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      IMAX Looks Beyond Movies to Live Events

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      To combat the decline of theatergoing, the large-format cinema company will show events like concerts, stand-up comedy and e-sports tournaments.As Kanye West thundered through “Black Skinhead” at the Los Angeles Coliseum in December as part of a benefit concert, young fans in the front row threw their bodies around in wild abandon. Others pumped their fists in the air and shouted along to the lyrics: “Pardon, I’m getting my scream on!”Except these fans were nowhere near the Coliseum. They were inside a suburban movie theater. IMAX, the large-format cinema company, had teamed up with Mr. West to expand the concert’s live footprint by beaming his performance in real time to 35 IMAX theaters, adding more than 10,000 seats. Although the first-of-its-kind event was also available to stream live on Amazon Prime Video, IMAX sold out its shows.“It’s hard to beat a six-story Kanye standing in front of you,” Richard L. Gelfond, IMAX’s chief executive, said in a phone interview.Kanye X Drake Concert IMAX Reaction🔥👀 pic.twitter.com/1uwHgz0dM5— Rap301 (@_Rap301) December 12, 2021
      Mr. Gelfond needs a lot of ticket buyers to agree with him — and not just for events involving Mr. West, who did another live collaboration with IMAX on Tuesday night, this time in 60 theaters, with a near-sellout crowd of almost 18,000 and tickets costing $20 to $30. In the coming months, IMAX intends to expand its menu to include stand-up comedy and e-sports tournaments. A company spokesman said negotiations were underway with several pop stars for concerts. H.E.R., the R&B sensation, has already agreed to collaborate with IMAX on a project. (One challenge: artist punctuality. Mr. West started his Tuesday performance more than two hours late.)Other events will revolve around exclusive film screenings, with stars and filmmakers participating in live question-and-answer sessions. Frances McDormand and the director Joel Coen did one tied to “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” a film that was primarily distributed on Apple TV+. Peter Jackson fielded questions after an IMAX-only release of his Disney+ documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back.” Both streaming services were looking for ways to “eventize” the content — to focus attention on “Macbeth” and “Get Back” so they didn’t get lost in the torrent of streaming-service offerings.A discussion featuring the actor Frances McDormand and the filmmaker Joel Coen was shown at 17 IMAX theaters after a screening of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” in December.Loren Wohl for IMAXIn December, Gwen Stefani hosted an IMAX fan event live from her house, where she screened her favorite holiday film (“Elf,” which had never been shown in the IMAX format) and promoted her Christmas album. Steven Spielberg and members of his “West Side Story” cast also participated in an IMAX event.“If you don’t keep reinventing yourself, you’re not going to move your business forward,” Mr. Gelfond said. “So we’ve been working for the last few years on events, what we informally call IMAX 3.0. The world is changing, and the movie industry is changing.”Mr. Gelfond was referring to the ascendance of streaming services and the decline of traditional moviegoing. Both trends have been percolating for years, but they intensified during the pandemic, when many theaters were closed. Studios are now diverting most of their dramas, musicals, comedies and modestly budgeted action movies to affiliated streaming services. Leviathan fantasy franchises and sequels will continue to flow to theaters. But how will theater operators fill the gaps in their schedules?Megan Colligan, the president of IMAX Entertainment, noted that live events “often bring in audiences that haven’t been to an IMAX theater and, in many cases, have not been to a movie theater at all in a very long time, sometimes ever.”Ms. Colligan emphasized that IMAX events were not just about throwing content onto a really big screen, but would specifically make use of the company’s premium-format technology. Mr. West and his team, for instance, used 16 extra-high-resolution IMAX cameras to capture the December benefit performance (out of 20 cameras in total).“There was a lot of smoke and mist, and making sure we were capturing that correctly was something that was really important to them,” Ms. Colligan said. She added that the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Larry Sher was the project’s director of photography.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Mr. Bachmann and His Class’ Review: Learning From the Best

