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      The Middle Eastern Party Scene Thriving in Brooklyn

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      Several New York City parties offer spaces where anyone and everyone can let loose, come together and find comfort in Middle Eastern and North African music.Just before midnight on a Friday in June, a short line formed outside Elsewhere, a music venue and nightclub in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Saphe Shamoun, one of the D.J.s performing that night, gingerly approached two women in the queue.“Are you here for Laylit?” he asked. They nodded, and Mr. Shamoun directed them toward another entrance — and a much longer line — further up the block.Laylit, or “the night of” in Arabic, is a party based in New York and Montreal that spotlights music from the Middle East and North Africa and its diaspora.It has had a residency at Elsewhere since October, but this night was special: The event had become so popular that for the first time, it was being held not in the venue’s smaller rooms but in its cavernous hall, where over 800 people would soon dance under a shimmering disco ball and hypnotic light show.On the bill: a performance by Anya Kneez, a Lebanese drag queen, and D.J. sets highlighting Arabic pop, hip-hop, folk and electronic music.A decade ago, it was practically unheard-of for a major New York club to regularly host a Middle Eastern-themed party. But now, Laylit is part of a thriving scene in Brooklyn that puts Middle Eastern and North African music front and center.The events vary in style, but they all celebrate cultures that the promoters say have been overlooked in the West. And they offer many New Yorkers a sense of comfort in a teeming city that can nonetheless feel isolating, especially after more than two years of a pandemic.“It’s so, so beautiful to see the community coming together,” said Felukah, a hip-hop artist who moved to New York from Egypt in 2018 and is a regular at Laylit and other parties like it. “The sounds remind me of home.”For some partygoers, nostalgia is the main attraction. Yet each event also looks toward the future, be it through challenging stereotypical notions of Middle Eastern culture or by championing inclusivity and progressive ideals.Laylit, for one, has created a shared space for Arabs who hold those values, said Mr. Shamoun, a Syrian D.J. and Ph.D. candidate who founded the party in 2018 with Wake Island, a Montreal-based music duo made up of Philippe Manasseh and Nadim Maghzal.Ironically, it wasn’t until the two left their native Lebanon that they embraced its sounds.“It wasn’t cool when I was growing up to play Arabic music,” Mr. Maghzal said.“It was actually uncool,” Mr. Manasseh added.And after emigrating to Montreal in the early 2000s, they actively separated themselves from their culture, fearing discrimination and feeling a sense of duty to assimilate, Mr. Manasseh said.But now, they use Laylit as an outlet to rediscover their roots. In September, they’ll be celebrating the party’s fourth anniversary with another show at Elsewhere, and a tour across Montreal, Detroit and Washington, D.C.Ana Masreya, an Egyptian drag queen, getting ready before a drag show at Littlefield, in Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesDisco Tehran, a dance party and performance project that channels the international music culture of 1970s Iran, was also born out of the immigrant experience. The organizers, Arya Ghavamian and Mani Nilchiani, said it took years to get it off the ground.Nearly a decade ago, Mr. Ghavamian, an Iranian filmmaker who had moved to the United States a few years earlier, approached an organization about throwing a party to celebrate Nowruz, a holiday that marks the beginning of the Persian New Year and is observed in several countries across Central and West Asia. “It was a ‘no,’” Mr. Ghavamian said.A few years later, he began hosting get-togethers in his apartment where he would cook Persian cuisine and invite musicians to play. By early 2018, his apartment could no longer accommodate the crowds, so he and Mr. Nilchiani hosted their first public Disco Tehran event: the long-shelved Nowruz celebration.The party has since expanded and evolved, and it now includes a film project and community outreach efforts. It celebrated its fourth anniversary last month at the Sultan Room, a nightclub and eatery in Bushwick, with an eclectic playlist and performances by Alsarah and the Nubatones, an East African retro pop band, and Epilogio, a Puerto Rican indie-funk band.Disco Tehran, Mr. Ghavamian said, “is about a collection of different cultures who may not have anything to do with each other on a given day, but they come together.”And the project is on its third European tour, which gives the organizers the sense that they “have a place wherever we are in the world,” Mr. Ghavamian said. Its next New York event is Aug. 13, at the Knockdown Center in Queens.Yalla! Party Project also grew out of intimate apartment gatherings, hosting its first public event in the spring of 2018. (“Yalla” translates to “let’s go” or “come on” in Arabic.) Its founder yearned for a queer party that featured Southwest Asian and North African music.Over the years, Yalla! has expanded into an arts collective and community-building exercise. It is starting a professional directory to help people find jobs and it runs a market that supports small businesses run by women, people of color and queer people.Its parties reflect New York’s cultural diversity. At a May show at the Sultan Room, an Eritrean henna artist drew intricate patterns on a man’s palm while partygoers danced to R&B and Lebanese pop. Yalla! also ramped up programming during Pride month, with four events spread across venues in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.Hanan Selim, center, dances with her husband and friends during a Haza party in Bushwick, Brooklyn.