Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Calendar Girl’ Review: A Portrait of an Angel of Fashion

      by

      This documentary follows Ruth Finley to shows and tributes as she reluctantly brings her decades-long career to a close.Fashion is a cosmos unto itself, as so many books, articles and films insist on reminding us. And so it has its own angels and demons — as you know, the Devil wears Prada. In this firmament, Ruth Finley, who died in 2018 at the age of 98, was unquestionably one of the angels.Finley is introduced to us as a nice lady in her 90s who sits patiently with folded hands as she’s made up before heading onstage to receive another award for her work. Her dress is understatedly elegant; she speaks of her old friend Bill Blass as one of her favorite designers.Finley, in this opening scene and subsequent ones, is celebrated for creating a publication which you may have never heard of, but which has been vital for keeping the fashion industry on schedule: “Fashion Calendar.” It is perfectly described by its title.A subscription publication that took no ads, the calendar was simplicity itself: a grid describing who was showing what, and, most important, when they were showing it. It never ran illustrations or outgrew its use of typewriter font. And Finley was slow to take it into the online world, where it resides today.“Calendar Girl,” directed by Christian D. Bruun, follows Finley to shows and tributes as she reluctantly brings her decades-long career to a close.Finley’s story is also the story of how New York became a fashion powerhouse: Her own discernment, and her kindness to up-and-coming designers, is recounted in sometimes nostalgic detail.This affectionate portrait is also well grounded. Finley is remembered as a hard worker among other hard workers. Despite the extremes often associated with the fashion industry, in Finley’s narrative, there’s very little haughty self-regard or hyperbole on display.Calendar GirlNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      How the ‘Encanto’ Soundtrack Became a Smash

      by

      With its eighth week at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, the LP featuring songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda is a lesson in how fans drive hits from social media to streaming services.The soundtrack to Disney’s “Encanto” had an inauspicious start on the Billboard 200 album chart, arriving at No. 197 after the animated film’s release in November, just below Bob Seger’s “Greatest Hits” and a Notorious B.I.G. reissue.But this week the soundtrack, featuring songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a score by Germaine Franco, notches its eighth week at No. 1 — one of only three albums with a run this long in the last five years — while Miranda’s song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” slipped to second place on the Hot 100 singles chart after five times at the top.What happened in between is an object lesson in how songs become hits now, with tracks elevated by fans through streaming and social media, and radio often lagging behind the curve.For “Encanto” and “Bruno,” the key factor was TikTok. Soon after the film became available for streaming on Disney+ on Christmas Eve, fans shared their reflections there and acted out scenes from the movie, about an extended family in Colombia that has been touched by magic.“The first instance on TikTok was people posting that these characters look like me and my family, that I’m seeing myself in this picture,” said Ken Bunt, president of the Disney Music Group. “Then it fairly quickly moved into another phase, where people were doing the dances and singing to it.”Explore the World of ‘Encanto’Disney’s new film, about a gifted family in Colombia, pairs stunning animation with spellbinding songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda.Review: “Encanto” charms with its focus on family dynamics, fantastic feats of wizardry and respect for Latino culture, writes our film critic.The Voice of Mirabel: Stephanie Beatriz, who won over fans with her role in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” discusses taking on the lead role in the film.An Enchanting Soundtrack: The film’s album of music recently climbed to the top of the Billboard 200, displacing Adele’s “30.”A Slice of His Homeland: A Times reporter watched “Encanto” with her Colombian father. Here’s what they thought.Once ignited on TikTok — where videos tagged #wedonttalkaboutbruno have been viewed 3.5 billion times — “Bruno” and other soundtrack songs, like “Surface Pressure,” began to dominate Spotify, Apple Music and other audio streaming outlets. The soundtrack ousted Adele’s “30” from No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart in early January and has since held that slot every week but one.Since its release, “Encanto” has had the equivalent of just under one million sales in the United States, according to MRC Data, the tracking service used in