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      ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Costume Designer Shirley Kurata Becomes the Story

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      With the success of the film “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the work of Shirley Kurata is in demand, but her personal style has always had its own fans.Shirley Kurata wore a pink long-sleeve T-shirt designed by her husband, Charlie Staunton; a vintage pink floral Comme des Garçons skirt; and yellow and purple Melissa x Opening Ceremony sneaker jellies, one of at least two pairs she owns. The large round L.A. Eyeworks glasses are exclusive to her, in a marbled pattern and tobacco color called “bronzino.”Ms. Kurata, who gives her age only as “Gen X’er,” has a signature style, mixing vintage with high-end designers, and is drawn to an intense color wheel — an exuberant look she has cultivated since her brother’s girlfriend gave her hand-me-down Barbies from the 1960s. (“I thought, ‘Wow, these clothes are so much cuter’” than Barbies from the ’80s, she recalled.)She has brought her aesthetic to the Linda Lindas’ new music video “Growing Up,” Rodarte’s recently released look book for its fall 2022 collection, the MiuMiu short film “House Comes With a Bird” and Vans’s capsule collection with the rapper Tierra Whack. But perhaps most notably, this sought-after costume designer’s original eye was showcased in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this spring’s sleeper hit feature film.“She’s able to take the dumbest-looking things and turn them into high fashion,” said Daniel Kwan, who, along with Daniel Scheinert, directed “Everything,” which is now streaming. “In a lot of ways, she’s a kindred spirit to our process and very much focused on the same endeavor, putting highest and lowest on the same level and showing people maybe they’re two sides of the same coin.”“A lot of the movie is regular people wearing kind of frumpy things that are very specific to an I.R.S. office or a laundromat, and it was exciting that Shirley was just as passionate about that as the far-fetched, wild aspects of it,” Mr. Scheinert said. “Shirley was a slam-dunk for this movie.”For the film, Ms. Kurata spearheaded the costumes for the actors Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis as they traveled between multiple universes — including nearly a dozen wild looks for Ms. Hsu, who played Joy Wang, the daughter of a Chinese American couple running a suburban laundromat, as well as the villain Jobu Tupaki.Ms. Kurata spearheaded the costumes for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” in which characters (above, Jamie Lee Curtis as Deirdre Beaubeirdre) travel between multiple universes.A24“She’s able to take the dumbest-looking things and turn them into high fashion,” said Daniel Kwan, who, along with Daniel Scheinert, directed the film. Above, Stephanie Hsu as Jobu Tupaki.Allyson Riggs“The interesting parallel is my parents owned a laundromat, too,” said Ms. Kurata, who grew up in the Los Angeles suburb Monterey Park and attended an all-girls Catholic high school in La Cañada Flintridge. “I really related to Joy’s character.”Based in Los Angeles, Ms. Kurata describes herself as a “creative collaborator.” She has dressed Billie Eilish (including for her current world tour), Ms. Whack, Lena Dunham, Jenny Lewis and Pharrell Williams. Among her fans are the directors Autumn de Wilde, Cat Solen and Janicza Bravo. And Ms. Kurata herself emits an aura of celebrity — as a fashion icon, a model, a muse and a co-owner, along with her husband, of the lifestyle store Virgil Normal — even if fame is not how she measures her success.The youngest of four children in a Japanese American family, she said she didn’t fit in at her “predominantly white and preppy” school. At a freshman ice cream social, she recounted, “One of the seniors asked me earnestly, ‘Do you speak English?’”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.“You’re just as American as these other white students,” she said. “But in terms of the mainstream, there wasn’t much that reflected who you were. It was always a challenge or dilemma to assert your Americanness.”She expressed herself through fashion.“I was really into Japanese magazines,” Ms. Kurata said, adding that she loved the fashion and styling and would try to do her own version on “free-dress days,” when school uniforms weren’t required. “I had a friend that lived in Orange County, and she introduced me to the whole world of thrift shopping.” While studying art at Cal State University Long Beach, she decided to move to Paris to study fashion design.It was during this formative three-year period attending Studio Berçot, known for its avant-garde curriculum, that Ms. Kurata’s interest in film burgeoned. “There was such a big appreciation for filmmakers and there would always be film festivals — Godard, Jacques Tati,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Who is this Cassavetes?’ I had a thirst for seeing cult and indie films and the fashion in them.”“I really consider Shirley to be one of the top five stylists in the world,” said Peter Jensen, chair of fashion at the Savannah College of Art & Design. Mr. Jensen founded (and has since sold) a namesake label that once featured a collection inspired by Ms. Kurata — with color-blocked ’60s silhouettes and models all sporting her glasses and hairstyle. “She comes from a fashion design background. She knows the language. She understands the nuance and small elements and how to put all of it together to become a full story.”“I was really into Japanese magazines,” she said. “I loved the fashion and styling and would try to do my own version.”Jimmy Marble for The New York TimesMuch of her inspiration comes from the world she has built around her, including Virgil Normal, the East Hollywood store she opened with Mr. Staunton in 2015 in a former motorcycle-repair shop that was also the hangout for their moped gang Latebirds. The shop’s patio hosts events such as a pop-up for hand-lettered signs by She Chimp, fund-raisers and gatherings to rally support around local causes.“Having the shop has been really fulfilling and it was kind of a surprise to me because it’s beyond just having a store, it’s having a community,” she said. “Having events here, being part of this neighborhood, we’ve met so many people, artists, designers.”Her home in Los Feliz (by the midcentury architect Stephen Alan Siskind) is an extension of her style, filled with art, vintage furniture, records, magazines, books, CDs and DVDs. Among her enthusiasms are ’80s music (tickets to a freestyle show with the headliners Stevie B and Rob Base are affixed to her refrigerator), shopping in Japan, analog entertainment devices (especially “anything that’s round”) and photography books.