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      Maria Speth’s enthralling documentary spends a year in the classroom of an unconventional teacher in a German industrial town.The students in Dieter Bachmann’s class are sometimes bored. They’re in the sixth grade, so this is to be expected, though there’s a decent chance that these particular adolescents, observed by the filmmaker Maria Speth over the course of the 2016-17 academic year, are less bored than most of their peers, thanks to their energetic and unconventional teacher.What is certain is that, even at more than three and a half hours, the fly-on-the-wall documentary Speth has culled from her time in the classroom is the opposite of tedious.By virtue of its length, the elegance of its editing and the warmth of its curiosity, “Mr. Bachmann” and his class might remind you of a Frederick Wiseman film. The comparison only goes so far. Wiseman tends to be interested in how collective and impersonal structures — neighborhoods, organizations, institutions — illuminate individual personalities and relationships. Speth’s attention moves in the opposite direction.Her film starts with the teacher, whose patience and charisma draws out the children and magnetizes the viewer. Gradually, a group portrait emerges that is also a remarkably detailed and complex picture of a town and a nation. And more than that: an intimate, humanist epic.The town is Stadtallendorf, Germany, about an hour north of Frankfurt. A rural village for most of its history, it was industrialized by the Nazis, who built armaments plants and forced-labor camps. After World War II, “guest workers,” mostly from Turkey, were recruited for metalworks and other factories. (You’ll learn these facts and more on field trips and during class discussions.)Bachmann’s pupils are mostly the children of immigrants — from Bulgaria, Morocco and Azerbaijan, among other countries. Their proficiency in German varies, as do their academic prospects. Part of Bachmann’s job is to decide which secondary-school track is right for each student, a task he undertakes with clarity, compassion and some reluctance.A former sculptor and sociology student now in his 60s, usually dressed in a knit cap and a hooded sweatshirt, Bachmann is aware of the tension between his countercultural impulses and his bureaucratic duties. He administers tests and hands out grades, but also keeps musical instruments and art supplies on hand for jam sessions and creative projects. Even though his anarchist streak is partly what makes him a benevolent authority figure, you wouldn’t say he’s soft or lenient with his students. Instead, he’s honest with them, treating them not as friends or peers but as people whose entitlement to dignity and respect is absolute.They test and tease him and can be inconsiderate or cruel with one another. They’re kids, after all. A handful come into special focus, nearly upstaging their teacher and contributing to the emotional richness of the film. We don’t learn much about their lives outside of school (or about Bachmann’s), but each one is a universe of feeling and possibility, vivid and vulnerable.And lucky to have crossed paths with Bachmann. The film ends with his retirement after 17 years of teaching, a bittersweet moment that Speth observes with tact and understatement. This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.Mr. Bachmann and His ClassNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 37 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘The Automat’ Review: Put a Nickel in the Slot for Nostalgia

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      A documentary about Horn & Hardart’s automated cafeterias is sweet and shaggy, but an engrossing tale of cultural harmony.Whatever nostalgia is — homesickness, fantasy, delusion — it’s flooding “The Automat.” There’s something about people’s memories of these automated cafeterias that flourished in the United States for much of the 20th century — you put a nickel into a slot, open a door in an enormous wall of cabinets and pull out, say, a slice of pie or a ham sandwich — that sends them back to the era in which they frequented one. The documentary Lisa Hurwitz has directed about Automats is shaggy and full of cutesy stuff, mostly involving Mel Brooks. But the sight of all these lit-up faces — see Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell — made me hunger to be back where they wish they were: at 5, at 17, at 20-something, plunked down at a table with a bowl of baked beans.The movie unfurls the history of Horn & Hardart, the Manhattan-and-Philadelphia-based chain of restaurants the Automat was synonymous with. It’s an engrossing tale of commercial expansion, industrial innovation and cultural harmony even in times, like the Civil Rights era, when that kind of unison seems tough to fathom. Hurwitz finds biological descendants of Hardart and professional heirs of Horn. She locates John Romas, an Austrian immigrant who was the company’s vice president of engineering. There are conversations with the authors of a Horn & Hardart book, a moving visit to one of the designers of a powerfully witty 1970s ad campaign and a sit-down with W. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, who served during a notoriously cataclysmic period. And the worst that anybody has to say about anything is that the Automat is gone.Hurwitz and her editors, Michael Levine and Russell Greene, have the interviews, archival footage and bright, soaring, relentless music to plunge us, accordingly, into states of delight and visceral lament. I, at least, am astounded that a movie this chipper, one so easily distracted by its boldface names (Hurwitz includes footage of Brooks essentially telling her how to make the movie), also feels like the key to some lock on the American soul. Just about every source says that what they loved about the Automat was that everyone was welcome. So as the millionth exterior shot and umpteenth photo of those towering cabinets hit me, I got sad, too: why oh why did it all have to end? The answer is typical: the interstate, suburbanization, mismanagement, classism, snobbery, inflation. All of which this movie does more than allude to.And yet — and this, for me, is a heavy yet — it feels as if the movie is skirting something. I get it: Hurwitz wins time with at least four American VIPs, three of whom are no longer with us, and the fourth, Brooks, remains so bewitched by the Automat that he writes a theme song and performs it with real Jimmy Durante bark. Romas, we learn, has also died. And each luminary’s enchantment appears to have inhibited an urge to commit more rigorous probing. (This is a feel-good movie!)I just wonder whether it could have felt better to know more precisely how Horn & Hardart managed a racially integrated clientele when its competition couldn’t have cared less for that sort of thing. When Ginsburg and others enthuse that everybody was welcome, they mean matrons and stenographers, executives, artists and “bums,” to quote Brooks; a panorama of metropolitanism commingling over coffee and Salisbury steak. But the montage of images that accompanies Ginsburg’s assessment includes one photo of an Asian family and another of a blurry Asian man sharing a table with a white diner. The movie has photos of other nonwhite diners; they just don’t appear in this “everybody was welcome” section.The doors did appear to be open to all. Goode offers that Horn & Hardart was “a nice place where African Americans could go and feel dignified.” Powell more or less backs him up, only to have Hurwitz interrupt not with a follow-up question but to move and make an unseemly adjustment of his necktie. (He doesn’t seem amused.) On one of our regular phone calls right before she died in 2020, when she was about 90, my grandmother Martha Ann James, a lifelong Philadelphian (and dignified African American) who is very much not in this movie, rhapsodized for 20 minutes about Horn & Hardart: the coffee, the classy downtown building, the meatloaf, the affordable prices, the magnitude of welcome. (This from a woman who maintained quite a catalog of unwelcome.)So — this is not to dispute the film’s gloss on the belonging one could experience at the Automat. It’s merely to say that it is indeed a gloss. Powell remembers that part of the magic of the dining experience was the magic of the automation itself. As a boy, he knew that someone was behind that wall of food lockers — cooks, maintenance men, servers of a sort. But Hurwitz is content to let the mystery be.If anything, “The Automat” seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage. We hear about the chiefs and their business decisions and, save for the late appearance of the actor and former busboy Apache Ramos, very little from or about the people behind the lockers, or even regular people who remember eating there. What we learn about the bosses is illustrative, of course. So is Hurwitz’s approach.Her determination to embody nostalgia succeeds all too well. As the film unspools Horn & Hardart’s demise, something telling happens. A person close to the company identifies a shift away from a kind of civic benevolence in its management style after its president, Edwin Daly, died in 1960. A minute later, the movie turns to Howard D. Schultz, the Starbucks founder and executive, who recalls that his first Automat experience is what made him want to be a merchant. The Horn & Hardart ethos infuses Starbucks’s, he says, beaming. You can see what he means. He then holds up a framed photograph of Automat cabinets that hangs in his office, a handsome people-free image of imprisoned pies. He, too, mentions that the place was run by magic. It’s a shame we don’t hear more about the less fancy magicians. The closest we get are rapturous accounts of the women who changed dollars into nickels without ever looking at the coins. With minutes left, Brooks goes gaga at the thought of the Automat’s coconut custard. “God made that,” he says. In this movie, He might as well have.The AutomatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Automat,’ Where Dining Out Was D.I.Y.