compiling Billboard’s charts. This week, “Encanto” tops the rapper Kodak Black’s new “Back for Everything” (No. 2) and albums by Morgan Wallen (No. 3), Gunna (No. 4) and the Weeknd (No. 5).On the singles chart, “Bruno” was replaced at No. 1 by Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” a song released nearly two years ago that was resuscitated as a TikTok meme and recently got a fresh boost on the radio.Even with the imprimatur of Miranda, the Tony-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning creator of “Hamilton,” “Encanto” might have seemed a long shot as a mainstream pop hit. The album is a pan-Latin fusion that draws on Colombian folk styles like vallenato and bambuco, with touches of salsa, Broadway bombast and rock en Español.In the past, Disney might have leaned on a Broadway-style ballad, with a globally recognized star singing in English, to propel one of its soundtracks. (Think Elton John’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from “The Lion King,” which went to No. 4 in 1994.)“Encanto” flips that playbook, showcasing Colombian stars like Carlos Vives and Sebastián Yatra. “Bruno,” a complex ensemble piece with a classic cha-cha beat, is credited to six of the film’s cast members. “Dos Oruguitas,” the first song Miranda wrote from start to finish in Spanish, is nominated for an Oscar.To record the album, producers brought in Colombian specialists to help bring authenticity to the rhythms and instrumental arrangements; most of the sessions, which took place last year, were conducted remotely.But even with its use of acoustic instruments like the cuatro and the tiple — two relatives of the guitar — the sound of “Encanto” is not as distant from the pop mainstream as it may seem. Mike Elizondo, one of the album’s producers, who has worked with Dr. Dre, Fiona Apple and the band Twenty One Pilots, pointed out the heavy bass that drives songs like “Bruno,” and the presence of synthesizers that would not be out of place on a rap hit.“When we were making the music to the soundtrack, Lin was very encouraging,” Elizondo said in an interview. “‘Let’s not try and water anything down,’” he recalled Miranda saying. “‘Let’s not feel like we have to follow any of the rules of prior soundtracks.’”Even so, “Bruno” was almost entirely absent from radio for most of its ascent. Disney did not begin promoting it to radio stations until late January, Bunt said. In recent weeks, “Bruno” has had fewer than 4,000 spins a week on radio stations. By comparison, in the week that Adele’s “Easy on Me” first reached No. 1, in October, American radio stations played it more than 18,000 times.Videos shared on social media helped contextualize the story behind “Bruno” in a way that radio play never could. TikTok clips show fans enacting the story, while a Disney clip on YouTube translates the lyrics into 21 languages, including Norwegian, Thai and Korean. The latest viral mutation in the success of “Bruno” is mash-ups with Doja Cat or Bruno Mars (get it?).In a sense, those videos capitalize on one of the advantages of any successful soundtrack, from the days of “Saturday Night Fever” to “Frozen,” Disney’s last comparable blockbuster: a story line that links the songs together and lets fans relive the film through its hits. That has become vital in the streaming age, when individual songs are increasingly disconnected from their albums.“They’re like potato chips: you can’t eat just one,” said Gary Trust, Billboard’s senior director of charts. “With ‘Encanto’ songs, you can’t just listen to one. You want to relive the whole story.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Daniel Radcliffe to Star in Off Broadway ‘Merrily’ Revival

      by

      A new production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” is to be staged late this year by the nonprofit New York Theater Workshop in the East Village.The actor Daniel Radcliffe will star in an Off Broadway revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” a Stephen Sondheim musical that famously flopped on Broadway but in the decades since has become an oft-produced and beloved show.The new production, directed by Maria Friedman, is sure to be a tough ticket to get, given Radcliffe’s celebrity and the size of the venue: It is to be staged late this year by the nonprofit New York Theater Workshop at its 199-seat main stage in the East Village.Sondheim, in an interview days before his death last November, said he was looking forward to the production. Friedman, a British musical theater star with a long history of performing in Sondheim musicals, first directed “Merrily” at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in 2012; that production, hailed by The Guardian with a five-star review, transferred to London’s West End in 2013, and Friedman then directed a run at the Huntington Theater in Boston in 2017.