“Shirley has knowledge of all different mediums of art that makes her references and eye unique,” the actress Kirsten Dunst, whom Ms. Kurata has worked with on Rodarte collaborations, wrote in an email while shooting Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” Besides being a great dancer and karaoke partner, she continued, “Shirley has an innovative imagination and knows how to make that a reality.”Standing at her Eero Saarinen tulip dining table on a recent Saturday morning (in a bright red turtleneck worn underneath a knit tank dress with vertical black and white stripes), Ms. Kurata brought out a book called “Fruits,” while the soundtrack for the 1971 movie “Melody” played.“I’ll show you my bible,” she said, with the book, a 2001 collection of Tokyo street-style looks photographed by Shoichi Aoki, in hand. “I refer to this all the time because the way they mix, you know? It never looks out of date to me.” Mr. Aoki also published the magazine Street, chronicling fashion in cities such as London and Paris — including, in one issue, a photo of Ms. Kurata while she was studying at Studio Berçot.“Shirley is always hip to new things, so whenever I present an idea to her, she’s able to think quickly and find a resolution,” Ms. Whack wrote in an email. “There are so many looks that Shirley and I pulled off. Recently for my show in New Orleans I sent Shirley a photo of this outfit Michael Jackson wore when he was a kid and, boom, she got it made.”“You know how when you’re dreaming and then a sound from the real world appears right before you wake up?” said Ms. Solen, who directed Ms. Whack’s fantastical videos for “Link” and “Body of Water,” working alongside Ms. Kurata. “It’s almost like you’re seeing into the future for a second. That’s what working with her is like. She understands what you want immediately, and it’s also something that only could have come to you in a dream — slightly newer, different, more surprising. She’s a visual artist and she could do anything, and she wants to do costumes. She blows my mind the way that she costumes Tierra, which is out there, but then she also works with Rodarte.”Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters who founded and are the designers of Rodarte, have worked with Ms. Kurata, along with the stylist Ashley Furnival, since their first New York show, in 2006. Its fall 2022 collection — presented in a look book instead of a runway show — featured a cast of actors, musicians and directors such as Kathleen Hanna, Rachel Brosnahan, Lexi Underwood and the Linda Lindas. Laura Mulleavy talks to Ms. Kurata almost every day on the phone.“Shirley is very much connected to a visual narrative,” Ms. Mulleavy said. “Creating character, an intention to come across in the clothing, extreme or subdued, she understands the theatricality. She understands the history of fashion in a very interesting way.”“The first time we met her it was over Zoom and she had her cat on her lap,” said the drummer for the Linda Lindas, 11-year-old Mila de la Garza. (Ms. Kurata has two black-and-white tuxedo cats, Fanny and Moondog.) “She was already there petting her cat. And she has her glasses. And we were like, ‘Wow, this girl is cool.’”“In film right now, it’s still very much a boys’ club, so throw in being a person of color, that’s another challenge,” Ms. Kurata said. “I’ve definitely felt that. I think it’s still a battle.”Jimmy Marble for The New York Times“For us, it’s important that you’re comfortable and you can move in your clothes and you’re confident in what you’re wearing,” Lucia de la Garza, 15, a guitarist for the group, said over Zoom as her bandmates nodded in agreement.That’s what punk is, according to Bela Salazar, 17, another guitarist: “a way of doing things and thinking, so it translates into fashion.” “It’s a way of expressing yourself,” she added. “And we trusted Shirley.”Ms. Kurata said she wished a band like the Linda Lindas had existed when she was growing up.“We need more voices and new stories,” she said. “Things are changing; it’s long overdue.”Ms. Kurata has taken a momentary pause to field scripts before signing on to her next major project since the surprising box-office success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”“I don’t want to be working on things for superficial reasons, because I need money or to build my book or whatever — I did that when I was younger,” she said. “I’m seeing how much the movie has affected people. Being part of something like that means a lot to me, where you see Asian representation not in a clichéd or stereotypical way.”Ms. Kurata is also involved in workers’ rights in her own field, as a board member on pay equity for the Costume Designers Guild. “In film right now, it’s still very much a boys’ club, so throw in being a person of color, that’s another challenge. I’ve definitely felt that. I think it’s still a battle.”Though she’s reached a certain level of success, Ms. Kurata says she’s far from done.“For me, it was a long path,” she said. “It wasn’t like I was discovered, I didn’t have the contacts. I worked on the crappiest low-budget movies for years. It was very slow and it took a lot of hard work to get to where I am now. I’m still not even where I could be, but getting there.” More

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      ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘Tina’ to End Their Broadway Runs

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      “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two Broadway musicals that had been selling strongly before the coronavirus pandemic but never recovered following the lengthy theater closure, both announced Tuesday that they would close late this summer.“Dear Evan Hansen,” a heart-tugging musical about an awkward adolescent who tells a terrible lie, will end its run on Broadway on Sept. 18, five years after winning the Tony Award for best new musical.The show opened to enormous acclaim and has been a significant hit, but it suffered a double blow from the coronavirus pandemic and a poorly received film adaptation, and has in recent months been soft at the box office.“Tina,” a jukebox musical about the life and career of seminal rocker Tina Turner, will end its run on Aug. 14.Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner in the musical “Tina” in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBoth shows will continue to play outside New York. “Dear Evan Hansen” is closing its London production in October, but a North American tour has been selling well and is continuing. “Tina” will begin a North American tour in September, and is also running in Britain, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.“Dear Evan Hansen” began its Broadway run on Nov. 14, 2016, and opened Dec. 4, 2016. At the time that it closes, it will have played 21 preview performances and 1,678 regular performances.The musical, produced by Stacey Mindich and directed by Michael Greif, began its life at Arena Stage in Washington, and then had an Off Broadway run at Second Stage before transferring to Broadway. It won six Tony Awards, including for the score by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the book by Steven Levenson, and two of its performers: Ben Platt, who played the title character, and Rachel Bay Jones, who played his mother.Not only did the show win the best musical Tony, but the London production won the Olivier Award for best new musical, and the cast album won a Grammy.The show, which long ago recouped its capitalization costs and became profitable, was regularly grossing over $1 million a week before Broadway shut down in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, a film adaptation was released and was the subject of significant online derision; it’s not clear how that affected the stage version, but grosses have been unsteady and slipping since the show resumed performances last December. The show grossed $508,455 during the week that ended June 5.“Tina,” with music from the singer’s catalog and a book by Katori Hall, began its life in London and then transferred to Broadway, starting previews on Oct. 12, 2019, and opening on Nov. 7, 2019. The musical, produced by Stage Entertainment, which is a large European production company, is directed by Phyllida Lloyd; it won one Tony Award, for its lead actress, Adrienne Warren.“Tina,” which has a much larger cast and a more elaborate physical production than “Dear Evan Hansen,” which means it costs more to run each week, was generally grossing over $1.5 million a week before the pandemic; it was again selling strongly after resuming performances last fall, but its box office grosses plummeted with the arrival of the Omicron variant and never fully rebounded. The show grossed $747,931 during the week ending June 5. At the time of its closing, “Tina” will have played 27 preview performances and 482 regular performances. More

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      ‘The Policeman’s Lineage’ Review: Undercover and Overcaffeinated

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      A clean-cut young cop goes undercover to investigate a top officer in this thriller.A clean-cut young cop shadows a top officer under suspicion in “The Policeman’s Lineage,” an undercover thriller that turns muddled and goes slack just when the pursuit should be heating up. Park Kang-yoon (Cho Jin-woong), is a big shot investigator who rubs shoulders with high-rollers and wrangles informants to make tough arrests, and Choi Min-jae (Choi Woo-shik), the scrupulous son of a slain policeman, is assigned to Park’s team to sniff out any signs of corruption.There’s always some potential in the double life of a mole, as the risk of discovery gives every twist an extra frisson of suspense. Min-jae boldly snoops around Kang-yoon and plants bugs, as the older officer takes him on his rounds, throwing around cash at high-stakes poker tables and speedboat races.But the film never hits its stride, rambling through plot points that don’t really cohere, while hokey flashbacks about Min-jae’s dad sap momentum. As Park, Cho plays his cards close to his vest, keeping us guessing, but Choi (who played the tutor to the rich family in “Parasite”) puts on a dutiful front that isn’t especially forceful or memorable.The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured. But a running debate about whether the ends justify the means in police work never ignites, and the movie climaxes ignobly with a plot point involving a machine that injects drugs into coffee.The Policeman’s LineageNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in June

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of June’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)Erin Doherty as Becky Green in “Chloe.”Luke Varley/Amazon StudiosNew to Amazon Prime‘Chloe’Starts streaming: June 24In this British psychological thriller series, Erin Doherty plays Becky Green, a clever schemer who is plagued with self-doubt and prone to daydreaming — like a cross between Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and James Thurber’s Walter Mitty. Becky has a habit of scrolling through social media accounts, looking for high-end parties to crash, which gets her into trouble when one of her favorite influencers, Chloe Fairbourne (Poppy Gilbert), mysteriously leaves her two phone messages before being found dead. Becky uses her uncanny ability to fit in with the elites to get close to Chloe’s friends, in hopes of figuring out what really happened.Also arriving:June 3“The Boys” Season 3June 10“Fairfax” Season 2June 17“The Lake” Season 1“The Summer I Turned Pretty” Season 1From left, Joel Kim Booster, Maya Rudolph and Ron Funches in Apple TV+’s “Loot.”Colleen Hayes/Apple TV+.New to Apple TV+‘For All Mankind’ Season 3Starts streaming: June 10Though “For All Mankind” has been one of TV’s best dramas since it debuted in 2019, it has never drawn much social media buzz or awards attention. Perhaps the more overtly science fiction-oriented Season 3 will win some new fans. The show is set in an alternate history where the 1960s Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated instead of petering out, leading to cultural changes for both nations — some subtle, some not — in the ensuing decades. Season 3 is set in the 1990s, as the push toward the stars extends to Mars, which the Americans and the Russians are scrambling to conquer first, while their respective governments deal with multiple political crises back on Earth.‘Loot’ Season 1Starts streaming: June 24The writer-producers Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard — the team behind the smart, strange afterlife dramedy “Forever” — team up again with the actress and producer Maya Rudolph for the sitcom “Loot.” Rudolph plays Molly, a recent divorcée who has billions of dollars at her disposal and no sense of direction in her life. She decides to rededicate herself to her charitable foundation, and quickly finds that decades of living in a bubble have left her way out of touch with the kind of people her money is meant to help. Mj Rodriguez plays the foundation’s director, who needs Molly’s money but doesn’t really want her input. “Loot” is essentially an old-fashioned workplace comedy, but rooted in the uniquely modern problem of mega-rich folks who want to leave a positive legacy but aren’t accustomed to taking advice.