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      The director Lisa Hurwitz discusses the history of the Horn & Hardart chain of restaurants, which offered comfort food in coin-operated glass boxes.What do Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner and the former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz have in common? They all fondly recall eating at an Automat — that beloved institution of D.I.Y. dining that lasted from 1902 to 1991 in New York and Philadelphia. Lisa Hurwitz’s detailed documentary, “The Automat” (in theaters), toasts Horn & Hardart’s storied chain of restaurants, where comfort-food dishes perched in coin-operated glass boxes lining the walls. Sort of like a mailroom, but with delicious pie and soup instead of bills.The bustling Automats merged marble-and-brass style and a come-one-come-all philosophy. Horn & Hardart’s last Automat (on 42nd Street and Third Avenue) closed in 1991, after a decline hastened by fast food joints, real estate trends and changing habits. The film, Hurwitz’s debut feature, teems with historical detail and varied interviews (including all of the above fans plus Mel Brooks, in a movie-length swoon).I spoke with Hurwitz about her self-distributed film, which was nearly 10 years in the making. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why does the Automat hold a special place in many people’s hearts? Do you have any personal connection?Zilch. I grew up in Los Angeles, my mom is from the Midwest, my dad is from L.A. When our families emigrated to America, we did not settle in New York. So I became interested from stumbling upon it in the library. Eventually I made a short film in a nonfiction media class, a profile about Steve Stollman, the Automat collector. I didn’t really start hearing people’s personal stories until I started making the [feature] film and talking to people in New York and Pennsylvania.For people who are younger and remember going to the Automat one or two times, it was this incredible experience, going as a kid. For a lot of kids, that was the first time they got to choose what they wanted. Their parents would give them coins, and they could do what they wish. But for older people, I think the nostalgia is connected to the loved ones they went there with, people who are no longer with them. They think about their grandparents, their parents. It was like a second home.Lisa Hurwitz, the director of “The Automat.”Lucien Knuteson/Film ForumThe superfan Mel Brooks sings a tribute to the Automat, with a 26-piece orchestra. How did that come about?When I was directing this film festival in Olympia, Washington, we had a 3-D 35-millimeter presentation of “Jaws 3-D.” We had one of the screenwriters, Carl Gottlieb, who is part of that Mel Brooks circle. Carl and I became Facebook friends after his visit in Olympia, so he saw my Kickstarter campaign pop up in his newsfeed. He sent me a message saying, “I’m having dinner with Mel Brooks tonight. Do you mind if I mention your project?” He used his Mel Brooks card for me! I was really appreciative.Mel took a liking to me and the project, and he asked what else he could do to help. I asked him if he would sing a song. I would have it written for him, so all he had to do was go to the recording studio and perform it. He said, yeah, sure, and maybe even you and me, we can write something together, think up some ideas. A few weeks later he called me back and said, you know, Lisa, I’ve been doing some writing, and I got something. “Listen to this!” He starts singing to me on the phone, and it’s the beginnings of the song. Then a few weeks later, he’s got more. So he wrote the whole song. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me! Mel thinks I’m nutty in the nicest way possible, but he believes in the project. And I wanted the music to match the era. I wanted it to feel like an old Hollywood movie.Does the Automat represent an American ideal in some ways, with its democratic approach?It really does. And it’s a window onto America over 100 years. It was such an important place for immigrants. As people came into New York, the Automat became part of their American story. It played a role in the Americanization process, because it was an incredible environment: it had incredible food, it was cheap, you didn’t need to speak English, you could stay there a while. You could get freebie fare like ketchup soup, lemonade, water. And a place to stay warm. I think the Automat represents people coming together in the literal and metaphorical senses.What surprised you most in learning about the Automat?The big moment was when I found out about Howard Schultz. The creator of what has become the new Automat — ugh, I know people will hate me for saying that. But the way you see a Starbucks on every other block, that’s the way it was with