“Merrily” is an unusual show, written in reverse chronological order, about a trio of artists whose close friendship, and shared dreams, unravel over the years. The musical, featuring songs by Sondheim and a book by George Furth, ran on Broadway in 1981; it closed 12 days after opening. The abbreviated Broadway run was the subject of a well-received 2016 documentary film, “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened”; Richard Linklater is now spending 20 years making a film adaptation of the musical starring Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein.Ben Brantley, then the co-chief theater critic for The New York Times, called “Merrily” “the much-loved problem child of Sondheim’s musicals.” He saw Friedman’s production in London, where he called it “heart-clutching,” and in Boston, where he deemed it “transcendent.” The show, with an admired score and a critiqued book that builds toward a rooftop moment where the three main characters meet, has been repeatedly rethought; Jesse Green, the current Times chief theater critic, once described himself as “someone who’d gladly patronize a dedicated ‘Merrily’ repertory theater, perhaps on that rooftop, running nothing but reworked versions in perpetuity.”New York Theater Workshop, best known as the birthplace of “Rent,” said Monday that its production of “Merrily” would run in “late 2022”; it did not announce dates. Radcliffe will play Charley Kringas, a lyricist and playwright; the theater did not announce other cast members.The cast of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” Radcliffe, center, starred in the 2011 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRadcliffe, who vaulted to fame by portraying Harry Potter on film, has starred in several Broadway and Off Broadway plays; he also starred in a 2011 Broadway revival of the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”The “Merrily” production is the final show chosen by James C. Nicola, who has been the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop since 1988, and who is planning to step down in June. Nicola saw the original production on Broadway, and in the decades since, he said, the show “eerily, uncannily, has managed to entwine itself into my own life.”“I had never before heard or read any work of art that seemed to understand me — in fact, all of us Boomers in that precise moment of our lives,” he said by email. “‘Merrily We Roll Along’ is once again magically finding its way into my life.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Mary Badham, Who Starred in 'Mockingbird' Film, Joins Broadway Tour

      by

      Six decades after she played Scout in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Mary Badham takes on the role of a neighbor in the play’s national tour.Mary Badham describes herself as “just a retired old lady who likes to be in her garden and play with her grandkids.”But in 1962 she was a child star, captivating the nation with her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Scout, the daughter of Atticus Finch, in the film version of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”Now, six decades and many careers later, she is helping to dramatize the story once again, this time from a different vantage point. Badham, who has not previously worked as a stage actor, is now in rehearsals for a national tour of the “Mockingbird” Broadway production in which she will play Mrs. Dubose, Scout’s mean, and morphine-addicted, neighbor.“I’m going full circle,” Badham said in an interview. “This is something I never contemplated.”Badham, now 69, is still a little hazy on how this happened. She says she got a call out of the blue from the production, inviting her to audition. The play’s director, Bartlett Sher, said Badham’s name had come up during brainstorming for the tour, and that the casting team had tracked her down; he said as soon as he saw her do a workshop, he knew she could do it.In the 1962 film, Badham was 10 years old when she played Scout opposite Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch.Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images“She has not been on a stage, and that was a big adjustment for her, but she’s going to be great — she has a bright, blazing intelligence, and good listening and sharp delivery and all the things you need as a great actor,” Sher said. “And it was incredibly fascinating — I have never had an experience quite like it, to have this voice from the cultural history of the very work we were doing, and to see how we’ve changed and how she’s changed. It was beautiful to have her in the room.”Badham has always been a bit of an accidental actor. She had no experience when a talent scout showed up in Birmingham, Ala., where she lived, looking for a Southern girl to star as Scout in the film adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel about a white Alabama lawyer — Finch — who agrees to represent a Black man accused of rape. Badham’s mother performed in local theater, and her brother (who became a film director) was in drama school; she aced a screen test, and before she knew it, she was off to California, performing alongside the actor Gregory Peck, who became an important mentor and friend.