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      ‘Sneakerella’ Review: Beauty and the Hypebeast

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      This musical remake follows an orphaned boy in Queens as he falls head over sneaker heels for the daughter of a Manhattan footwear magnate.A Queens hypebeast falls for a Manhattan rich girl in “Sneakerella,” the latest rehashed fairy tale to be foisted upon audiences. It seemed inevitable that Disney would swap glass slippers for pumped-up kicks eventually; Cinderella is too shoe-centric a story and Hollywood too besotted with remakes — lest viewers forget, Camila Cabello played the maiden mere months ago — for nobody to dream up a sneakerhead crossover.If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise. Peppered with an array of original songs, “Sneakerella” is a hip-hop opera whose music is never mere emotional embroidery. Scenes are often sung-through, with rap and lyrics serving as dialogue. The actors could have used some more lip-syncing practice, but the effect is fun. Lin-Manuel Miranda might be tickled to see how the trickle-down of his stylings can elevate even the most dubious of re-trodden I.P.The story is also gender-swapped. Our orphaned hero is El (Chosen Jacobs), a sneaker fanatic and stock boy in an Astoria shoe store who’s overworked by his stepfather and razzed by his stepbrothers. In line for new kicks, he meets Kira (Lexi Underwood), the daughter of a sneaker tycoon and the heiress to its empire. First comes love, then comes drama: El wants to design footwear for Kira’s family business, and fibs about a wealth of experience to score the gig. It’s a complication as contrived as they come, but then again, so is a prince shoving a kingdom’s worth of feet into a stiletto.SneakerellaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Foxhole’ Review: A History of Violence

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      This small-scale dramatic military anthology tells a familiar story of the endless cycle of war.Jack Fessenden’s war film “Foxhole” is really three short war films spliced together, each revolving around a banal moral dilemma. The first, set during the Civil War, concerns a squad of Union soldiers who must decide whether to abandon a fortified trench to save the life of a wounded man; the second, during World War I, follows American soldiers on the front lines who must decide whether or not to execute a potentially dangerous German captive; the third, set in Iraq, focuses on a detachment of American soldiers who, separated from their convoy and under heavy fire, must choose between fleeing to higher ground on foot or remaining under tenuous cover in their damaged Humvee.The three-part scope is ambitious, but “Foxhole” is a film made on a very small scale. The soldiers in each segment are played by the same actors — a theatrical conceit meant to emphasize, rather tritely, the eternal repetition of war — and the action is almost entirely limited, for the duration of the movie’s 95-minute running time, to the cramped confines suggested by the title. Fessenden, the son of the cult horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden, attempts to disguise the production’s slender means by way of several unconvincing tricks ordinarily found in student films, such as using blown-out high-contrast lighting to hide backgrounds in close-ups, and blanketing wider shots in thick, phony-looking fog. These gimmicks, however, do not mask the thin, superficial writing, which relies on blandly sentimental monologues and an assortment of patriotic war-flick clichés.FoxholeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life’ Review: A Gay Porn Star Is Born

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      The director Tomer Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy.“Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life” has a somewhat sensationalist appeal: It’s a documentary about the rise and fall of the eponymous Israeli gay porn superstar. But the director, Tomer Heymann, finds idiosyncratic insights within typical narrative beats about fame and power — two mercurial things that, for the film and Agassi himself, don’t exist in a vacuum. Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy, with striking detail.Agassi, now retired, shot to fame after appearing in the Lucas Entertainment gay porn film “Men of Israel” in 2009, and Heymann documents the actor’s aggressive rise to notoriety. He Skype calls his mother from Berlin frequently, even as his stardom intensifies. She’s caring and supportive, albeit long distance. She approves of his awards-show garments (harness, lace garters, heels) through the computer. It’s with her that he puts on pause his craving of being wanted and his desire to perform. (“Jonathan Agassi,” after all, is a pseudonym, a character.) In contrast, he does not like talking about his absentee homophobic father, to whom he refers by first name. That Heymann outlines Agassi’s family dynamics with such detail facilitates a dialogue between the two parts of Agassi’s life: his gay pornography and his home.“Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life” achieves an impressive level of formal closeness with its subject while maintaining a critical distance from him, following his personal moments closely without over-sentimentalizing interactions. The film mostly abstains from judgment. When Agassi is alone, Heymann catches the performer vacillating wildly between self-awareness (about performance, desire) and naïveté. And when things fall apart, the safety of mom is there, waiting.Jonathan Agassi Saved My LifeNot rated. In English and Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Innocents’ Review: Head Games