Automats in New York! So to hear from Howard about how he’s never stopped thinking about the Automat when he’s thinking about how to grow Starbucks, I’m just drooling at this point. He could be serving shoes on a plate for all I care, but the point is that one of the most successful food entrepreneurs in the world is saying that. And it was easy to go about getting connected to him because at the time I lived in Seattle, which is kind of like a small Jewish town.If I had to choose one thing that the Automat was about, it’s about people sitting together and taking their time. It’s not only Starbucks — there’s a gazillion cafes out there. I just think it’s really healthy for society, for people, for us to be stuck with each other and to share a table with one another.What would you get if you could go to an Automat now?Macaroni and cheese, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes. I would try all the pies. And I would for sure need to try that coconut custard pie that Mel and Carl were both talking about! More

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      ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ Review: The Blade Is Back

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      Leatherface returns to terrorize a fresh batch of innocents in this poorly plotted, efficiently executed Netflix blood bath.By this point, the state of Texas has experienced so many chainsaw massacres that it’s a wonder the power tool hasn’t been banned.In David Blue Garcia’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably. In empathy, the cinematographer Ricardo Diaz imbues a rare moment of calm with gorgeous pathos as Leatherface lumbers, alone, across a field of dead sunflowers, his hulking figure dwarfed by a bruised violet sky.Establishing a familiar red state-blue state tension immediately, the movie sends four young entrepreneurs (Sarah Yarkin, Nell Hudson, Elsie Fisher and Jacob Latimore) to a virtually deserted small town. Their mission is gentrification, their destination a property flying a Confederate flag and housing a withered crone (a delightfully desiccated Alice Krige). A surly, gun-toting local (Moe Dunford, displaying greater nuance than the silly script requires) appears to be the town’s only other non-maniacal resident.“Why are you such a nihilist?” one newcomer inquires, because that’s how city folks speak to armed strangers. Dialogue, fortunately, is soon overtaken by dismemberments, building to a squelchy, party-bus slaughter and the movie’s sole stab at humor. Flashbacks to an earlier mass trauma suffered by one of the newcomers feel distasteful, but the return of Sally, the sole survivor of the first film (now played by Olwen Fouéré), feels exactly right.Having waited almost 50 years to bag her monster, Sally should not have been surprised to find him, like so many failed sons, living with his version of a mother this whole time.Texas Chainsaw MassacreRated R. It’s right there in the title, folks. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

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      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Kanye West Always Wanted You to Watch

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      The three-part Netflix documentary “Jeen-yuhs” shows the superstar in his earliest days, then time warps to the present, with disorienting results.No one could quite understand why the young producer was being followed by a cameraman. Almost everywhere Kanye West went beginning in the early 2000s — before “Through the Wire,” before “The College Dropout,” before anything, really — he was trailed by Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, a comedian and public-access TV host from Chicago who had decided to document West’s attempts to become a successful musician.In “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” the three-part Netflix documentary that draws heavily on that footage, the camera serves two functions: It captures West at a vulnerable moment in his nascent career, when the future was anything but guaranteed. And it is also a kind of marker of success on its own. The camera’s presence forces the people West encounters to treat him just a tad more seriously, or at least to wonder if they should. In almost every encounter captured, there is a slight hiccup at the beginning, in which the other person wonders, what exactly are we doing here?West, one of the defining figures of the last 20 years, has been a consistent innovator in music and style. But he has also long had a preternatural grasp of the mechanisms of celebrity, how success is only truly impactful if it is imprinted onto others. West believed in himself, but wouldn’t stop until he’d convinced those around him, too.