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’: With a touch of horror, the franchise’s newest film returns to the world of the mystic arts.‘Moon Knight’: In the Disney+ mini-series, Oscar Isaac plays a caped crusader who struggles with dissociative identity disorder.‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: In the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series, the web slinger continues to radiate sweet, earnest decency.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.Also arriving:June 3“Physical” Season 2June 10“Lovely Little Farm”June 17“Cha Cha Real Smooth”“Home” Season 2Iman Vellani will play the latest Marvel hero in “Ms. Marvel.”Marvel/DisneyNew to Disney+‘Ms. Marvel’ Season 1Starts streaming: June 8This action-comedy series introduces one of the most popular new comic book superheroes of the past decade to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Iman Vellani plays Kamala Khan, an awkward 16-year-old Pakistani American girl from Jersey City, N.J., who is a superfan of the cosmic Avenger Carol Danvers, a.k.a. Captain Marvel. When Kamala inherits a device that gives her powers of her own, she has to balance her daily life as the daughter of strict Muslim parents with the wild experiences of a superhero-in-training. Less epic in scale than other Marvel movies and TV shows, “Ms. Marvel” — like the comics it’s based on — is really a coming-of-age story, featuring a hero who often feels like a hapless outsider whenever she’s not in costume.Also arriving:June 3“Hollywood Stargirl”June 10“Beyond Infinity: Buzz and the Journey to Lightyear”June 15“Family Reboot” Season 1June 24“Rise”“Trevor: The Musical”June 29“Baymax!” Season 1Alicia Vikander as Mira in “Irma Vep.”Carole Bethuel/HBONew to HBO Max‘Irma Vep’Starts streaming: June 6The French writer-director Olivier Assayas revisits and updates the themes of his 1996 film “Irma Vep” for this new mini-series, which, like the original, is about a movie crew remaking Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915-16 serial “Les Vampires.” Alicia Vikander plays Mira, an American actress who agrees to take the lead in the picture both to stretch her talents and to escape the pressures of being a big star. When Mira unexpectedly finds herself surrounded by indecisive crew members, duplicitous castmates and a parade of ex-lovers, she copes by disappearing more and more into her character: a devious master criminal. The particular details of this “Irma Vep” are different from the old version, but once again Assayas is interested in the peculiar ecosystem of a film set, which can be baffling to outsiders but welcoming to weirdos.‘The Janes’Starts streaming: June 8This timely documentary looks back at the years just before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision laid the groundwork for abortion rights. Directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, “The Janes” covers a Chicago-based underground network that helped women procure safe and affordable abortions in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Using archival footage and new interviews, Lessin and Pildes recall how dangerous the pre-Roe America could be for women, whose needs were often overlooked by the male-dominated medical establishment — and who could be exploited by criminals out to make a quick buck from people too desperate to complain. The film is also about the era’s growing feminist movement, which was born in part from women bonding over common experiences rarely discussed in public.Also arriving:June 9“Amsterdam” Season 1“Summer Camp Island” Season 6June 16“Father of the Bride”June 23“Menudo: Forever Young”June 26“Westworld” Season 4June 30“Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed: The Underground Rock Experience”John Lithgow in “The Old Man.”Kurt Iswarienko/FXNew to Hulu‘The Old Man’Starts streaming: June 17Based on a Thomas Perry novel, the road-trip thriller “The Old Man” stars Jeff Bridges as a former intelligence officer who has been in hiding for decades, living a relatively quiet life under the alias Dan Chase. When his past finally catches up with him, Chase goes on the run, pursued by an old associate (John Lithgow). The ex-spy’s faculties have dimmed considerably during his downtime, but he remembers enough tradecraft to keep the game going — even though he’s risking everything he holds dear just to stay alive and out of prison a little longer. “The Old Man” combines slam-bang action scenes with quieter character moments, in which grizzled warriors reflect on their successes and mistakes.‘Only Murders in the Building’ Season 2Starts streaming: June 28Last summer’s surprise streaming hit returns for a second season, with Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez reprising their roles as New York neighbors who launch a true-crime podcast in an effort to solve a shocking crime in their apartment complex — and perhaps to revitalize their moribund personal lives. Season 1 of “Only Murders in the Building” ended with the amateur detectives finding the killer, then immediately becoming the chief suspects in yet another homicide. Expect another twisty and surprising mystery in Season 2, as well as more charming interplay between the show’s three main characters, who are each emotionally needy in their own way but fundamentally good-hearted.Also arriving:June 2“The Orville: New Horizons” Season 1June 3“Fire Island”June 13“The Worst Person in the World”June 15“Love, Victor” Season 3June 17“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”June 23“The Bear” Season 1Annette Bening and Bryan Cranston as a couple who crack the Massachusetts lottery in “Jerry and Marge Go Large.”Jake Giles Netter/Paramount+New to Paramount+‘Jerry and Marge Go Large’Starts streaming: June 17Based on a true story, the dramedy “Jerry and Marge Go Large” stars Bryan Cranston as Jerry Selbee, a retired Michigan factory worker and amateur number-cruncher who discovers a glitch in the Massachusetts lottery’s odds and puts together a consortium of his small-town friends and neighbors to buy enough tickets to maximize returns. The community’s feel-good story hits a bump when a group of Harvard students discovers the same lottery loophole and conspires to drive the Selbees out of