“I had no idea what was going on — I was just out there playing,” she said. “I don’t even think we got complete scripts, because there were certain words and things that were deemed unseemly for children to hear. I did not have a clue what the film was about until we started going to premieres, and then all of us were in tears.”In the decades since, Badham has worked selling cosmetics, became a certified nursing assistant, and even occasionally appeared on film and television. She never became a large animal veterinarian — her childhood aspiration — but, along with her husband and two children, she did make a Virginia farm her home. “I always wanted to live on a farm and have horses and animals, and we’ve had that through the years,” she said.“I’m not an actor,” she added. “Acting is something that has just happened to me.”She said she has a hard time watching the film “because all my friends are gone now — there’s only a few of us left.” But she usually says yes when given new “Mockingbird” opportunities; she has spent decades talking about the story at schools, universities and social clubs. “‘Mockingbird’ has been my life,” she said.“It’s just weird, and I put it to the man upstairs — I just feel like he has something he wants me to say, and he picked me to say it and keep saying it,” she added. “My job has been basically to keep this story alive, and have people talk about it, so we can try to move forward with all of these problems that we still have.”And what is the message of “Mockingbird”? “We should try to learn to love each other and be good people,” she said.“‘Mockingbird’ has been my life,” Badham said. Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesThe show’s tour, led by Richard Thomas as Atticus and Melanie Moore as Scout, begins performances on March 27 in Buffalo and opens on April 5 in Boston, followed by runs around the country. This adaptation, written by Aaron Sorkin, opened on Broadway in 2018, had an enormously successful run before the pandemic and sold strongly again when Jeff Daniels returned to lead the cast as Atticus Finch. As Daniels departed and the Omicron variant surged, the show announced it was taking a nearly six-month hiatus, with a planned resumption in a smaller theater on June 1. A London production is scheduled to begin performances on Thursday.Badham said she agonized over whether to play Mrs. Dubose, because the character uses racist language to describe Black people. “I had a real problem with accepting this role, because I have to use the N-word, and I have to be this horrible, bigoted, racist person,” she said. “I went to my African American friends, and said, ‘Do I want to walk around in the skin of this awful old lady?’ And they were like, ‘This is important. This is part of the story. You have to go out there and make her as mean as you can, and show what it was really like.’”Badham also said she believes that the character of Mrs. Dubose, as a morphine addict, is important at a time when many Americans are struggling with opioid addictions. “That gives me another facet of the story to concentrate on,” she said.After a few weeks of rehearsal, she said she is feeling more comfortable.“It’s scary — I’ll tell you point blank, I’m mortally terrified every time I have to open my mouth, and I had no idea I was going to be onstage so much,” she said.But, she said, she can feel the presence of others who have told the story before, and that strengthens her. “I feel like they’re with us, supporting us,” she said, “because they know this needs to be said.” More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Russian Filmmakers and Other Artists Face Boycotts Over Ukraine

      by

      A Russian moviemaker with Ukrainian roots and relatives in Kyiv denounced the war. The Glasgow Film Festival dropped his film anyway.The Russian filmmaker Kirill Sokolov has spent the past week distraught at the horror unfolding in Ukraine. Half his family is Ukrainian, he said in a telephone interview, and as a child he spent summers there, staying with his grandparents.His maternal grandmother was still living in Kyiv, he said, “hiding from bombs in a bunker.”Since Russia’s invasion began, Mr. Sokolov said he had signed two online petitions calling for an end to the war, an act that carries a risk in Russia, where thousands have been arrested for protesting the conflict, and some have reportedly lost their jobs.Yet despite his antiwar stance, Mr. Sokolov on Monday learned that the Glasgow Film Festival in Scotland had dropped his latest movie, “No Looking Back.”A spokeswoman for the festival said in an email that Mr. Sokolov’s film — a comedy about a mother and daughter trying to kill each other — had received Russian state funding. The decision to exclude the movie was not a reflection on the filmmaker himself, she said, but it would be “inappropriate to proceed as