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesOnce word of Yalla! got around, similar events followed. It was at an early Yalla! show where Mr. Maghzal, of Laylit, first spun Arabic music. A year later, a drag queen named Ana Masreya — her name means “I’m an Egyptian woman” in Arabic — organized a Middle Eastern and North African cabaret called Nefertitties, a play on the name of the ancient Egyptian queen.Ana celebrated her show’s third anniversary in May with an event at Littlefield, in Gowanus, and visited Washington, D.C., for a cabaret in late June. For her grand entrance at the anniversary show, she was carried in on a makeshift sedan chair, shrouded by a gold mesh sheet, which she later removed to reveal a gold crown modeled after that of Nefertiti.Onstage, Ana spoke about her experience being a publicly known L.G.B.T.Q. person from the Middle East, a region where homosexuality is largely taboo and can, in some nations, lead to persecution. “It’s mad scary sometimes,” Ana said.The night featured drag performances by Rifi Royalty, who is Egyptian American, and Meh Mooni, who is Iranian American; a set by Felukah; and a belly-dancing contest set to an Egyptian song that is a staple at Arab parties: “Shik Shak Shok.”The following week, the song would be played again at the Sultan Room’s rooftop during Haza, a dance party and radio show that began in 2019 and spotlights artists from the Middle East and African diasporas and beyond.One of its founders, an Egyptian American D.J. and creative writing consultant who performs under the name Myyuh, grew up in a predominantly white town in Connecticut, where she said she was largely detached from Egyptian culture. She felt embarrassed when her mother would blast Arabic music at home, she said.But at Haza, she turned to it for comfort — and blasted it on a pulsating dance floor while fellow Arabs ululated in celebration under the Bushwick sky. (Haza will return to the Sultan Room for its next show on July 29.)“We’re creating a totally different experience with these songs,” Myyuh said.Her co-founder, an Egyptian D.J. and audio engineer who performs under the name Carmen Sandiego, likened the experience to a hug.“It’s everything that you know and love,” she said. “And it’s not just you, but the person next to you is singing the same thing because they understand why this is so meaningful.”For Mr. Shamoun, of Laylit, that experience is particularly important for those who have fled the Middle East amid war, uprisings and refugee crises.“We’ve been robbed of a present and a future in the Arab world,” he said.When he’s behind the decks at his shows, he often spots recent immigrants and hopes the songs he plays transport them back home, if only for a few minutes.As the events continue to generate buzz, few of the promoters appear to be in competition — in fact, most of them collaborate with each other.Ana Masreya performed at a Laylit party earlier this month, drawing cheers from the crowd, while Myyuh was in the D.J. lineup.Mr. Manasseh believes the scene grew out of what he calls an “affirm yourself on the dance floor” movement that took hold after the aughts and grew stronger when Donald J. Trump became president.Rock was suddenly out, dance and electronic music were in, and more people of color and L.G.B.T.Q. people were creating spaces where they felt seen and heard.Even though Laylit is seemingly rooted in faraway cultures, Mr. Manasseh credits its existence to a single city.“All this was inspired and enabled by New York,” he said. More

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      5 Smart Comedy Specials From Veteran Standups

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      Joel Kim Booster, Nikki Glaser, Bill Burr, Fahim Anwar and Cristela Alonzo deliver strong hours ideal for summer viewing.Why isn’t there a standup-special equivalent of a beach read? I wouldn’t recommend sunbathing with a smartphone in your hand, but it’s certainly possible. As more comics release their first specials developed in the pandemic, a new crop of hours from seasoned acts is ready to complement your summer vacation.Nikki Glaser, ‘Good Clean Filth’HBO MaxWearing thigh-high white boots and a short yellow dress, Nikki Glaser looks as much like a Bond girl as a standup. She’s not selling sex so much as teaching it, explicitly making the case for her own bawdy jokes filling the niche left by the pitiful job done by sex education and porn. Long adopting the persona of an older sister leveling with you, she moves closer to a modern comedy update on Dr. Ruth or even old-school women’s magazines, speaking prescriptively about everything from anal sex to how to get a man.A sly and skilled joke writer, she knows sex jokes get easy laughs, so she makes transgressive ones that look difficult to pull off. She scatters punch lines in a nimble voice that moves from gravelly deep to squeaky sweet. She delights in wordplay. Joking about her vagina, she says, “I talk about it so much that I don’t call it my privates. I call it my public.”And then there’s this gem on male rationalization for dating younger women. “There’s an epidemic of young people with old souls according to all my 40-year-old-friends.” Her hour can feel a little familiar, going over territory she has already mastered. On the other hand, there’s her closer, a silent act-out that works as a callback, an innovation and a big laugh.Bill Burr, ‘Live at Red Rocks’NetflixEarly in the pandemic, Bill Burr went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and got into it about masks. Rogan made