“Jeen-yuhs” is something like the demo tape of that phenomenon. It is both fascinating and obvious, eerie in the way that it foretells who West eventually would become by showing who he always has been.West, as we understand him now, is in early bloom during the first two of the docuseries’s three parts. Driving down lower Broadway in Manhattan, he tells a journalist sitting in the back seat how he feels when others tell him he’s thriving: “I might be living your American dream but I’m nowhere near where my dream is, dog. I got aspirations.” At one point, he says, “I’m trying to get to the point where I can drop the last name off my name.” (Indeed, he is now known solely as Ye.)Granting Simmons access was a combination of marketing savvy and also deep ego — “A little narcissistic or whatever,” West says. Nowadays, most pop superstars (and nowhere-near stars) are documented constantly for social media, but West understood the value of that labor early.The result is a prehistory of one of the most transfixing and agonizing celebrities of the 21st century. The footage could explain to aliens what creativity on Earth looks like. We see West recovering from his 2002 car crash, going through several dental procedures, and then getting back to work and emerging with “Through the Wire,” his debut single, which would finally catapult him toward the stratosphere. The camera captures a vivid, undimmable mind at constant, stubborn work.He asks to save the wires that held his jaw together, still bloody, for his mother, Donda. She appears throughout the film, often as a corrective force; even as West becomes more famous, he is never something other than his mother’s son. She doesn’t flinch from the lens, perhaps because the camera’s eye and that of a loving, knowing parent aren’t all that different.West also encourages the new people he meets to live out their relationship to him on camera. When he plays Pharrell Williams “Through the Wire,” Williams becomes a willing actor, walking out of the room and down the hall, overcome with thrill. After a recording session with Jay-Z in which West talks his way onto a song, Simmons prompts Jay-Z for a quote, asking him to literalize his co-sign of West for the camera.Not everyone plays along with West’s schemes. It’s odd to watch Scarface, one of rap music’s great philosophers, effectively pass on “Jesus Walks,” maybe the most meaningful and popular spiritual hip-hop song of all time. He also chides West for leaving his orthodontic retainers out on the countertop, a light spank from elder to child. (The retainers appear on several occasions, a symbolic embodiment of West’s still unformed persona.)There is, perhaps surprisingly, ample footage like this — this was an era in which West was almost always the less successful person in any interaction. Note the hangdog way in which he skulks out of the Roc-A-Fella Records office after going door to door and playing music for various executives, who seem to regard him as a lovable nuisance. Given how West moves through the world now, it’s disorienting to see him, time and again, as a supplicant.This is footage that most hagiographers would omit, but Simmons and his directing partner Chike Ozah — professionally, they’re known as Coodie & Chike — understand their subject differently. Simmons was inspired, he says in the film, by the Chicago basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams,” a film that cuts its melancholy with bolts of hope.And much about West in the early 2000s, before Roc-A-Fella Records relented and signed him as a recording artist (rather than just a producer), is lightly tragic. When West is at an industry event with far more famous people, in search of a little validation, Simmons films him from a distance, emphasizing his relative smallness. But even this footage doesn’t feel directed so much as captured, tiny moments that in the rear view appear huge.Cameras are not neutral — they change their subject. But while everyone lies for the camera, some people live in the camera. Throughout the film, West often appears most mindful of how history might regard him, driven by a sense that in a room full of people, the most important connection he could make was with Simmons’s lens. (See the scene in which he and Mos Def rap “Two Words,” and West appears to be staring through the camera’s aperture somewhere into the future.)Simmons offers largely space-filling voice-over throughout the film, not an unreliable narrator so much as an uncertain one. There is either far too much or not nearly enough of him, more likely the former: The segments where he links West’s story to his own feel particularly ill-placed, a distraction that doesn’t offer context on the main subject. And some narrative choices are contrived: Too much time is given over to West’s desire to be featured in an MTV News segment spotlighting new artists. (It so happens that MTV was where