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      Four children develop unusual abilities in this wonderfully eerie Norwegian horror movie.“The Innocents” may share a title — and even some thematic fragments — with Jack Clayton’s 1961 ghost story, but its vibe is ultimately more superheroic than spectral. There’s no hint of either characteristic, though, in the movie’s gorgeous opening shot of an angelically sleeping child, the brush of eyelashes on freckled skin glowing in summer sunlight. The child is 9-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), and when she wakes and carefully pinches the thigh of her autistic, nonverbal sister, Anna (played by the neurotypical actor Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), we know Ida is no angel.Yet “The Innocents,” written and directed by Eskil Vogt (probably best known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier), isn’t concerned with adjudicating right and wrong. Rather, this uncannily atmospheric movie immerses us in a childhood world where choices between cruelty and kindness, empathy and hostility must be learned and negotiated. Set in a large Norwegian housing complex, where towering apartment blocks huddle before an encroaching forest, the story pulls Ida and Anna toward two other children: Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), sweet and gentle, and the slightly older Ben (Sam Ashraf), moody and intense. Both live with single mothers; but while Aisha’s is lovingly attentive, Ben’s is neglectful, unaware that her bullied son is becoming dangerously angry. And that he has paranormal gifts.Those aptitudes — telepathy, telekinesis and a terrifying ability to control minds — are amplified when Ben is around the other children, who begin to share some of them. Thoughts move unhindered from one brain to another, and an injury to one child causes another to bleed. At first, Ben’s tricks with rocks and bottle caps seem innocent enough, no more worrying than Ida’s double-jointed elbows; but when, in a series of increasingly horrifying scenes, his playfulness lurches into sadism, Ida is the first to recognize that they may all be in danger.Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), “The Innocents” constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate. Keeping the light bright and the camera mostly at child height, the cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen fills his sunny, soaring final shot with chilly foreboding. Ida and Anna, knowing no adult can help them, can only try to save themselves.The InnocentsNot rated. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      When Motherhood Is a Horror Show

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      For the onscreen moms in “The Baby,” “Umma” and “Lamb” — and for an ascendant class of sardonic mom influencers — the source of psychological torture is motherhood itself.In the first episode of “The Baby,” a new comedic horror series on HBO Max, an infant falls into a childless woman’s arms, as if dropped there by a cosmic stork. But the special delivery is not a blessing — it’s a curse.Natasha (Michelle de Swarte), the 38-year-old chef who catches the gurgling babe, does not want children. She has watched with disgust as her friends have vanished into motherhood; now they are always droning on about their babies, going on play dates with their babies, telling Natasha to stop smoking cigarettes around their babies. The baby-from-the-sky quickly reveals himself to be a supernatural manifestation of her own dying youth. Once he starts crawling after Natasha, everyone around her ends up dead or maimed.The show is a not-quite-sendup of a genre that imbues the trials of motherhood with a paranormal charge. The mothers in several horror movies released this year are not straightforward villains (like the mother in “Carrie”) or innocent naïfs (as in “Rosemary’s Baby”), but sympathetic figures who become implicated in haunting family dysfunctions.In “Umma,” a beekeeping single mom (Sandra Oh) is possessed by the ghost of her own mother. In “Lamb,” an Icelandic farmer (Noomi Rapace) adopts a hybrid lamb-human newborn she discovers in her barn, with monstrous results. Marvel’s flirtation with horror, in the director Sam Raimi’s zombified “Doctor Strange” sequel, finds its villain in a mother, a lurching Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who is willing to wreak havoc across as many universes as it will take to reunite with her children.Even “The Twin,” an original film from the horror streaming service Shudder, cycles through a mess of clichés (evil twin, Scandinavian occultism, Faustian bargain) before landing on mommy psychodrama. Though these mothers often carry past domestic traumas — abuse, neglect, infant loss — their stories signal that there is something psychologically harrowing about the role of motherhood itself.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.The Villain: The actress Stephanie Hsu, who plays an all-powerful evil being, talks about how clothes convey the full range of her character.