fun of them as feminine and weak. “You’re so tough with your open nose and throat,” Burr snapped back, with an additional curse, pushing Rogan about turning a medical issue into something about manhood. “Why does it always become like that?”This viral moment revealed a divide between the two popular comics. On his podcast, Rogan sells a certain aspirational view of masculinity, while in his standup, Burr presents a more tortured portrait, giving anguished voice to male resentments and phobias as well as expression to their destructiveness. Along with one of the great deliveries in standup comedy, this complexity is what makes Burr a riveting performer.His messy, rambling, often hilarious new special baits the audience at every turn. Like Bruce Banner, Burr is worried about his temper, but it’s what we’ve come to see. And it can be the engine to some daring riffs that dig at both sides of the culture war, even though he’s more animated and funnier going after liberals. None of his many peers do this as well. No clichés about lattes and kale here. Describing a privileged white tweeter who’s virtue signaling, he imitates, typing out, “My heart breaks on my L-shaped couch.”Burr does repeat himself, and for the second special in a row, he speculates that they are running out of men to cancel. His bits are more intricately organized than his act. He closes on one that’s not as strong as the bit that came before. The emotional highlight sits awkwardly in the middle when he gets choked up describing the self-loathing of losing his temper in front of his daughter and finding that he is falling into the same mistakes that his father made. Bent down in a hunch, Burr is unexpectedly emotional, the bluster vanished and the rage transformed into tenderness. It’s a range that makes you think there’s a leading role in a great movie in his future.Fahim Anwar, ‘Hat Trick’YouTubeFahim Anwar filmed his special in three rooms at the Comedy Store.via YouTubeThe pun in the brisk, low-concept “Hat Trick,” in which the flamboyantly silly comic wears a backward cap while performing in three different rooms of the Comedy Store in Hollywood, is its only effortful part. Otherwise, the vibe is laid-back, offhanded, just another night at the club. You see introductions, shoptalk with comics and some of the drive home. In between are jokes on the most meat-and-potato standup subjects: dating, the pandemic, weed, porn.There’s something pleasingly comfortable about the style here, one that Anwar can pull off because he is one of the finest physical comedians working in clubs today. His act-outs rival Sebastian Maniscalco’s in grace and exceed them in goofiness, whether they are of a deer, a dancing emoji or a member of the Taliban using hand sanitizer. Each of these works nicely with the joke. The only risk is in seeming a little strained, which is why the underplayed style works so well. If you want a few laughs but don’t have time to get to the club, this will do.Cristela Alonzo, ‘Middle Classy’NetflixWhen Cristela Alonzo is telling a story, she has a specific if ambiguous look on her face that somehow generates suspense: a smiling kind of wonder that doubles as exasperation. It’s somewhere between “Can you believe this nonsense?” and “What a world.” You want to find out where she lands.It’s part of the fun of her first special in five years, whose highlights are sensitively observed jokes explaining the transition from growing up poor to finding some success. Keep an eye out for a virtuoso story about her first trip to the gynecologist. Her joyful comedy has a dark side, which shows around the edges of jokes, in the subtext. “I’ve been smiling so much and I’m not even happy,” she says about midway through. “I just got my teeth fixed.” Flashing radiant dental work, she says it was expensive in a pointed way that makes that joyful look on her face seem like a setup to this payoff.Joel Kim Booster, ‘Psychosexual’NetflixAfter saying he never hears queer women complaining about their inability to achieve orgasm, Joel Kim Booster abruptly silences a round of applause with a glare and a raise of a hand. “I will not let this descend into clapter,” he adds pointedly. For years, Booster — who between this special and his new Hulu movie, “Fire Island,” is having a moment — has brought a commanding club-comic energy to alt rooms: prickly, aggressive but clear premises that set up hard punch lines.His stylish and funny debut is broken into three acts, one that leans on his identity as a gay Korean American comic, the second that doesn’t and the third that focuses on sex. Throughout, he uses a straight white man in the crowd as a foil to examine questions of relatability and universality. He periodically talks directly into the camera to address the director about where to focus the camera, a fun tactic that evokes shows like “Fleabag.”His formal devices are clever and nicely integrated into the set — even if it builds to an argument that is ultimately pretty traditional. The strength here is his forcefully seductive presence, one that grasps that politics or sex are, among other things, powerful instruments to set up a punchline. After discussing the racism of Asian fetishes, he deadpans: “I think it’s doubly racist if you have an Asian fetish and are not attracted to me specifically.” More

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      L.Q. Jones, Who Played Heavies With a Light Touch, Dies at 94

