Los Angeles police have not released any information about Mr. Lee’s motive for the attack on Mr. Chappelle, whose comedy has provoked controversy in the past. Mr. Chappelle discussed the encounter at another comedy show in Los Angeles later that week, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mr. Chappelle told the audience that he had spoken to Mr. Lee after the incident, and said that Mr. Lee had said he did it to draw attention to the plight of his grandmother, who had been forced out of her neighborhood by gentrification, the trade publication reported.The Laugh Factory recently installed a new security camera.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“More than the incident itself, it’s the reaction people are having and saying — saying this is an ongoing or repeat thing,” said Angelo Sykes, a co-owner of Uptown Comedy Corner, which stiffened its security after the attack on Mr. Chappelle. “When you hear those things it makes you say, ‘OK, we can’t take those chances. We’ve got to be on the safe side.’”In telephone interviews last week, several comedians in Los Angeles said the attacks had been a topic of conversation between comics after shows. Ms. Gold described some of her fellow comedians as “weary and tired” and said others were “freaking out.”Comedy, she noted, is often a work in progress. “We don’t know where the line is until we bring up our material,” she said. “The audience informs us.”Tehran Von Ghasri, a Los Angeles-based comedian, was among those who said an increasing share of “hypersensitive” audience members seemed to be coming to shows and either inviting confrontation, “looking to be offended” — or both.Mr. Kilgallon said social media was also to blame. He has noticed that audience members are now quick to pull out their phones if a controversial topic is being discussed or a tense moment arises. But he said that the fundamentals of comedy remained the same.“Over the last five years, people come up to me after a show and say, ‘It’s got to be tough these days doing comedy — everyone’s so sensitive,’” Mr. Kilgallon said. “And I say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I perform in the bluest parts of the country and some of the reddest parts of the country. If you’re funny — no matter what the joke is, people laugh.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story’ Review: An Event With Unique Flavor

      by

      Gumbo, fried oysters, po’ boy sandwiches. And then there’s the music. This documentary gives an overview.As has been demonstrated in films as wide-ranging as “Monterey Pop,” “Woodstock,” and “Summer of Soul,” music festivals can’t help but get part of their vibe from their settings. As musicians from all over the world testify in the documentary “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story,” directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, the Louisiana city’s annual jazz festival has an irreproducible flavor because it happens in the cradle of American music.The movie’s opening montage, featuring familiar famous faces ranging from Tom Jones to Pitbull, is — happily — a bit of a fake out. These big names and others get some play (and in what some might consider an unfortunate feature, Jimmy Buffett gets a lot of play) but the movie is conscientiously attentive to the festival’s homegrown eclecticism.Exploring the musical atmosphere of New Orleans itself, the film features experts laying out the distinctions between Cajun and Zydeco, for example. While both are dance music that trades in old melodies, the latter features electric guitar and washboard and comes at you “like a freight train.”The entrepreneur George Wein, who founded the Newport Jazz Festival, had a hand in Jazz Fest’s creation, sagely taking on the musician Ellis Marsalis (you may be familiar with the pianist’s work, or that of his sons, who include Wynton and Branford) as his New Orleans docent. The organizational work was soon handled by the young music enthusiast Quint Davis, who’s still in charge today.The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005. But the music came back like a miracle, and the movie reports that after a two-year postponement because of Covid-19, the event is currently on the comeback trail again.Jazz Fest: A New Orleans StoryRated PG-13 for a little saucy language. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More