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama.A Healing Experience: For some viewers, the movie was a way to reflect on how the effects of trauma can be passed down between generations.In pregnancy, birth and young life, the horror tropes abound. Growing another human being inside your body is a natural human process that can nevertheless feel eerie, alien and supernatural. Also, gory. When the photographer Heji Shin began taking unsentimental photographs of babies at birth, “I looked at them and I was like, This is literally ‘The Exorcist,’” she told T Magazine. Bringing life into the world also brings death viscerally close. Thousands of infants die unexpectedly in the first year of their lives. Giving birth in the United States is more than 20 times as lethal as skydiving. Even the most desired and successful of pregnancies (let alone the kind that anti-abortion laws would require be carried to term) can conjure themes of shape-shifting, disfigurement, possession and torture.The pandemic surfaced horrors of a more quotidian nature: the drudgeries of ceaseless child rearing. The veneration of motherly fortitude and sacrifice endemic to nature documentaries and Mother’s Day Instagram tributes has always disguised an American disinterest in functionally supporting mothers and other caretakers. But recently the image of the overworked American mother has assumed a darker valence, as new levels of isolation and stress have unleashed a maternal desperation that’s been described as “primal,” “Sisyphean,” and, as the writer Amil Niazi put it in The Cut last year, “like my brain is burning and so is my entire house and someone just stole the fire extinguisher.”Often a mother’s own fixation on such darker themes is written off, trivialized as old news or pathologized as postpartum depression. So it makes sense for it all to get sublimated into horror. In fact, it makes so much sense that the outcome is often a little too on the nose. Psychological frights that jumped from the screen in earlier mother-focused films, like “The Babadook” (from 2014) and “Hereditary” (2018), now seem to drift wearily through pop culture, as stories of motherhood are retold again and again through the blunt instruments of horror.When a woman notices bizarre behavior in her young son in “The Twin,” the twist is foreshadowed via the diagnosis of a shrink, who tells her that her child “is a mirror — he’s a reflection of your emotions and fears.” In “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” Wanda Maximoff fashions the tension into a tagline: “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother,” she says. And in “Umma,” as Oh’s character endures a tedious possession by her abusive mother’s ghost, a kindly neighbor (Dermot Mulroney) vocalizes the old saw that grinds through the whole movie: “Oh God, I can hear myself turning into my mother.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York Times“The Baby” is clever to convert this mode into comedy, though the mood soon darkens. At first, Natasha’s antipathy toward parenthood feels refreshingly specific, with its focus on the mundane degradations that can haunt the imaginations of the happily childless. A soiled diaper escalates into a scene of body horror; a struggle to collapse a stroller ends with a severed finger. But the murderous-baby metaphor assumes more and more of motherhood’s potential pitfalls with every episode. Soon the show is also about postpartum depression and forced birth and compulsory heterosexuality and intergenerational trauma.There’s something frustrating about this relentless construction of motherhood as a horror show, and not just because mothers experience the full range of human emotions (some of which are more faithfully explored in a Hallmark movie). By breaking a taboo, the genre has created a new cliché: of the exhausted mother pushed to her psychological breaking point. Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one, with a narrative resolution that resembles a postpartum therapy session or an invitation to collectively scream. Mothers are made to suffer, and then they are flattened into a long-suffering mother persona.On the internet, there is a cutesy horror-inspired term for this kind of mother: the mombie. This lightly ironic version of the overwhelmed mom persona is ascendant on Instagram, TikTok and e-commerce novelty sites, where the lobotomized stereotype of the mommy influencer is countered with a version of motherhood defined by bedraggled debasement. In this exaggerated burlesque performance, motherhood is analogized to prison, or the feeling of a child’s scooter wheel repeatedly hitting you in the ankle bone for all eternity.These jokes are often accompanied by sincere messages about how negative feelings about motherhood are valid, and that it’s important to speak out. But the persona can also seem curiously invested in feeling aggrieved, as if the conversion of suffering into content is itself a balm. A common joke format is to complain that men do not help, but that when they do help, they do not help correctly. If you can’t relate, perhaps it is because you are so smugly privileged that you can pay other women to perform the drudgery of motherhood for you. (A recent “Atlanta” episode actually mines great comedy-horror from this premise: When the Trinidadian nanny for a rich white boy dies suddenly, the parents are haunted by the dawning realization that she was more family to their son than they were.)I found relief from this narrative trap in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which unchains its overworked mother character from the limits of the domestic horror genre by vaulting her into a multiverse of thrilling supernatural