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      His face was familiar, mostly in westerns, during a career that spanned five decades. He also directed the cult film “A Boy and His Dog.”L.Q. Jones, a hirsute, craggy-faced, swaggering Texan who guilelessly played the antihero in some 60 films and dozens of television series, died on Saturday at his home in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles. He was 94.His death was confirmed by his grandson Erté deGarces.A former stand-up comic, Mr. Jones also tried his hand as a bean, corn and dairy rancher in Nicaragua and once described himself as “but several hours away from three degrees — one in law, one in business, one in journalism” at the University of Texas.But he was lured to the Warner Bros. studios when a college roommate, Fess Parker, the actor who later played both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, persuaded him to audition for a minor role in the 1955 film “Battle Cry,” directed by Raoul Walsh and adapted from Leon Uris’s novel.Mr. Parker sent him a copy of the book and a map with directions to the Warner lot. Mr. Jones was cast in two days.Billed as Justus E. McQueen (his birth name), he made his first appearance onscreen as the movie’s narrator introduced a group of all-American Army recruits being shipped by train to boot camp. The camera then panned to a character named L.Q. Jones.“Then, abruptly, the narrator’s voice drops to the scornful tone of a 10th-grade math teacher doling out detention,” Justin Humphreys wrote in “Names You Never Remember, With Faces You Never Forget” (2006).“‘There’s one in every group,’ he tells us, as we see L.Q. mischievously giving one of the other soldiers-to-be a hotfoot,” Mr. Humphrey added. “There could have been no more perfect beginning to L.Q. Jones’s career in the movies. The word that best sums up his overriding screen persona is hellion.”The actor pirated the character’s name for his own subsequent screen credits. From then on, Justus McQueen was L.Q. Jones.Mr. Jones joined the director Sam Peckinpah’s stable of actors, appearing in “Ride the High Country” (1962), “Major Dundee” (1965) and “The Wild Bunch” (1969), in which he and his fellow character actor Strother Martin play rival bounty hunters and, as the studio described their manic competition for the highest body count, “bring their depraved characters to life with a childish energy.”Mr. Jones was also frequently seen in the stampede of westerns that arrived on TV in the 1950s and ’60s, including “Cheyenne,” “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train” and “Rawhide.” His films included the 1968 westerns “Hang ’em High,” in which he slipped a noose around Clint Eastwood’s neck, and “Stay Away, Joe,” with Elvis Presley. Among his other screen credits were Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” (1995) and Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), his last film.Don Johnson and friend in “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), which Mr. Jones directed. “I hope he goes on directing,” one reviewer wrote. But he didn’t.LQ/JAFMr. Jones directed, produced and helped write “A Boy and His Dog” (1975), a dark post-apocalyptic comedy starring Don Johnson and Jason Robards, based on the book of the same name by Harlan Ellison.“‘A Boy and His Dog,’ a fantasy about the world after a future holocaust, is, more or less, a beginner’s movie. It has some good ideas and some terrible ones,” Richard Eder wrote in his New York Times review.“This is the second film directed by L.Q. Jones, better known as an actor,” Mr. Eder continued. “It is not really a success, but I hope he goes on directing.”He didn’t. “A Boy and His Dog” acquired a cult following, but Mr. Jones returned to what he did best. He preferred the independence of choosing the villainous roles that appealed to him, and that measured his success, to the prospect of directing someone else’s script and wrangling larger-than-life egos.“Different parts call for different heavies,” Mr. Jones told William R. Horner for his book “Bad at the Bijou” (1982).“I have a certain presence,” he explained. “I play against that presence a lot of times, and that’s of a heavy that is not crazy or deranged — although we play those, of course — but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy.”“It’s really hard to say what they’re looking for when they pick me,” Mr. Jones said. “A lot of times your heavy is not that well presented in the script. Most times he’s too one-sided. So we look for things to bring to being a heavy: a certain softness; a vulnerability that makes him human; a quiet moment when he’s a screamer most of the time; a look; the way he dresses; the way he walks into a room.”Mr. Jones was born Justus Ellis McQueen Jr. on Aug. 19, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas. His father was a railroad worker; his mother, Jessie Paralee (Stephens) McQueen, died in a car accident when he was a child. He learned to ride a horse when he was 8.After graduating from high school, he served in the Navy, attended Lamar Junior College and Lon Morris College in Texas, and briefly attended the University of Texas at Austin. His marriage to Sue Lewis ended in divorce. In addition to his grandson, his survivors include his sons, Randy McQueen and Steve Marshall, and his daughter, Mindy McQueen.Mr. Jones seemed to measure success less by his bank account (he once described himself as “independently poor”) than by professional gratification. But he had a sense of humor about it.“I’m around somewhere, probably just counting my money,” the message on his telephone answering machine said. “When I get through, if I’m not too tired, I’ll return your call.” More

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      ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      Watch Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman Reunite in ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’