business. Directed by David Frankel from a Brad Copeland screenplay (adapting an article by Jason Fagone), the movie features a cast of older comedians and actors, including Annette Bening as Jerry’s wife, Marge.Also arriving:June 1“South Park: The Streaming Wars”June 12“Evil” Season 3June 16“Players” Season 1Jana Schmieding and Ed Helms in “Rutherford Falls.”Ron Batzdorff/PeacockNew to Peacock‘Rutherford Falls’ Season 2Starts streaming: June 16The first season of “Rutherford Falls” delivered incisive and funny riffs on the indelible stain of colonialism, via the story of a proud New England historian named Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms) who sells tourists a skewed version of American history in which his ancestors worked happily arm-in-arm with the native Minishonka tribe. Season 2 picks up after last year’s big twist, which saw the Minishonka casino owner Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes) and Nathan’s best friend Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding) seizing control of the town and choosing to maintain its idealized take on the past in order to enrich their own community. The power dynamic between these characters has changed, but the show’s writers are still coaxing dark comedy out of the many ways they scramble to maintain lies rather than face painful truths.Also arriving:June 14“Dateline: The Last Day” More

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      With ‘Neptune Frost,’ How to Make an Afrofuturist Sci-Fi Musical

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      What does technological progress look like to those exploited to achieve it? The co-directors Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman discuss their unusual film.The unconventional sci-fi musical “Neptune Frost” (in theaters), from the co-directors and partners Saul Williams, a seasoned musician and actor from New York, and Anisia Uzeyman, a Rwandan actress and filmmaker; interrogates the notion of technological progress from the vantage point of those living in the places exploited to achieve it.Set in the mountains of the African nation of Burundi, their Afrofuturist vision, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, follows a former miner and an intersex hacker as they lead an uprising against oppressive forces. The realm they inhabit is one where reality and a digital interface, imbued with a magic realism, intersect in tactile ways.Speaking via video call from their home in Los Angeles, the duo elucidated some of their one-of-a-kind film’s key concepts. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Neptune Frost” was originally envisioned for the stage until producers persuaded you to turn the concept into a film. How did the medium of cinema reshape the project?SAUL WILLIAMS: It allowed us to imagine what it would be like to shoot on location. We had written the story to take place in Burundi but knew that we wouldn’t be able to shoot there because of political unrest. But in the neighboring country of Rwanda, where Anisia is from, the doors were open. We arrived there in 2016 to shoot a sizzle reel and discovered a slew of Burundian refugees in Kigali who were students, artists and activists. We got excited about showing a place and faces that people haven’t really seen onscreen.Anisia Uzeyman, left, with Saul Williams on the set of the film.Chris SchwaggaANISIA UZEYMAN: We wanted to share the existing beauty of Rwanda that I was intimate with, as well as the language. We have an ancestral tradition of poetry.WILLIAMS: After writing the script, working with those poets and writers from Rwanda and Burundi to translate the text into Kinyarwanda and Kirundi was an extraordinary experience. The film allowed us to share way more than the stage would have.In creating this intricate narrative, were you drawing from specific historical events pertinent to Burundi or larger ideas about neocolonialism in Africa?WILLIAMS: When we first started conceptualizing the project in 2011, the Arab Spring, Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks were going on. On the continent, there were American evangelists arriving in countries like Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda offering money to pass anti-L.G.B.T. laws. We were also learning about e-waste camps [in Africa], places where our tech goes to die, village-size camps with piles of motherboards, keyboards and towers. We learned of their close connection to the mining industry and the irony that digital technology is rooted so heavily in analog exploitation.This is connected to what has been happening on that continent for centuries. We wake up every morning and say, “I can’t start my day without my coffee,” with no sense of where that coffee comes from, where the rubber from your tires come from, where the stuff that makes your computer work comes from. The spirit of protest in the film comes from what was happening while we were writing it. We wanted to incorporate these things and to connect dots between these disparate ideas and show how they were all part of the same timeline.Given that the music represents an integral storytelling aspect here, can you explain the thought process behind its composition?WILLIAMS: The music came first. I grew up on musicals and one of the goals was to make one that corresponds with the musical interests that have been a part of my exploration as an artist. I was interested in polyrhythm because we made the connection between drum rhythms and coding because drums themselves have been used for wireless communication. We were playing with the idea of drum coding in terms of computer programming, and the exploration of what is beyond the binary in the question of gender.UZEYMAN: Music was also a great means to communicate with the actors who are all singers and musicians. They have that very privileged relationship to rhythm. It was a way of working toward their own understanding of the characters that they were playing and how their voices evolve over the arch of the story.Cheryl Isheja, left, with Bertrand “Kaya Free” Nintereste in “Neptune Frost.” Kino LorberThere’s a striking visual quality to the costumes and set decorations that’s both otherworldly and recognizable, how were these designed?UZEYMAN: We met Cedric Mizero, the young designer behind those costumes and the décor, in 2016 in Rwanda. After hearing the story that we wanted to tell, he came back the next morning with sandals made of motherboards. Cedric’s work also inspired the writing of the film because he already was working with people in the village recycling and transforming materials that