normal with the screenings while the assault on the Ukrainian people continues.”As the war in Ukraine enters its second week, cultural institutions worldwide are grappling with the question of whether to boycott Russian artists, in debates reminiscent of those around South Africa during the apartheid era, and calls by musicians, writers and artists to shun Israel in support of the Palestinian people.Kirill Sokolov at a 2021 Moscow event for Russian filmmakers seeking state funding for their projects.Mikhail Tereshchenko/TASS, via Getty ImagesMost attention has so far focused on figures close to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, including the conductor Valery Gergiev and the diva Anna Netrebko, both of whom lost engagements at concert halls and opera houses this week. On Tuesday, the Munich Philharmonic fired Mr. Gergiev as its chief conductor.But measures are also being taken against Russians with no apparent ties to their leader. In Britain — where a government minister this week published an opinion essay calling culture “the third front in the Ukrainian war” — a Russian state ballet company from Siberia and an opera troupe had multiple performances canceled.On Monday, the Glasgow Film Festival also dropped “The Execution,” by Lado Kvataniya, a Russian director whose work has been censored in Russia and who last week posted online about his opposition to both the war and Mr. Putin. (A representative for Mr. Kvataniya declined to comment for this article.)Festival organizers and movie executives have been considering protest actions since shortly after Russia’s invasion last week, when the Ukrainian Film Academy launched an online petition calling “for a boycott of Russian cinematography.”The petition, which had over 8,200 signatures on Friday, says screenings of Russian movies at festivals create “the illusion of Russia’s involvement in the values of the civilized world.” It also urged distributors not to work in Russia. Several Hollywood studios, including Disney, have paused releases there, and a Netflix spokeswoman said Friday that the streaming service had halted all future projects in Russia, including acquisitions.Mr. Sokolov, the Russian director, said he accepted the Glasgow festival’s decision, though he found it “really strange.” Many Russian filmmakers are critical of Russian society and politics, he said; if festivals outside Russia stop showing their work, “it’s like they shut our voice down,” he added.“Probably 99 percent of Russian movies” receive funding from the Russian state, Mr. Sokolov said. “It’s very difficult to make a movie here without government sponsorship.” That includes many that are veiled — or even unveiled — critiques of life under Mr. Putin.Several small film festivals have acted on the Ukraine Film Academy’s call, including the Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia and the Vilnius International Film Festival in Lithuania, which on Monday dropped five movies from its program. One of them is the award-winning “Compartment No. 6,” by the Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen, which also received Russian funding. Mr. Kuosmanen said in a telephone interview that he accepted state investment in his Russia-set movie to ease bureaucratic difficulties. He understood the festival’s decision, and said he was “happy if my movie can be used in this fight.”The Cannes Film Festival said it would ban official Russian delegations, but would accept movies from Russian filmmakers.Pool photo by Kate GreenThe world’s largest film festivals are taking a different tack. On Tuesday, the Cannes Film Festival in France said in a statement that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government.” This would mean Russia’s film agency could no longer have a pavilion at the event in which to host parties and receptions. A Cannes spokeswoman said in an email that this would not mean a ban on Russian filmmakers.On Wednesday, the Venice Film Festival followed, saying it would not accept “persons tied in any capacity to the Russian government” at its events. It added that it would welcome “those who oppose the current regime in Russia.”Russia-Ukraine War: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4A humanitarian crisis. More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      With ‘Lucy and Desi,’ Amy Poehler Gets to the Heart of a Marriage

      by