possibilities. The film begins with Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner pestered by her aging father, her bumbling husband, her depressed teenage daughter and the I.R.S. Her life has devolved, as she puts it, into the endless repetition of “laundry and taxes” — until she learns that a plethora of Evelyns exist in endless multiverses, that she happens to be living the most disappointing possible version of her life, and that now she must access her untapped potential in order to save the worlds. “Everything Everywhere” accesses familiar themes of fraught mother-daughter relationships and overburdened moms, but this time the film’s whole paranormal dimension is built around Evelyn’s powerful complexity.After a numbing few weeks of watching mothers tortured onscreen, the absurdly funny “Everything Everywhere” is the one that actually made me cry. But even during this elevated viewing experience, I was reminded that I was still living in our universe. Before the previews began, the theater screened a KFC commercial where a family gathers around the table for a fried chicken dinner. We hear each of their internal monologues as they dig in: “Mmm, mac and cheese,” the son thinks. “Mmm, tenders,” thinks the father. Then we hear the mind of the mother, who is nourished only by a respite from her domestic burden: “Mmmm,” she thinks. “Silence.” More

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      ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: A Bland Hash

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      In this World War II drama from Netflix, a team of spies uses a vagrant’s corpse to outwit the Nazis.Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers died fighting in World War II. “Operation Mincemeat,” directed by John Madden, tells the real-life story of one man drafted into the war effort after death — or rather, it tells the story of the men who conscripted him. In this bizarrely celebratory tale, the titular “mincemeat” is a troubling figure, weighing heavy on the conscience as the men who’ve enlisted him engage in petty infighting.Colin Firth plays Ewen Montagu, a former barrister who teams up with Charles Cholmondeley, played by Matthew Macfadyen, after hearing his plan to deceive Hitler by using forged papers attached to a corpse. They’re aided by two girls Friday: Hester, Montagu’s steadfast “spinster” secretary played by Penelope Wilton, and Jean, a younger typist played by Kelly Macdonald.They end up pilfering the corpse of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who died from ingesting rat poison. There are conflicting accounts as to whether Montagu and Cholmondeley informed Michael’s family before repurposing his body. Michelle Ashford’s screenplay, based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, has an unexpected relative nearly sabotage their plans before, oddly, disappearing from the script. This seems the filmmakers’ main attempt at injecting some conscience into their protagonists — the scene ends with Montagu declaring, “May God forgive us all.”But “Operation Mincemeat” is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic. As the leading men spar over Jean (yawn) and their bond is further threatened by a superior officer with Red Scare accusations, we’re expected to lose ourselves in their human squabbles. Alas, the more provocative Michael — and all the existential and ethical issues he represents — lingers in the periphery.Operation MincemeatRated PG-13 for light sexuality and a gnarly autopsy. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Strange Afterlife of George Carlin

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      In the closing monologue from a recent episode of his HBO talk show, Bill Maher cataloged a series of social conditions that he suggested were hampering stand-up comedy and imperiling free speech: cancel culture, a perceived increase of sensitivity on college campuses, and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.Near the end of his remarks, Maher invoked the comedian George Carlin, a personal hero whose iconoclastic spirit, he seemed to believe, could never thrive in such a thin-skinned and overly entitled era. “Oh, George,” he said, “it’s a good thing you’re dead.”Carlin, the cantankerous, longhaired sage who used his withering insight and gleefully profane vocabulary to take aim at American hypocrisy, died in 2008. But in the years since, it can feel like he never really left us.On an almost daily basis, parts of Carlin’s routines rise to the surface of our discourse, and he is embraced by people who span the political spectrum — they may rarely agree with each other, but they are certain that Carlin would agree with them.Carlin’s rueful 1996 routine about conservatives’ opposition to abortion (“they will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born, you’re on your own”) became a newly viral phenomenon and was shown on a recent broadcast of the MSNBC program “11th Hour.” A video clip of a Carlin bit about how Americans are ravenous for war (“so we’re good at it, and it’s a good thing we are — we’re not very good at anything else anymore!”) has been tweeted by Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota. On the right-wing website Breitbart, Carlin has been cited as an expert on bipartisanship (“the word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out”) and hailed as a rebel who didn’t acquiesce to authority.Carlin is a venerated figure in his chosen field who unites performers as disparate as Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan, but he’s also someone whose influence transcends comedy. He is a touchstone shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker, the rapper and actor Ice Cube and people on social media who equate the pandemic with George Orwell novels. Carlin’s indignant voice feels so impossible to duplicate that quotes he never said and entire essays he didn’t write are often wrongly attributed to him.George Carlin on “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. His fans include Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan.Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesThere’s a strange afterlife that Carlin enjoys, not just as a comic but also as a moral compass. Few of us care in quite the same way if our choices in life would meet the approval of Johnny Carson or Andy Kaufman.That Carlin’s work endures long after him is not only a testament to his talents; it’s a sign that his frustrations, which he expressed humorously but felt authentically, still resonate with audiences, and that the injustices he identified in American society persist to this day.“There’s something about his righteous aggravation — it’s a rare point of view, and it’s rare that it’s a natural point of view,” said Marc Maron, the comedian and podcaster. “It’s not something you can pretend to make happen. Aggravation is not always funny.”And Carlin’s routines, particularly from his splenetic, late-period specials, have hardly lost their punch. It’s still bracing to hear the bitter wordplay in his lament: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”When he spoke, “you always felt like you were hearing the truth, or his truth,” said the comedian Bill Burr. “He was giving you the truth of what he felt, which most of us don’t do. It’s refreshing to listen to another human being tell you exactly how they feel, even if it’s 180 degrees removed from what you agree with.”But the durability of Carlin’s material can be dangerous, too. Dislocated from the time and circumstances that inspired his work, the arguments he delivered can be made to serve purposes he didn’t intend.As those who were closest to him have learned, when he is unable to advocate for himself, he can be made to seem like he supported any opinion at all.“It is a daily battle for me,” said Kelly Carlin, the comedian’s daughter. “At first I was like, I’ll be the interpreter and tell them what I think he meant. And then it was like, this is not my job. It’s like trying to push back a tidal wave sometimes.”The continuing relevance of Carlin’s material is partly a result of how he learned to compose and refine it over a career that spanned nearly 50 years.As he explained in a 1997 interview on “The Chris Rock Show,” he essentially saw himself as a playful provocateur. “I like to bother people,” he said, adding that he tried to figure out “where the line is drawn, and then deliberately cross it and drag the audience with you. And have them happy that you did it.”Carlin with his daughter, Kelly, on the left and his first wife, Brenda. He’s the subject of a new documentary.George Carlin’s Estate, via HBOCarlin is well-known for pivoting from a strait-laced, suit-and-tie approach to standup in the late 1960s and early ’70s and for immersing himself in the counterculture that shaped his personal politics.But a new two-part HBO documentary, “George Carlin’s American Dream,” which will be shown May 20 and 21, illustrates how his professional trajectory consisted of numerous ups and downs — multiple efforts to rediscover his voice and refine his material when his personal radar detected he was out of step with the times.“He would do that every decade or so,” said Judd Apatow, the comedian and filmmaker who directed the documentary with Michael Bonfiglio. “At the moment when it seemed like he was out of gas, he would suddenly recharge and reinvent himself.”As he evolved from a fast-talking parodist of TV and radio to a rhetorical bomb-tosser, Carlin had a set of standards that remained consistent. “He had deep core values that were good,” Bonfiglio said: “Take care of other people. Take care of the planet. There was a sense of fairness and rooting for the underdog. Those would shine through, even in his darkest stuff.”But over the decades, as Carlin watched America’s retreat from Vietnam and its entrance into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as corporate power grew more intractable and environmental catastrophe felt unavoidable, his feelings of bitter disappointment flooded into his routines.At times, Maron said, “his anger became more pronounced than his ability to speak funny within it.” But in every hourlong set he performed, Maron added, “there would be one bit that was worth the entire special.”Carlin’s personal politics were readily identifiable. Kelly Carlin said her father was “99 percent progressive” and that he raised her in a manner that today might be contemptuously dismissed as woke.