are seen as waste into art installations and zero-waste fashion.WILLIAMS: For example, making backpacks out of water containers or using African wooden sculptures as the guns that we used in the film.How does Afrofuturist art, which incorporates folklore and culture into futurist tropes, allows you to address today’s issues from a decolonized lens?WILLIAMS: There’s something experienced and understood about the fluidity of things in Indigenous cultures that transcends Western projection. These things have been a part of reality and storytelling in Africa and other places for a long time, but the rigidity of the Western lack of imagination has closed the doors on those ancient myths and mythologies. It’s crucial for us to not participate in poverty porn or the expectations white people have of Africa.UZEYMAN: From the perspective of artists on the continent, what’s important is the possibility of telling whatever story we want to tell, not the story that you are waiting for us to tell or that you’re willing to finance. We want to tell all tales from our perspective — science fiction or historical dramas — freed from the Western framing. More

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      For Joel Kim Booster, Making ‘Fire Island’ Was a Real Trip

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      The writer and star of “Fire Island” reflects on making the rare romantic comedy that puts gay Asian American men at its center.Joel Kim Booster had a thought: Why do we even need movie trailers? Sure, they give people a bite-size look at a film they might find intriguing, but couldn’t we just … not?This was the theory Booster advanced to me one evening in late April, just hours after the trailer was released for “Fire Island,” a gay romantic comedy he wrote and starred in. Booster had anticipated this moment with a not-inconsiderable level of anxiety, so he met the morning with a plan: After posting the trailer online, he would go back to bed, then keep himself distracted with a trip to the gym and several palliative episodes of “Real Housewives.”A few hours into this plan, as his phone blew up with text messages and Twitter began to pick the trailer apart, he texted the “Fire Island” director Andrew Ahn to announce that he was having either a heart attack or a series of mini-strokes.So consider this his mea culpa: “I’ve done it, too — I’ve made massive judgments about a movie based on two minutes,” said Booster, who is 34, bleached-blond and possessed of a voice so NPR-smooth that a microphone almost seems superfluous. “But now, being on the other side of it, I’m just like, ‘Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing in the world!’”A modern, same-sex gloss on “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, “Fire Island” (streaming on Hulu) stars Booster as our narrator Noah, who makes knowing observations about the titular gay enclave and its social mores. (Think of him as Elizabeth Bennet in a pink Speedo.) Noah didn’t come to Fire Island to look for true love, but as he attends to his insecure friend Howie (Bowen Yang) during their vacation gone wrong, he also takes the measure of a stiff and arrogant suitor who just may be his Mr. Darcy.After Booster was done dodging internet comments and replying to his friends’ texts about the trailer, he met me at Akbar, a storied Los Angeles gay bar with amber lighting, strong cocktails and kitschy, beaded bamboo curtains. (Booster, who moved here from New York a few years ago, picked Akbar because it was one of the few gay bars in town “that didn’t feel like WeHo or a Chipotle.”) We were joined by Ahn, who initially drew Booster’s attention after directing the 2016 indie “Spa Night.” They met years ago and bonded over being gay and Korean in an industry that rarely makes room for their stories.From left, Torian Miller, Bowen Yang, Margaret Cho, Tomás Matos and Booster in “Fire Island.”Jeong Park/Searchlight Pictures“We were supposed to split up and do our own things so that we’d take the burden off each other,” Booster said as Ahn chuckled into his tequila soda. “But then we decided to do one project together that now has the same problem of having to represent everybody.”Though there have recently been more gay rom-coms from big studios than ever before, that’s not exactly saying much: They still come around as rarely as comets, and none of the other ones — not “Love Simon,” “Happiest Season,” or this year’s forthcoming Billy Eichner vehicle “Bros” — have a leading cast that is comprised mainly of Asian American actors. So there’s an extra layer of scrutiny that Booster expects from people who’ve never seen themselves in a film protagonist before.And he totally gets that, but it’s all superseded by the fact that he’s the protagonist in question, and he can never be all things to all people because his own story is so specific. Booster was adopted as an infant and home-schooled by white parents in Plainfield, Ill., before he came out as a teenager, studied musical theater in college and moved to New York to become a stand-up comedian. Even now, his conservative family is barely aware that their son is making gay rom-coms that the entire internet is determined to weigh in on.So you’ll have to excuse Booster if he can’t take on everybody else’s concerns right now — not when he’s still got plenty of his own to grapple with.“The night before we started shooting, I was like, ‘This is either going to change my life or it’s going to be the biggest flop of my career,’” Booster told me. “And I don’t think there will be anything in between that.”THE FIRST TIME that Booster and Yang went to Fire Island, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. In those days, both men were still clinging to their day jobs (Booster was the project manager for an internet sock company), and to make the trip economically feasible, they fit 11 impoverished friends into a house with three bedrooms. They knew that the island had a reputation as a haven for rich, white gay men with muscles, but it still unnerved Booster when someone would fix him with a hard stare that all but declared, “You don’t belong here.”Still, the more time he spent with his friends on Fire Island, the freer he felt. “You don’t realize the weight you carry every day by just walking around in straight spaces,” he said. And even the peculiar prejudices of the island became grist for the mill once Booster read Austen’s novel and realized that her story of social stratification would map neatly onto his own experiences.Over the next few years, while Booster’s star began to rise as a stand-up comedian, he kept going back to Fire Island and plugging away at a script about the place that would star him and Yang. And in early 2020, Booster’s breakthrough finally arrived when the project was greenlit … by Quibi.Booster with the director of “Fire Island,” Andrew Ahn, at Akbar.Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesDon’t laugh. Yes, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form streaming app has since become one of Hollywood’s most infamous flameouts, but at the time, Booster was all-in. Every other studio had passed on “Fire Island,” and Booster’s other big break — a supporting role on NBC’s 2019 sitcom “Sunnyside” — had capsized, leaving his career in a precarious place: “People were like, ‘It’s going to be huge, it’s the next “Office,” you’re going to be able to buy a house with the residuals once it gets to five seasons.’ And then we were canceled after three episodes.”Quibi didn’t last much longer. The app launched one month into the pandemic, tumbled out of the most-downloaded charts within a week, and was sold for parts to Roku by the fall. “Going into lockdown, everyone was depressed, but I felt like my career was kaput,” said Booster. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is done. By the time this is all over, people will have forgotten about me completely.’”Luckily, Searchlight Pictures began to sniff around the project, provided that Booster could rewrite it as a feature film. And that’s when Ahn got into the ring.“I don’t think I’m patting myself on the back by saying, yeah, I think I’m the only person that could have directed this,” Ahn told me. For the last decade, he has lived in what he calls “a gay Asian flophouse in Echo Park” — a building with cheap rent, no central air, plenty of party-throwing camaraderie and an invader opossum that took an entire month to capture. Ahn felt so well-suited for “Fire Island” that he could have been a character from it; in fact, for the movie’s mood board, he used images of himself and his friends.Ahn was thrilled as the movie became even more Asian during the casting process: When a male actor dropped out, the comedian Margaret Cho came aboard as the characters’ destitute den mother, and Booster’s love interest, originally written for a non-Asian person of color, went to the Filipino American actor Conrad Ricamora. (“In the chemistry read, Conrad flustered Joel, and I loved seeing that,” Ahn said.) Though Booster happily signed off on both castings, he still had some reservations.“It became suddenly not only a gay movie, but an Asian gay movie,” Booster said as we finished our drinks and set out for another bar. “It felt heavier, the responsibility of it.”Still, he knows these sorts of opportunities are few and far between. Booster was crestfallen when he didn’t land the key role of Michelle Yeoh’s gay child in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which ultimately went to the actress Stephanie Hsu: “I went in for it and there was just me and a million girls, and I was like, ‘What is going on?’” he said.Sometimes, Booster even feels like he has to justify being cast in his own movie. As we arrived at the Eagle — a leather bar boasting pinball machines, a pool table covered in red felt and TV sets playing vintage porn — Booster talked about the internet commenters who pronounced him too gym-fit to be plausible as a Fire Island outsider. “I think people are really naïve about how awful gay men can be sometimes,” he said, nursing a beer.“I think there’s a lot of nuance in the fact that, yes, I experience gay racism, but I also look like this,” Booster continued. “I’m aware that I’ve done a lot of work to try and make myself visible in those spaces, and I’ve taken a very conventional way of trying to do that. But also, I had to feel good about myself before I started to do all of this — it wasn’t reverse engineered. The first time I sold a script, I was like, ‘Oh, I have so much more value than just if some rando thinks I’m sexually viable or not.’”And ultimately, you can’t control what those randos think of you, whether they’re anonymous internet commenters or strangers who pass judgment in person. Ahn recounted a story of shooting the movie on the Fire Island boardwalk when two gay men walked by and noticed Booster standing there. “Oh, that’s the lead of the movie,” one said.“Him?” said his friend.Booster, right, with Conrad Ricamora in “Fire Island.”Jeong Park/Searchlight PicturesAhn was indignant, but as he told the story, Booster just nodded. “As a comedian, with everything I’ve done up to this point, I’m just supposed to be funny, you know?” Booster said. “But with this, I’m supposed to be a romantic lead, and it’s a lot for me in my life to be confronted with that and be like, ‘Am I that guy? Is this believable?’”Booster had never been in a relationship before he started writing “Fire Island,” and everything he knew about love, he had learned from watching Nora Ephron movies. But as “Fire Island” headed into production, Booster met the video-game producer John-Michael Kelly, and something in him softened.“I’ve just never met somebody that has made me want to not be alone until I met him,” Booster said.He began to rewrite the scenes he shared with Ricamora, pulling from actual conversations he’d had with Kelly. And the film’s final beat between the characters, which initially culminated in a flippant joke, was tweaked to land on something sweeter and more romantic. “It was like I was doing drag when I first wrote the movie about love,” Booster said, “and then after experiencing it and doing the rewrites, it felt much more real and lived in.”The movie has been earning stellar reviews, which has Booster breathing a sigh of relief: “When I was making it,” he said, “I thought, ‘If this movie is bad, I can never show my face here again. I just ruined my favorite place in the world.’” And yes, he and Yang both plan to go back to the island this summer.“Do you think it’s going to be different?” Ahn asked. “Do you think it’s going to be weird?”“It’s going to be extremely weird,” Booster said. “I’ll either be persona non grata or the mayor.”And what will it feel like when Booster goes from “He’s the lead of ‘Fire Island’?” to “He’s the lead of ‘Fire Island’!”Booster just shrugged: He’ll know when he knows. “I don’t think it’s hit me quite yet,” he said. “I’m not getting Grindr messages about it.” More

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      Johnny Depp’s Win in Court Could Embolden Others, Lawyers Say