      The performer and director wanted to deliver a down-to-earth portrayal of a couple whose union was far from perfect, even if viewers wouldn’t accept that.Near the beginning of the new Amy Poehler-directed documentary, “Lucy and Desi,” an audio recording plays. In it, Lucille Ball thanks her husband, Desi Arnaz, for her two beautiful, healthy children. That’s not exactly a shocking statement coming from a woman in 1950s America. What’s surprising is that Ball finishes by thanking her husband for her “freedom.” It’s one of many moments in the film that might cause those who think they know the story of these stars, and this couple, to lean in a little closer.For Poehler, also an actor and comedian whose professional and personal lives are subjected to the occasional tabloid treatment, Ball’s striking admission was one of many revelations that inspired her to look deeper into the relationship of one of Hollywood’s most recognizable couples. Partly because of the enduring popularity of “I Love Lucy,” Ball and Arnaz, who played the married Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, came to represent a particular brand of loving, married couple for generations of audiences. Like many marriages, though, their partnership was far from perfect.When Poehler was approached by the production companies Imagine Entertainment and White Horse Pictures about making a documentary about Ball and Arnaz, she knew she didn’t want to make a film where “funny people talk about how funny everyone is” but instead to speak to people who actually knew one or both of them — like their children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., or Carol Burnett or Bette Midler. Poehler didn’t want to portray Ball as a genius, but as a very real woman whose 20-year marriage was at once complex, loving, painful and tender.During a recent phone call while she was walking through New York, Poehler discussed the ways Ball and Arnaz broke barriers, shaped culture and proved that a marriage doesn’t have to be last forever to be successful. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.When Lucy thanks her husband for her children and her “freedom,” it’s striking. What was your reaction when you heard that?What to Know About ‘Being the Ricardos’The Aaron Sorkin-directed dramedy looks at one very bad week for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, played by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem.Review: The not-so-funny side of the “I Love Lucy” stars is the focus of Sorkin’s lively, chatty, somewhat odd and insistently depoliticized biopic.‘Funny’s Hard’: Nicole Kidman said that comedies do not come easily to her. Here’s how she learned to love playing Lucille Ball.Remembering Lucille: How does Nicole Kidman’s Lucy compare to the real Lucille Ball? A writer recalls his first disorienting meeting with the comedian.Best-Picture Race: ​​Our columnist thinks “Being the Ricardos” is among six contenders with the strongest chances to win the Oscar.I didn’t expect that word. I don’t know exactly what she meant, but I like to think she meant she was able to have financial freedom. A woman over 40 and a Cuban American immigrant and refugee were not often the people in the room when the deals happened, and so for her, financial freedom was huge. She grew up with scarcity, and Desi had a privileged life in Cuba and went through a traumatic experience of losing everything and having to escape his own country. So they both cared about work and providing for their family. I think that freedom came from a kind of security. I also think they loved each other for who they were.Did you have any reservations about taking on the project?I was trying to figure out, as a filmmaker, what would be my way in and my point of view. I do find that with people this famous and accomplished, you hear words like “pioneer” or “genius” a lot and it’s like … OK. There have been so many tributes already. I was excited when I talked to White Horse and Imagine, and I basically said there are a couple of things I want to try to avoid. One was to spend the whole movie having funny people talk about how funny everyone is. I wanted to try to bring them back down to earth. Then I figured out that the love story is really the thing that, hopefully, keeps people watching.Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz at their studio, as seen in the new documentary. Leonard Mccombe/The LIFE Picture Collection, Shutterstock, via Amazon StudiosThe footage and tapes you had access to were so intimate, and many had never been seen or heard by the public. How much archival audio did you have access to?It was hours and hours of stuff. One of our producers was at [Ball’s daughter] Lucie’s house, and she pointed to a box, like, “What’s in that one?” It was very much a genie-in-the-bottle moment, finding all these audiotapes. When you’re doing a documentary, you realize that you and your editor [Robert Martinez, whose credits include “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”] are like two people on a life raft. There was so much material, and that was by far the most overwhelming thing. Once we made the decision to hear Lucy and Desi tell us their story [via the recordings], everything changed, because not only did it make them feel alive and human, but we were able to age them as the film went on. Even though I strongly believe that most people are unreliable narrators, I think you learn a lot from what people don’t say, and it’s just as important as what they do say. I was always very moved by how they spoke about each other.The film gives you the sense that on one hand, they’re upholding this very 1950s version of happily ever after, but that off camera, at least later in the marriage, they struggled. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile that with the Lucy and Ricky we see on television.Television is an intimate medium that you often watch with your family, and they were the early inventors of the idea of rupture and repair, which is, maybe Lucy baked too much bread or Ricky forgot her birthday or whatever it is, and you think there’s no way they’re going to fix it, and they fix it at the end and everything’s fine. There’s a deep longing, especially in postwar America at the time, of thinking: “Can things be fixed? Are we going to be OK? Is the family going to stay together?” And what was really exciting to me is they were experiencing very human, complicated things that most people feel with success and marriage. You know, all the things that happen in a human life.Did you have discussions with the producers or your editor about their marriage or about why their relationship might resonate with modern audiences?Yeah, we really tried to deconstruct the idea of a partnership and ask questions about what makes a successful marriage. What Lucy and Desi do in their lives is they work very hard on themselves and their craft. They create this beautiful music together. And they go on to continue to create separately, respecting each other and finding ways to work together. So there’s always that question of, what is a successful partnership? Their marriage ends, but they co-parent and find new love. I loved talking to Laura LaPlaca [director of the Carl Reiner Department of Archives and Preservation at the National Comedy Center] because she said that America just didn’t accept their divorce. America was just like, nope. But they showed what it was like to get divorced and show respect for each other. They were blazing a trail. You know, if I had had the privilege to speak to either one of them, they probably would have just been living their human, complicated lives. They weren’t trying to do any of that.Desi passed away in 1986. Their daughter Lucie tells a moving story about bringing them together to watch old episodes of “I Love Lucy,” which, in a way, is a little bit of a happily ever after, but very bittersweet. What did that story mean for you, and what do you think it says about their marriage and that notion of happily ever after?Lucy said that after they divorced, they became a lot kinder to each other. As a culture, we’re obsessed with “till death do you part.” But don’t you want the goal to be that on your death bed, you can tell people you love them? Is the goal to have an unhappy, decades-long marriage, or is the goal to come together in partnership to create interesting stuff together and to stay full of love and respect for each other? Lucy and Desi worked really hard, and when given the opportunity, they held hands and they jumped. It just feels like they were astronauts. More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Akaash Singh and His Case for Bringing Back Apu

      by

      The stand-up comic, whose special has gone viral, takes issue with how some South Asians like Hari Kondabolu portray their experience in the United States.When “The Simpsons” stopped using the Indian convenience store owner Apu in new episodes, many saw it as a hard-won victory against cultural stereotypes. The Indian American comic Akaash Singh was not one of them. In fact, he was upset about it — and as stand-ups do, he brought that onstage.“Here is a brown man married to a beautiful brown woman, owns his own business, selling overpriced products to unwitting white people,” he said, building momentum at the start of his 20-minute debut special, “Bring Back Apu,” released on YouTube a month ago. “Apu is not racist. He’s the American dream.”Singh, 38, hit a nerve, racking up one million views in a week. (It’s now approaching 1.5 million.) The special never mentions the comic Hari Kondabolu by name, but it is a response to a public conversation kicked off by his cutting critiques of “The Simpsons,” which did more than anything else to lead to the removal of the character. Kondabolu started criticizing Apu on late-night television in 2012 and, five years later, built it into a documentary, “The Problem With Apu,” fleshing out the argument that Apu was a modern-day minstrel figure. After avoiding the issue for a while, Hank Azaria, the white actor who voiced Apu for decades, apologized and refused to play the character.Even a decade ago, there were few South Asian voices getting attention in mainstream American comedy. Not only are there more now, but there are enough to reflect sharp divides among them. In a 2019 special, Aziz Ansari mocked the fact that Apu being played by a white person was only lately becoming controversial. “Why didn’t anyone say anything 30 years ago?” he asked, then answered his own question. “Because