“He taught me from Day 1 that the Black and brown people have always been oppressed, horribly and systematically, by the owners of wealth,” she said. “He had a pure disdain and loathing for white men in America.”That leftist bent was unmistakable in Carlin’s standup, too: He railed against police violence, championed prison reform and environmentalism and condemned organized religion.But he was also critical of Democrats and “guilty white liberals,” while he endorsed other ideas that conservatives supported. He despised euphemism and the policing of language, reviled what he called “the continued puss-ification of the American male” and rebuked his countrymen who would “trade away a little of their freedom for the feeling — the illusion — of security.”Using language that would later be echoed by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Carlin observed in a 2005 routine that the interwoven systems of American economy and government were not designed to ensure the prosperity of the average citizen: “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” he said.“The table is tilted, folks,” Carlin added. “The game is rigged.”Carlin didn’t hesitate to criticize presidents by name — Bill Clinton and George W. Bush among them — but, more often, he spoke in broader terms and addressed institutional failings.“There were other court jesters before Carlin and alongside Carlin, but Carlin was more powerful and dangerous to the king,” said Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center, which is home to more than 25,000 items from Carlin’s archives.What gave him his potency, Gunderson said, was that he turned his standup “into a call to action.” Carlin, she said, “taught everyone where to find the power that they have and encouraged them to use it.”Carlin at a benefit for the Bitter End in New York in 1992. He was “99 percent progressive,” said his daughter, but also took some positions that echoed those of conservatives today.Ed Bailey/Associated PressThat approach gave Carlin’s comedy a longevity that not even the work of his esteemed predecessor Lenny Bruce has attained.“It requires a scholarship to appreciate Lenny Bruce,” Maron said. “You’ve got to sort through a number of very dated impressions and news stories. Whereas George was always making things totally accessible.”(Even in her father’s later years, Kelly Carlin said, if he had an idea for a topical joke, rather than put it in his act, he would share them with people like the broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who was then the host of “Countdown” on MSNBC. Olbermann confirmed this, saying that Carlin sent him “a couple of one-liners about Bush” and a sports joke he keeps framed on his wall.)For the most part, Carlin left behind no protégés or appointed successors. When he died, no one else could say they spoke on his behalf. And while the generations of stand-ups that have followed may have a sincere reverence for him, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are fluent in the jokes he told.“A lot of us know that you’re supposed to say Carlin is an influence, but I don’t think a lot of us can back that up,” the comedian Nikki Glaser said.A lack of familiarity with Carlin’s words, his history and his values can lead to misapprehension when his arguments are stretched to fit present-day conditions he didn’t live to see.Several times during the pandemic, Carlin has drawn attention for a routine from his 1999 special, “You Are All Diseased,” in which he mischievously suggests that a childhood spent swimming in the polluted Hudson River was the reason he didn’t catch polio.(“In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio,” he fulminates. “No one, ever. You know why? ’Cause we swam in raw sewage. It strengthened our immune systems. The polio never had a prayer.”)As Kelly Carlin explained, some viewers concluded — wrongly — that her father would have opposed coronavirus vaccines.“Everyone’s like, see? George Carlin would have been anti-vaccination,” she said. “And I’m like, no. My dad was pro-science, pro-rational thinking, pro-evidence-based medicine. The man was a heart patient for 30 years. When he was a kid and the polio vaccine became available, he got the polio vaccine.”Though she generally tries to avoid intervening in these kinds of disputes, Kelly Carlin has used her social media to correct this reading. “I felt it was important that people not use him to undermine what we needed to do to get through this virus,” she said.On other modern-day topics in which George Carlin surely would have had an incendiary but clarifying take on — the Trump and Biden presidencies, social media, Elon Musk or the Marvel Cinematic Universe — no matter how much we might wish to know his thoughts, he remains frustratingly out of reach. Kelly Carlin said she could understand why audiences might long for her father’s particular brand of unvarnished honesty at this moment.“I think we are in a time of exponential uncertainty as a species,” she said. “He’s a man who looked forward and said, ‘This is not going to end well.’ He saw the chaos coming.”And Carlin remains almost universally admired as a free-speech pioneer: He was arrested in 1972 for a performance of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and that same routine would later play a key role when the federal government asserted its power to regulate the broadcast of indecent content.Because of that status, Carlin is frequently summoned in contemporary debates over how comedians choose to use their platforms. When controversy engulfed Dave Chappelle’s 2021 special “The Closer,” which was criticized as transphobic and prompted walkouts at Netflix, Carlin’s name was invoked, even though no one could be certain what position he might have taken: Would he have criticized Chappelle as intolerant or defended his right to express himself?Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee in 1972 on obscenity and disorderly conduct charges. The case was later dismissed and the comedian was widely admired for his free-speech stance.Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesIn efforts to divine his opinion, some Carlin fans pointed to a 1990 interview he gave to Larry King, when he expressed his misgivings about the crude standup of Andrew Dice Clay: “His targets are underdogs, and comedy has traditionally picked on power — people who abuse their power,” Carlin said at the time.Kelly Carlin said her father “always took the stand that more speech is better than less speech” and would have supported Chappelle’s right to perform the special. But, she added, “if you’re a comedian, you’ve got to be funny.”“If you’re going to take the audience over the line, you’ve got to construct things in a way that they’re willingly crossing it with you,” she said. “Did Dave Chappelle do that for everybody? Clearly not.”Even so, Kelly Carlin said, “is it dangerous when a culture wants to shut people down for speech? I think my dad would say that is dangerous.”Like his friend and forerunner Lenny Bruce, who was arrested and convicted on obscenity charges (and who later received a posthumous pardon), George Carlin was battling the state’s power to discourage and punish his expression.Maron contended that free-speech conflicts have shifted since Carlin’s era in such a way that it doesn’t make sense to drag Carlin back into them.“That fight was already won,” Maron said. “What’s going on now is not that fight.” Today, he said, we live “in a world where anybody can really say what they want, whether anyone believes that or not.”While Carlin would still probably be dissatisfied with the state of free speech today, Maron said, his barbs would have been aimed at “the corporate occupation” of discourse, with digital monoliths like Google, Facebook and Twitter “dictating how culture thrives and is consumed.”And if a comedian wants to claim freedom of speech while using words that others deem hateful, Maron said, “you can say them all you want — you’re probably just going to be hanging around people who enjoy that kind of stuff. If that’s the company you want to keep, do what you gotta do.”Without Carlin’s humanistic spirit to guide it, contemporary standup can sometimes feel like a ruthless place. “There’s this fearlessness in comedy now that is so fake,” Glaser said. “There’s so much sleight of hand and so many illusions happening onstage to trick an audience that you’re being brave.”“There was never a cruelty to Carlin,” she said. “He always seemed filled with empathy.”Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described Carlin as “a leader who didn’t want to hold all the power.” The ultimate lesson he had for us, she said, is that we have “the unlimited right to challenge everything, to never stop thinking critically about any source of power or any institution” — even Carlin himself.Kelly Carlin cautioned that we should not be too beholden to any of the messages in her father’s stand-up: Of course George Carlin believed in much of what he said onstage, but what mattered most to him was that audiences learned to think for themselves. He never wanted to be anyone’s role model and was never a comfortable joiner of causes.“The moment anyone gets in a group, gets together for meetings and puts on armbands, he instantly didn’t want that,” she said.If George Carlin were around now to respond to the questions we have for him, “he would have schooled us on both sides and come up with a third-way truth that would have blown our minds,” she said. “But not solved anything. He was never looking to solve the culture wars or solve America’s problems. He was always looking to show off what he’d been thinking about at home.” More

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      ‘The Village House’ Review: A Family and the Walls That Enfold It

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      Over two decades, babies are born, elders die, young people move on, but a home remains, even though visitors dwindle.In “The Village House,” the four sides of the camera frame find beautiful, painterly pockets of space and time within the four walls of an ancestral home. Achal Mishra’s feature debut, set in Madhopur, a village in east India’s Bihar state, unfolds as a kind of autobiography — a decades-spanning portrait of the director’s family, drawn from childhood memories — and also a biography, of the abode that came before him and whose legacy will outlast him.The film is divided into three chapters, set in 1998, 2010 and 2019. In the first, the sun-warmed house bustles with the activity of an extended family gathered to celebrate the birth of a child. The men play cards on a veranda; the women fry potatoes in hot oil; the children scamper about and pick mangoes.As we segue from one chapter to the next, the passage of time makes itself felt subtly, in the details. The house grows emptier and more worn, deaths and diseases are mentioned in passing, and conversations become increasingly nostalgic. By the end, the house is in disrepair, and its inhabitants have all either died or moved away to the city. In lieu of plot, the film accumulates rituals, traditions and memories, and charts a larger arc of familial change and rural emigration.With its patient lens and attention to textures, “The Village House” often evokes the durational cinema of Tsai Ming-liang or Chantal Akerman, though Mishra’s compositions are more mannered. The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.The Village HouseNot rated. In Maithili, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More