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      The actor’s victory against his ex-wife Amber Heard in one of the highest profile defamation cases to go to trial could inspire others to try their luck with juries.As the #MeToo movement fueled a public airing of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, defamation lawsuits quickly became a tool for both the accused and accusers to seek retribution and redemption.Men accused of misconduct have increasingly turned to defamation suits to try to clear their names, as have victims accused of making false allegations. But between the high costs of lawyers’ fees and the fears of revealing embarrassing details in open court, many such cases are settled before they ever reach trial.The bitter legal battle between the actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife Amber Heard was closely watched in part because it was one of the highest-profile defamation cases to make it to trial recently, and several lawyers said that Mr. Depp’s victory in a Virginia court on Wednesday — when he was awarded more than $10 million in damages — could embolden others accused of abuse or misconduct to try their luck with juries, despite the real risks of airing dirty laundry in public.Ugly charges of physical abuse and lurid testimony came to define the Depp-Heard trial, which included one line of questioning about actual dirty laundry: the couple’s fierce argument over how the sheets in a Los Angeles penthouse where they were staying had become befouled. But the jury found in the end that Ms. Heard had defamed Mr. Depp in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”“Some people will definitely look at this as a playbook for suing your accuser,” said Charles Tobin, a First Amendment lawyer who practices in Fairfax, Va., where the trial played out over six weeks, and who briefly represented the former employer of a witness called in the Depp case. The proceedings were broadcast and livestreamed far beyond the walls of the courtroom.The $10.35 million award to Mr. Depp was offset by a $2 million partial victory for Ms. Heard, who countersued Mr. Depp for defamation after a lawyer representing him made several statements to a British tabloid calling her abuse accusations a “hoax.” The jury did not find two of those statements defamatory, but found that a third — in which the lawyer had accused Ms. Heard of damaging the couple’s penthouse and calling 911 “to set Mr. Depp up” — did defame her.Mr. Depp praised the verdict, saying that “the jury gave me my life back,” while Ms. Heard described it as “heartbreaking.”The outcome differed from that of a case in Britain, where a judge had ruled two years ago that there was evidence that Mr. Depp had repeatedly assaulted Ms. Heard. That ruling came in a libel suit that Mr. Depp had filed after The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. While Britain is sometimes considered hospitable to libel cases, the judge who heard that case, Andrew Nicol, found that there was sufficient proof to conclude that most of the assaults Ms. Heard described had occurred, and he determined that what the newspaper had published was “substantially true.”Several high-profile defamation cases in recent years have been settled before they reached trial. In 2019, seven women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation after they were accused of lying, settled their claims; a spokesman for Mr. Cosby said that his insurance company had decided to settle the cases without his consent. And the casino mogul Steve Wynn recently agreed to a settlement of a defamation suit he had filed against the lawyer Lisa Bloom, who said she would retract a statement accusing him of inappropriate behavior involving a client.In the wake of the Depp verdict, several lawyers and legal experts said, people accused of assault and misconduct may now be more inclined to try to bring defamation cases to trial. And some advocacy organizations and lawyers worry that the case could have a chilling effect on the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, adding to their fears that they could be punished for speaking out.“I do think that well-resourced individuals who feel slighted by speech that embarrassed or criticized them in some way may feel emboldened by this verdict,” said Nicole Ligon, a First Amendment law professor who provides pro bono legal advice for people considering going public with sexual misconduct accusations. “I imagine part of the reason they’ll feel emboldened is beyond the verdict itself but the public reaction to it.”The trial was captured by two cameras in the courtroom that allowed the testimony to be packaged into memes and online commentary — much of which mocked Ms. Heard’s accusations of abuse. In an interview with NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, one of Ms. Heard’s lawyers, Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, said that the cameras had turned the trial into a “zoo.”Before the trial, Ms. Bredehoft had sought to persuade the judge to block cameras from the courtroom, arguing that Ms. Heard would be describing incidents of alleged sexual violence and predicting that “anti-Amber” networks would take statements out of context and play them repeatedly.“The potential for saturation of an unsequestered jury is a tremendous risk in this case,” Ms. Bredehoft argued, according to a court transcript from February.Judge Penney S. Azcarate ordered that cameras be allowed, maintaining that Ms. Bredehoft’s argument about victims of sexual offenses would only pertain to criminal trials. The judge suggested that allowing cameras could make the make the courthouse “safer” by giving a broader audience of viewers access to the case remotely.Mr. Depp may have won a victory in court, but it may take more than that to revive his career, or for Walt Disney Studios, which has cast Mr. Depp in several starring roles, to get back into business with him.The studio declined to comment, but two Disney executives privately pointed to his box office track record as the primary reason: None of his Disney movies have succeeded outside of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise since “Alice in Wonderland” in 2010. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” was a misfire in 2016, taking in 70 percent less than its predecessor worldwide. “The Lone Ranger” was a big-budget bomb in 2013. Except as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates” films, he has not been a box office draw recently.Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 7In the courtroom. More

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      ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ | 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