Indian people could only say something like four years ago, OK? We’ve had a slow rise in the culture.”Singh and Kondabolu have a lot in common: both comics are around the same age; both passionately cite their parents in their arguments about Apu and believe that representation matters. “The Simpsons” was important to Singh, he told me, in part because it was the only show of his childhood to portray a happy, loving Indian couple.What he saw onscreen as a boy “was always an Indian guy who can’t get a girl to save his life or an Indian girl who is supposed to marry an Indian guy but falls in love with someone else,” he said in an interview at Alice’s Tea Cup on the Upper West Side. “With Apu, finally there was one. It was an arranged marriage and he was in love with her. Arranged marriages where people are in love happen. A lot of Indian people I know.”Kondabolu did not respond to a request for an interview. But in a recent conversation with the author Wajahat Ali at the Bell House in Brooklyn, Kondabolu was asked how he responded to South Asians who were unhappy about the loss of Apu. He said that while of course Apu had positive characteristics, the source of the comedy, the reason people laughed, was the accent. As he put it in his documentary, that is “a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father.”Singh said that he wasn’t necessarily offended by comic accents and even thought Azaria did a better one than most “brown comics I know.” But he added that the accent shouldn’t outweigh the rest of the character. “A lot of my brown acting friends refuse to do a role that has an accent. I don’t understand that,” he said. “Your parents have that accent. That accent is beautiful. My issue is: What are the jokes behind that accent?”When Singh evokes the immigrant generation in his special, it is to soberly lament the loss of their values. He contrasts the South Asians who talk about the racism of “The Simpsons” with the self-reliance of the older generation. “I don’t remember being raised on this stuff by our parents,” he told me. “The mentality everyone I knew had was keep your head down, do the work, everything will work out.”He said he was angry in part because “the industry seemed to reward these stories.” He added pointedly that South Asians in America were not oppressed the way Black people or homosexuals have been. “This is a struggle that you are using to get ahead,” he said about his peers, “but it’s not a real struggle.”There’s something decidedly old-fashioned about Singh’s argument. He’s a comic proud to tell you that he doesn’t drink or do drugs and that he waited to have sex until his 30s, with the woman who became his wife. He also said he might be out of touch, which is why he brings up on his special that he’s from the 1990s. But there is an audience for this kind of comic attack on progressive critiques, one that comedians have been exploiting onstage and in podcasts. Joe Rogan is the most notorious example, but there is a constellation of popular podcasts around him, including Flagrant 2, with Andrew Schulz and Singh as hosts.Singh heatedly balked when I suggested he was part of an “anti-woke” comedy scene. He described himself as a moderate who leans left, but conceded that he spent more time mocking progressives on his podcast. Then again, in reaction to Senator Ted Cruz tweeting out a link to the Apu special, Singh said “I hate him,” noting that his parents had no running water or heat around the time of the power crisis in Texas when Cruz fled to Cancun.Growing up in Dallas, Singh said, and being surrounded by loud Texas conservatives pushed him to be a liberal; after moving to New York in 2008 to pursue comedy, those on the left pushed him in the opposite direction. When I ask if he ever worried about only being reactive, he brushed off the question, saying that is essential to his comedy. Singh is open about how liberal politics can be a good foil. When he appeared on Rogan’s podcast, he defended “woke” people. “Without them,” he asked the host, “what are we?”Singh said he even dabbled in what he described as victimhood in 2018, when he said he was going broke. “I tried to sell a special that had a little bit of that, a little sob story,” he said. “It was about going to India and connecting with my culture. It’s in the same vein of white people going, ‘This is so authentic.’ It didn’t work.”“Bring Back Apu” did. Singh said he recently sold out a 500-seat show at the Irvine Improv in Southern California.Singh is quick to compliment Kondabolu, who he said reached out to him after hearing him on a podcast. “He said I implied he didn’t work hard and I said I don’t think that at all,” Singh said, praising Kondabolu’s joke writing and work ethic. “My issue is with your mentality,” Singh said he told his fellow comic. “The victimhood mentality. The mentality weakens us as a people.”“There’s merit to both sides,” Singh said. “I’m not completely right, as much as I would love to be.” More