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      The director Taika Waititi narrates a battle sequence that has the two connecting onscreen again.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A battleground becomes the site of a bittersweet reunion in this scene from “Thor: Love and Thunder.”Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is facing an attack on New Asgard by Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale). He has help from Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), but also from powerful projectiles scattering through the air and taking out Gorr’s creatures. Those projectiles turn out to be pieces of Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, which he last saw when it was destroyed by Hela (Cate Blanchett) in “Thor: Ragnarok.” The pieces reassemble into a whole, but now Mjolnir is being wielded by a new figure whose costume looks a lot like Thor’s.It turns out to be the Mighty Thor, or Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), and the scene becomes a passionate reunion on multiple fronts.The director Taika Waititi discussed how he sought to play up both the action and the comedy of the moment, while highlighting Thor’s self-doubts.At the beginning of the film, Thor is “going through a lot of insecurity, trying to find himself,” Waititi said.So when the Mighty Thor appears, Waititi said, the moment is challenging for Thor because “he doesn’t know who he is and he’s seeing someone else dressed just like him.”The scene is also a reunion for the stars Hemsworth and Portman, who haven’t been in the franchise together since “Thor: The Dark World” (2013).The final shot of the sequence shows that they get along, quite literally, like a house on fire.Read the “Thor: Love and Thunder” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Enters the Pantheon of Conservative Fan Fiction

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      The American right has embraced Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster, hailing the movie as a patriotic gesture produced in defiance of “woke” liberal elites and the Chinese Communist Party.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from the Culture desk of The New York Times. Marc Tracy, who regularly covers the intersection of culture and politics, writes about Tom Cruise’s latest blockbuster — and the conservatives who are singing its praises.“Top Gun: Maverick,” the inescapable Tom Cruise blockbuster sequel, has been hailed as a cinematic throwback.Many critics have interpreted its story of an increasingly obsolete pilot being called back to teach today’s young people a thing or two for one last mission as a not-so-subtle allegory for the film itself. The movie uses relatively few computer-generated effects, stars the now-60-year-old Cruise and still managed to rake in more than $1 billion globally.But amid praise from filmgoers who enjoyed the realistic dogfights, filmed with real planes that the real actors rode in, another community has embraced the movie for representing its values and vindicating its outlook: conservatives.A sampling:Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida: “Any movie that’s not, like, overwhelmingly woke can actually appeal to normal people.” (DeSantis had not seen the movie at the time; he later saw it with his wife for her birthday, he said.)The Fox News host Jesse Watters: “We’ve been longing to see a movie that’s unapologetically American, and we finally got it.”Tomi Lahren, of the conservative sports outlet OutKick and Fox: “The undeniable success of Top Gun is proof Americans are sick of WOKE and just want to watch good movies without a grandstanding social justice message!!”The right vs. HollywoodWhat’s going on here?There is a long tradition in which conservatives seize upon a cultural artifact produced by the entertainment industry, which is generally seen as left-leaning, and claim it for themselves.“This goes back years,” said Doug Heye, a Republican consultant, “and included when we had a Hollywood actor or a reality TV star for president. They feel besieged by the culture. That feeling has only increased, and it’s increased because there’s even more substance behind it today.”In a recent essay that discussed movies including “Top Gun: Maverick,” A.O. Scott, The Times’s co-chief film critic, argued that one notable aspect of the conservative movement is its antagonism toward the entertainment industry.“The modern right,” Scott wrote, “defines itself against the cultural elites who supposedly cluster on the coasts and conspire to impose their values on an unsuspecting public. In this account, Hollywood acts in functional cahoots with academia and the news media.”And conservative activists’ enmity toward Hollywood and other cultural tastemakers has perhaps never been more conspicuous.DeSantis, whose ability to channel the movement might outstrip any other politician’s (including, arguably, Donald Trump’s), made waves this spring by revoking special tax and self-governing privileges that Disney had enjoyed for its enormous theme park in his state. The governor and the company had clashed over a newly passed state law that bars instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in some grades.‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.A Triumphant Return: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry betis betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters. It paid off.The Secret Ingredient: Cruise’s potent mix of athleticism and charisma goes a long way to explain why “Top Gun: Maverick” is a hit.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Your Burning Questions: How similar is it to the original? Who’s back? Who’s absent? We have answers.So when “Top Gun: Maverick” entered this culture war with its uncomplicated, feel-good patriotism — it is, among other things, a movie about how awesome U.S. Navy pilots can be, particularly when fighting America’s enemies — conservatives’ sense of alignment arrived naturally.