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      ‘The Innocents’ Review: Head Games

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

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      When Motherhood Is a Horror Show

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

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      ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: A Bland Hash

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

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      The Strange Afterlife of George Carlin

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

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

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

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      ‘Rust’ Production Appeals Fine for Cinematographer’s Death

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      The company, which was fined the maximum penalty allowed under state law, maintained that it did not violate safety protocols.The production company behind the movie “Rust” on Monday contested a fine issued by New Mexico state regulators, who cited the production for “plain indifference to the recognized hazards associated with the use of firearms on set” that resulted in the shooting death of the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The company, Rust Movie Productions, LLC, said in a filing Monday that it “did not ‘willfully’ violate any safety protocol, and in fact enforced all applicable safety protocols.” The producers also denied that the film’s armorer, who was in charge of weapons, had been overburdened with other duties, as her lawyers have claimed.Last month, the state fined the production company the maximum penalty allowed — $136,793 — asserting that the company had demonstrated indifference to firearm safety hazards. In a report, the Occupational Health & Safety Bureau of the New Mexico Environment Department said the production had not properly responded when there were two improper weapons discharges on set involving blank rounds, and that the production did not properly hold safety meetings or distribute safety bulletins.In a filing to the agency, lawyers for the production company wrote that the discharges had been “properly addressed,” including with safety briefings for the cast and crew, and said that none of the discharges involved violations of firearm safety protocols. Assistant directors for “Rust” were told to hold safety meetings on the days in which firearms would be used, the filing said.“In fact, a safety meeting was held the morning of the incident,” it said.On Oct. 21, the actor Alec Baldwin was practicing with an old-fashioned revolver he had been told did not contain live ammunition when the gun discharged a bullet that killed Ms. Hutchins and injured Joel Souza, the movie’s director. Mr. Baldwin has sought protection from financial responsibility in the legal disputes arising from the incident.In its report, the New Mexico agency also faulted the production for “failing to ensure that the handling of deadly weapons was afforded the time and effort needed to keep the cast and crew safe,” citing claims from the movie’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, that her extra duties as a props assistant sometimes took her away from her job overseeing the firearms on set. The agency also said the production did not give its staff enough time to inspect ammunition to make sure that no live rounds were present.The production company denied that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was overburdened, writing that her armorer duties “always took precedence” over her prop duties and that she was given sufficient time to inspect the ammunition, according to their filing. More

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      In Comedy, Timing Is Everything, Especially at Netflix’s Festival