“When something comes out,” Heye said, “and it’s another version of ‘Rocky IV’” — the 1985 movie in which Sylvester Stallone’s working-class boxer enters the ring with a Soviet fighter named Ivan Drago — “that becomes something that, for the activist part of the base that is looking for something that isn’t critical of their values, they’re going to grab onto.”This is not to say that Maverick, Hangman and the other pilots in the new “Top Gun” film face off against today’s equivalent of the Soviet Union, whatever country that might be. As in the first “Top Gun,” which came out in 1986, the enemy is not explicitly identified.Nor are conservative politicians and media personalities claiming that the movie makes a compelling case for policies like tax cuts or gun rights. Their argument has less to do with what the film is than what it is not; less to do with its specific plot or characters than with its vibe.“It’s political in being apolitical,” said Christian Toto, a conservative film critic and the proprietor of the website Hollywood in Toto.He contrasted “Top Gun: Maverick” with some films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the gender-swapped “Ghostbusters” reboot. Their efforts at inclusivity — diverse casting, same-sex relationships — could come across, he said, as ham-handed, particularly to conservative audiences whose antennae are already on alert for filmmakers they see as trying to sneak some spinach in with the cinematic candy.The conservative allergy to such moviemaking decisions flares up, Toto said, “when the audience gets a sense it’s being put in there awkwardly or there’s a message being sent as opposed to organically woven into the story.”That the pilots training for the daring raid in “Top Gun: Maverick” appear to come from a variety of backgrounds seems not like liberal messaging but realistic detail, Toto said.“The cast is moderately diverse; there are women as pilots,” he said. “But they don’t comment on it; they don’t base the script around it. It’s assumed these are just very talented people willing to risk their lives for the mission.”Cruise at the new movie’s global premiere in San Diego. The film has made more money in the United States and Canada than in the rest of the world.Vivien Killilea/Getty Images Paramount PicturesAn All-American hitBox-office information does not contradict conservatives’ case. About 55 percent of the opening weekend sales, an unusually high proportion, came from ticket-buyers over 35, according to Paramount.And — atypically for big box-office hits in this era — “Top Gun: Maverick” has made more money in the United States and Canada than in the rest of the world, according to Box Office Mojo.Which is itself a point of pride for some of the film’s conservative backers: “‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Reaches $1 Billion Worldwide — Without China,” read a Breitbart headline last month. (The film was not released in China; earlier, a Chinese company withdrew its share of financing for the film because of its pro-American message, according to a Wall Street Journal report.)Ben Shapiro, a popular conservative pundit who co-founded the website The Daily Wire, had predicted in his rave review that the movie would do better domestically than abroad. “The film itself is pretty red, white and blue,” he said. “That’s just assumed as the backdrop. Which is the way movies used to be.”Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California who studies China’s film industry, said in an interview that “Top Gun: Maverick” represented an emerging idea that “Hollywood doesn’t need China the way it used to.”The film’s success could signal that the days of Hollywood studios altering story lines to make their releases more palatable to Chinese censors and audiences — a trend documented in a recent book, “Red Carpet” by Erich Schwartzel — might slowly be on their way out.And, Rosen added, whatever the film’s actual political message, the argument that it has one at all might have its own uses.“The controversy over wokeness or whether this is Reagan-era nostalgia,” he said, is “very good for the box office.”What to readDepartment of Never Tweet: The Securities and Exchange Commission is broadening its inquiry into Elon Musk’s disclosures about Twitter, Kate Conger reports. The agency questioned whether a tweet Musk sent in May about the acquisition of Twitter should have been disclosed to the agency and investors.Natalia Winkelman reviews “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down,” a new documentary about the former Democratic congresswoman from Arizona who was shot in the head at a political event in 2011.Follow the latest news from President Biden’s trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia.HOW THEY RUNVice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California are longtime allies and possible future in-state rivals.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersTable for twoGavin Newsom, the governor of California, is sitting down for lunch on Friday in Washington with Vice President Kamala Harris, two of his aides have confirmed.For Newsom, the trip, officially made so he could accept an award and discuss policy issues with lawmakers and Biden administration officials, has doubled as something of a cleanup tour.On Thursday, Newsom said clearly that he supported President Biden to be the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024, amid a swirl of reporting by my Times colleagues and others suggesting that liberal voters are not especially enthused about another term for the 79-year-old commander in chief.News reports, including in this humble newsletter, have noted that Newsom’s rise as a leader in the Democratic Party could put him in competition with Harris, a longtime ally and possible future in-state opponent, in a hypothetical Biden-free presidential primary.Those stories have gotten the attention of the vice president’s office, while amusing the governor’s staff back home in California. Both camps insist there’s no rivalry between the two leaders.Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Newsom volunteered that Harris had been “wonderful” as vice president and said they were just going to “check in, as we do constantly.” He alluded, however, to unspecified “constraints” Harris had faced in office and said it was “a difficult time for all of us in public life.”Asked what was on the lunch menu, a Newsom aide joked in a text: “Arsenic and arm wrestling. The usual.”Thanks for reading. — BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      ‘Marx Can Wait’ Review: A Director Digs Into His Brother’s Death

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      In a moving new documentary, the Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio gathers his fascinating, aging family members to make sense of their brother’s suicide.Sometime in the late 1960s, Camillo Bellocchio confided in his twin brother, Marco, that he was unhappy with the way his life was going. Marco, already a well-known filmmaker and a committed leftist, counseled Camillo, who was managing a gym, to throw himself into radical politics and seek solace in the “historical optimism” of the revolutionary proletariat. Camillo doubted that his anguish could be healed through political engagement. “Marx can wait,” he told his brother. Not long after, Camillo died by suicide. He was 29.A fictionalized version of that conversation occurs in Marco Bellocchio’s 1982 film “The Eyes, the Mouth.” The relevant clip, along with other fragments from the director’s oeuvre, is inserted into his new documentary, “Marx Can Wait,” a wrenching and tender film that will be essential viewing for Bellocchio fans. But even for those who aren’t familiar with the personal and national history he has explored in more than 20 films, “Marx Can Wait” can stand on its own. It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.Marco and Camillo were the youngest of eight children born into a bourgeois family in the small Northern Italian city of Piacenza. In 2016, Marco, one of five surviving siblings, gathered with his brothers and sisters and their spouses and children for a reunion in their hometown. Filmed over several years, “Marx Can Wait” starts with toasts and table-talk, and then gravitates toward the black hole of Camillo’s death, in the process illuminating the legacy of a difficult and fascinating family.That family was Bellocchio’s first great subject. His debut film, “Fists in the Pocket” (1965), shot in Piacenza, turns domestic dysfunction, generational frustration and sibling resentment into the stuff of gothic, scabrous comedy. Awarded a prize at the Locarno Film Festival, “Fists” and the ferocious political satire “China is Near” (1967) established Bellocchio, still in his 20s, as an enfant terrible in Italian cinema.The IFC Center in Manhattan is showing those movies alongside “Marx Can Wait,” bringing the young man of the ’60s into poignant dialogue with his older self. Bellocchio’s career, between then and now, can be seen partly as a chronicle of disillusionment, as revolutionary ardor gives way to irony, compromise and defeat. His many films about Italian public figures and institutions — Mussolini; the violent, far-left Red Brigades; the Roman Catholic Church; and the Mafia — are also family stories, attentive to intimate nuances of power and emotion.The reverse is also true. “Marx Can Wait” is entirely absorbed in the faces, voices and personalities of Bellocchio’s brothers and sisters, present and absent, but it also feels, by implication or osmosis, to be telling the story of Italy in the past half century. Camillo’s fate is linked to the expectation that a young man of his background would pursue stability and worldly success — family and career — or else rebel in a dramatic and consequential way. He seems never to have found a path, and to have despaired of finding one.But suicide isn’t a mystery that can be solved, perhaps least of all by those closest to its victim. Marco and his brothers and sisters dwell on details and speculate about causes, including the influence of a mentally ill older brother, Paolo, who shared a room with Camillo when they were children, and the volatile presence of their devout, emotionally demanding mother. Repressed memories bubble up, secrets are revealed, but nothing is resolved. Freud can wait, too.Old photographs and film clips do their usual documentary work, but the power of “Marx Can Wait” comes from the faces and the voices of people, now in their 80s, trying at once to evoke and to make sense of their younger selves. Marco’s brother Piergiorgio and his sister Letizia, who is deaf, are especially vital, spiky characters.That Faulknerian chestnut about the not-even-pastness of the past has rarely been illustrated with such vivid intimacy. The loss of Camillo is ongoing, wrapped around the family’s life like a vine, impossible to untangle or prune away. What makes this film tender as well as tragic is how that loss also makes the family blossom before our eyes.Marx Can WaitNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Monty Norman, Who Wrote 007’s Memorable Theme, Dies at 94

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      He composed the instantly recognizable melody for the first James Bond film, “Dr. No.” It has accompanied the agent on his adventures ever since.Monty Norman, who in the early 1960s reached into his back catalog, pulled out a song about a sneeze and transformed it into one of the most recognizable bits of music in movie history, the “James Bond Theme,” died on Monday in Slough, near London. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his family on his website.Mr. Norman began his career as a singer, but by the late 1950s he was making a name for himself writing for the musical theater, contributing to “Expresso Bongo,” “Irma la Douce” and other stage shows. A 1961 show for which he wrote the music, “Belle, or the Ballad of Dr. Crippen,” had among its producers Albert Broccoli, who had a long list of film producing credits.As Mr. Norman told the story, Mr. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman had acquired the film rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels at about the same time. Mr. Broccoli asked if he’d like to write the score for the first of the films, “Dr. No.” He wasn’t particularly familiar with the books, he said, and was lukewarm about the idea — until Mr. Saltzman threw in an incentive: a free trip to Jamaica, where the movie was being shot, for him and his family.“That was the clincher for me,” Mr. Norman told the BBC’s “The One Show” in 2012. “I don’t know whether the James Bond film is going to be a flop or anything, but at least we’d have a sun, sea and sand holiday.”He was struggling to come up with the theme, he said, until he remembered a song called “Bad Sign, Good Sign,” from an unproduced musical version of the V.S. Naipaul novel “A House for Mr. Biswas” on which he and a frequent collaborator, Julian More, had worked.“I went to my bottom drawer, found this number that I’d always liked, and played it to myself,” he said. The original (which opened with the line “I was born with this unlucky sneeze”) had an Asian inflection and relied heavily on a sitar, but Mr. Norman “split the notes,” as he put it, to provide a more staccato feel for what became the theme song’s famous guitar riff.“And the moment I did ‘dum diddy dum dum dum,’ I thought, ‘My God, that’s it,’” he said. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes.”“Dr. No” premiered on Oct. 5, 1962, in London. Another piece of music was vying for public attention then — that same day the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do” — but the Bond theme caught the public imagination too. Luke Jones, a music producer and host of the podcast “Where is MY Hit Single?,” said the theme, which regularly turned up in various ways in subsequent Bond movies, was just right for “Dr. No” and for the franchise.“The Bond theme encapsulates many key aspects of the 007 brand in a very short space of time,” Mr. Jones said by email. “That iconic guitar riff perfectly accompanies footage of Bond doing just about anything.”“It’s such a simple melody,” he added, “that children can and have been singing it to each other in the playground for decades. Then, finally, an outrageously jazzy swing-era brass section that offers all the glamour of a Las Vegas casino.”A version of the theme recorded by the John Barry Seven was released as a single and made the pop charts in England. But there was controversy ahead.Mr. Barry, then early in what would be a long career of creating music for the movies, had orchestrated Mr. Norman’s theme, but in later years he was sometimes credited with writing it, and he didn’t discourage that notion.Mr. Norman in 2001. “His sexiness, his mystery, his ruthlessness — it’s all there in a few notes,” Mr. Norman said of his 007 theme.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Press Association, via Associated PressMr. Norman sued The Sunday Times of London over a 1997 article that gave Mr. Barry credit and played down his own contributions. The article, he told a jury when the case went to trial in 2001, “rubbished my whole career.” The jury found in his favor and awarded him 30,000 pounds. Mr. Barry died in 2011.Monty Noserovitch was born on April 4, 1928, in London to Abraham and Ann (Berlyn) Noserovitch. His father was a cabinet maker, and his mother sewed girls’ dresses.When he was 16 his mother bought him a guitar, and he once studied the instrument with Bert Weedon, whose manual “Play in a Day” would influence a later generation of rock guitarists. According to a biography on Mr. Norman’s website, Mr. Weedon once gave him a backhanded compliment by telling him, “As a guitarist, you’ll make a great singer.”By the early 1950s, Mr. Norman was singing with the big bands of Stanley Black and others, as well as appearing on radio and onstage in variety shows. Later in the decade he started writing songs, and that led to his work in musical theater. He was one of the collaborators on “Expresso Bongo,” a satirical look at the music business, staged in 1958 in England with Paul Scofield leading the cast.He, Mr. More and David Heneker collaborated on an English-language version of a long-running French stage show, “Irma la Douce,” which made Broadway in 1960 under the direction of Peter Brook, who died this month. The show was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best musical.Mr. Norman’s lone other Broadway venture was less successful. It was a musical parody he wrote with Mr. More called “The Moony Shapiro Songbook,” and the Broadway cast included Jeff Goldblum and Judy Kaye. It opened on May 3, 1981, and closed the same day.Mr. Norman’s marriage to the actress Diana Coupland ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Rina (Caesari) Norman, whom he married in 2000; a daughter from his first marriage, Shoshana Kitchen; two stepdaughters, Clea Griffin and Livia Griffiths; and seven grandchildren. More