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      Planned long before the streamer hit a rough patch, the expansive event had the feel of the end of an era. Still, there were plenty of stellar shows.LOS ANGELES — Over the past two weeks, in a shock-and-awe display of cultural power that suddenly seems from a bygone era, Netflix put on a behemoth festival that summoned all corners of the comedy world. Take Saturday evening, for instance. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey cracked jokes at the YouTube Theater while Billy Eichner hosted an evening of LGBTQ+ stand-ups at the Greek Theater that included, among others, Wanda Sykes and Tig Notaro. Tim Heidecker chatted with comics at the Elysian Theater, a savvy new alternative space, while Mitra Jouhari from Adult Swim’s “Three Busy Debras” prepared to go onstage. Two miles away, Gabriel Iglesias was getting ready to be the first stand-up to ever perform at Dodger Stadium.The inaugural Netflix Is a Joke Fest which was cooked up before the pandemic and then postponed, rivaled if not eclipsed Just for Laughs, the mammoth industry event in Montreal. Producing 298 shows in dozens of spaces throughout Los Angeles, this ambitious effort took place in an awkwardly humbling moment for the streaming giant, after a quarter when it reported losing subscribers for the first time in a decade and its valuation dropped more than a third. There were layoffs, talk of price increases and the once unthinkable, adding digital ads.The physical kind blanketed the city, including a seven-story sign overlooking Hollywood Boulevard that commanded: “Please Laugh Responsibly.” This is the sort of corporate humor that uses jokey irony to disguise a commercial purpose, but there was something especially incongruous about the swagger of these promotions. To trumpet, in another sign, “the biggest comedy event in history” (with an asterisk and the joke “probably”) while employees anxiously whispered about the company’s future gave the festival a certain “last days of the Roman Empire” vibe.Ads for the festival blanketed Los Angeles. Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMy week at the festival, seeing two shows a night, was a reminder that comics thrive in such environments. “Anyone hear an earthquake or a tremor?” David Letterman quipped at his live talk show, held at the festival with only stand-ups as guests. (They performed short sets and also sat down to chat.) With his old pinpoint timing, he waited a beat before quipping: “Must have been the Netflix stock crashing.”Anthony Jeselnik told the crowd at his show he loved that Netflix started the festivities by “laying off half their marketing team, losing a billion dollars and then trying to kill Dave Chappelle” — a reference to an audience member’s attack on Chappelle earlier in the festival. Known for taut jokes, Jeselnik leaned more into storytelling while sticking to his commitment to navigating hot button subjects in sharp-edged punch lines, starting with material on the trans community that aims to be both transgressive and progressive. The rap against Jeselnik is that his use of misdirection can be formulaic, like a math problem, but this show was advanced calculus, an implicit rebuke to comedians relying on lazy jokes about marginalized groups. He said he had writer’s block over the pandemic so he set himself goals to escape it. “I wanted to not aim too high,” he said at a leisurely pace: “Set something easy: try to handle this better than John Mulaney.”Those expecting Mulaney, who performed at the Forum, to dig deep into the relationship drama that has made him a tabloid staple would be disappointed. He is touring with an hour of material that is the most anticipated of the year, and it lives up to the hype. (No news on when it will become a special.) When I first saw him do the same material at City Winery one year ago, his discussion of addiction and rehab was raw and messy and bleak. It has tightened into a polished showbiz machine, with his broadest act-outs, impressions and even an extended song and dance. (The suggestion of a suicidal tendency is gone.) His show is less a baring of the soul than a joke-dense and pointed scuffing up of his image. Its key line: “Likability is a jail.”If so, Meg Stalter might be its current warden, since her videos during the pandemic turned her into an unlikely star with a devoted community of fans who delighted in her collection of flamboyantly overwrought characters. How this success will translate to her live comedy is an open question. In a hectic, digressive performance to a sold-out audience, she left her characters behind and stuck to one self-dramatizing, often flailing star whose biggest laughs were less the product of bits than interactions with the crowd.While there were several star-driven shows, the festival was anchored by many showcases of short sets, often hosted by big names like Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. They introduced a stellar lineup of mostly women comics, including Cristela Alonzo and Michelle Buteau (who both told quarantine jokes). In between acts, Fonda and Tomlin bantered, comparing notes on who had been arrested more. When Margaret Cho came onstage, a few days after the leak of the Supreme Court abortion opinion, she told the hosts, “I look forward to getting arrested with you after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.”Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda were hosts of one show featuring mainly women comics.Elizabeth Morris/Netflix The biggest show by far was Iglesias’s at Dodger Stadium, a stand-up set that seemed to double as a celebration of its own feat, even though seeing comedy in a ballpark is not ideal. When Martin Moreno asked the crowd to not look at screens before introducing him, most of the audience, myself included, was watching him on a giant screen.But many of the funniest, most satisfying performances took place in small rooms, none more so than the one by Liza Treyger, whose act has become a Richard-Lewis-level opera of neurotic self-deprecation. What she called her “monologue of bad habits” is a rapid-fire series of beyond-jaded jokes at her own expense that often take the form of exasperated questions: “Do you ever watch a video on Instagram and tell your friends you watched a documentary?” she said. “Do you run late on purpose just to feel something?”For comedy nerds, it was also a pleasure to see Marsha Warfield, a former star of the sitcom “Night Court” and a figure from the 1970s Comedy Store scene whose legendary reputation rarely translates into high-profile shows. In a confidently moseying delivery, she talked about falling out of the public eye and coming out of the closet on Facebook, then defensively insisted that’s just where old people are. “Facebook is the 21st-century version of sitting in an open window and yelling at people,” she said.Of course such intimate live shows are not what created the most news. That would be Pete Davidson returning to stand-up (“In the last couple years, I’ve been onstage less than the babies inside of Ali Wong,” he said, a solid inside baseball quip) and cracking jokes about Kanye West. There was also the attack on Chappelle which added an element of tension to the entire festival. Beefy security guys were quick to clamp down on hecklers. I saw two people wrestled to the ground and dragged out of a theater before a Snoop Dogg-hosted show; another person was forcibly ejected after heckling Letterman. Many comics seemed jittery and ready to battle. When Mike Epps, dressed in a black leather suit, walked onstage shadow boxing, everyone got the joke. This was funny, but that this celebration of jokes sat alongside the new alertness to security added yet another irony to this festival.Pete Davidson made headlines for his return to stand-up (and for jokes about Kanye West).Ser Baffo/Netflix Comics were sympathetic to Chappelle, but the backlash toward his jokes about the trans community started make its way into sets. After saying that people have been asking her about the assault, Robin Tran, a trans comic who was headlining a show, quipped: “I just want to say, for the record, I only told him to scare Chappelle.” At a different show, another trans comic, Nori Reed, did a very funny, experimental set that postponed telling a conventional punchline for a few minutes, then calling it inspired by Chappelle: “No jokes, all vibes.”One of the strengths and perhaps vulnerabilities of Netflix, the festival and service, is its range. The streamer’s comedy taste has always been difficult to pin down. Its brand is big. I interviewed the heads of Netflix comedy in 2018, around the height of their power, though competition from rival services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ loomed. Asked if they could continue to draw the most famous names with big money, Lisa Nishimura, the vice president of independent and documentary film content, said: “If we continue to grow the audience, we’re OK.”Now that the audience has shrunk, what does that mean? Will the number of Netflix comedy specials dwindle? Will competitors fill the space? HBO has been putting out quality shows and found a discourse-dominating hit with Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” (That special was directed by Bo Burnham, whose “Inside” is one of the most impressive success stories for Netflix of the past few years.)In a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, just a few blocks from the hotel where club owners and comics stayed and you could see unnerving sights like late-night Comedy Cellar staple Dave Attell bathed in Hollywood daylight, I met with Robbie Praw, the director of original standup at Netflix. He looked weary managing this behemoth. Asked if financial troubles will change Netflix’s commitment to comedy, he said no but conceded that when it came to the number of specials, there would be “a little more curation.”It was a cautious, careful answer, one that reflected the moment more than any joke, billboard or festival did that week. More

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      Ric Parnell, Real Drummer in a Famous Fake Band, Dies at 70

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      The central characters in the mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” were comic actors, but Mr. Parnell was an actual professional musician.Ric Parnell, a real drummer best known for playing in a fake band, the one chronicled in Rob Reiner’s fabled 1984 mockumentary, “This Is Spinal Tap,” died on May 1 in Missoula, Mont., where he had lived for some two decades. He was 70.His partner, McKenzie Sweeney, confirmed the death. She said a blood clot in his lungs led to organ failure.Mr. Parnell had been in several bands, including the British prog-rock outfit Atomic Rooster, when he auditioned for “This Is Spinal Tap,” a deadpan sendup of rock clichés, and got the role of the drummer, Mick Shrimpton. The central band members, though, weren’t primarily musicians, though they had musical ability; they were comic actors — Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. Mr. Reiner played the role of Marty DiBergi, a documentarian recording what turns out to be a disastrous tour by Spinal Tap, a heavy metal band that is past its prime and poorly managed.Mr. McKean said Mr. Parnell fit in seamlessly.“He looked perfect, all hair and cheekbones, but he also got the joke and knew to play the reality without comment,” he said by email. “And he was a great drummer in the tradition of his hero, John Bonham” — the drummer for Led Zeppelin.“Onstage,” Mr. McKean added, “he was the best kind of monster; offstage, a very nice, very funny guy.”Mr. Parnell had only a few lines in the movie, but he was pivotal to one of its funniest gags: Drummers for the band had a habit of dying in bizarre and unpleasant ways. In one scene, he lounges in a bathtub while Marty DiBergi asks him if he’s bothered by that history.“It did kind of freak me out a bit, but it can’t always happen,” Mick says, and Marty agrees, telling him, “The law of averages says you will survive.”The law of averages, alas, was wrong — near the end of the film, Mick spontaneously combusts onstage. When the film developed such a cult following that the fake band went on tour in the early 1990s, playing actual shows, that necessitated a tweaking of Mr. Parnell’s persona — he was now Rick Shrimpton, the twin brother of the deceased Mick.Life almost imitated art in mid-1992, when Mr. Parnell fell down some stairs while hurrying to a sound check as the band was rehearsing in Los Angeles. He injured an ankle.“Despite the odds of meeting with death by remaining with Spinal Tap,” a publicist for the band said at the time, “he’s looking forward to continuing the tour.”That “Return of Spinal Tap” tour eventually took the group to the Royal Albert Hall in London, a pinch-me moment for the British-born Mr. Parnell as he waited to go on alongside Mr. Shearer.“I remember during ‘The Return of Spinal Tap’ standing backstage with Harry and hearing the Albert Hall crowd just chanting, ‘Tap!’ ‘Tap!’ ‘Tap!’ ‘Tap!,’” Mr. Parnell told The Missoula Independent in 2006. “I turned to Harry and I said, ‘Come on, now. We’re a joke! Don’t they know that?’ It was just amazing how quite massive it all became.”The members of Spinal Tap, from left: Christopher Guest, Mr. Parnell, David Kaff, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty ImagesAbout two decades ago, Mr. Parnell settled into a much quieter sort of life in Missoula, where for a time he had a radio show called “Spontaneous Combustion” on KDTR-FM, on which he told stories and indulged his eclectic musical tastes. For one show he played only artists who were alumni of Antelope Valley High School in California, among them Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.“I get to play what I want, do whatever I want — all as long as I don’t swear,” he told The Independent. “That’s the only hard part.”Richard John Parnell was born on Aug. 13, 1951, in London to Jack and Monique (Bonneau) Parnell. His father was a composer, conductor and drummer, and he said that drumming came naturally from a young age.“I got it from my dad,” he told The Missoulian in 2007. “I could sit down at the drum kit and play a beat straight away.”Lessons, he said, were not his thing; he learned by playing in groups.“Over the years, I’ve built up a technique,” he told the newspaper. “I get drummers saying, ‘How did you do that?’ I say, ‘I have no idea. I’m just hitting.’ I wouldn’t know a paradiddle from a flam-doodlehead.”His father, who worked as musical director or in other capacities on numerous television shows, sometimes added to his education by taking him to the set. He recalled sitting at the feet of Jimi Hendrix when he performed on the singer Dusty Springfield’s British TV series in 1968.Mr. Parnell’s own career was starting about the same time. He recalled touring with Engelbert Humperdinck as a teenager. He joined Atomic Rooster in 1970, and then came a stint with an Italian group, Ibis. In 1977 he moved to the United States with a band called Nova, which settled in Boulder, Colo.He played numerous studio sessions over the years and can be heard on records by Beck, Toni Basil and others. For a time he toured with the R&B saxophonist Joe Houston. They would stop every year for a few shows in Missoula before heading into Canada to tour there. But, as Mr. Parnell often told the story, one year the group didn’t have the right paperwork to cross the border and had to extend its stay in Missoula.“I basically got stuck here and then didn’t want to leave,” he told The Independent. “I’d always liked this place — it’s like Boulder in the 1970s, when I first came to the states. I became a Missoulian instantly.”Mr. Parnell was married and divorced four times. In addition to Ms. Sweeney, he is survived by two brothers, Will and Marc, and two stepsisters, Emma Parnell and Sarah Currie.Over the last two decades he could often be found playing with one group or another at local spots in Missoula. In 2004, a writer for The Missoulian asked if he, as an accomplished musician, ever got tired of being recognized only for his joke band.“No, not really,” he said. “Really it’s quite nice to be a part of such a legendary thing.” More