Simmons and Ozah met.)The success that Simmons had hoped to capture ended up being his termination notice — once West’s career was finally operating under its own steam, he left Simmons (and his footage) behind. That alone would have made for a compelling film. But the third segment, which is far more scattershot, consists largely of scraps that Simmons accrues over the next couple of decades, an era in which West becomes something unfamiliar to him: a world-building superstar.This episode is less narratively satisfying and coherent than the first two, but Simmons’s indiscriminate eye and his pre-existing comfort with West end up as assets. Where in the early 2000s, Simmons had an aspirant as his subject, now he has someone who exists between superhero and autocrat, a figure who isn’t performing simply for one camera but for a world of cameras and observers.There is a grim scene in which West is speaking with potential real estate partners, a gaggle of older white men, and tells them, “I took bipolar medication last night to have a normal conversation and turn alien to English.” He likens his treatment by the public to being drawn and quartered.Simmons lingers for a while — this is who his subject has become, and it is as important to see as any of the clips from when he was simply an up-and-comer. But real as it is, this isn’t the West that Simmons knows, or can stomach. There’s something itchy in the camerawork, and eventually Simmons does something that doesn’t seem to come naturally: He turns the camera off. More

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      Is It Funny for the Jews?

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      Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.In the climactic scene of the musical “Caroline, or Change,” an 8-year-old Jewish boy, Noah, and his African American maid, Caroline, living in the Jim Crow South, get into a heated fight and end up trading ugly insults. Noah says he hopes a bomb kills all Black people, and Caroline responds that all Jews will go to hell.It’s always a charged moment, but there was something peculiarly unsettling about it the night I saw the recent Broadway revival. For while there was silence after Noah’s hateful outburst, what followed Caroline’s comment was something I did not expect: laughter. Nervous giggling in uncomfortable moments can be a coping mechanism. And that wasn’t the audience reaction every night. But in a radio interview, Sharon D Clarke, who played the title character, said that at the majority of shows, there was laughter. She was disturbed by it but couldn’t explain it.I found it jarring because I thought I could. Of course it’s impossible to get inside the heads of theatergoers, but as a Jewish person, I recognized this laughter. Who would buy a ticket to a Broadway show and chuckle at the eternal damnation of Jewish people other than Jews?There is a long, rich Jewish tradition of grappling with antisemitism by laughing at it. This has produced a vast amount of great comedy, from Mel Brooks turning Nazis into musical theater buffoons in “The Producers” to Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Borat, leading the denizens of a Southern bar in singing, “Throw the Jew down the well.” There is a sensibility behind these jokes that I grew up around and have long embraced.Adam Makké as Noah and Sharon D Clarke as Caroline in the recent Broadway revival of “Caroline, or Change.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSome artists argue that making light of prejudice, or turning purveyors of it into absurdities, robs hatred of power. I’ve been persuaded by that idea, and like many secular types, a Jewish sense of humor is more integral to my identity than any religious observance. It’s also a source of pride. A resilient comic sensibility that finds joy in dark places is one of the greatest Jewish legacies — as is an ability to laugh at ourselves.Those hung up on the question of whether the latest news is good for the Jews always seemed not only hopelessly ineffective but also tedious. Scolds from the Anti-Defamation League, alert to the damage done by every Jewish stereotype, will never end an ancient prejudice, but they could ruin a good time. And yet, as a critic engaging with a chaotic and constantly changing culture, in an online world that seems somehow both more outraged by and tolerant of hate speech, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this kind of condescension. It’s too glib. And that has made me look closer at the disturbing rise in antisemitism today, Jewish culture and identity, and the implications of what we find funny.THERE’S BEEN GROWING PUSHBACK in the last year from some Jews about double standards in the cultural conversation. Take the increasingly politicized issue of casting, which has inspired considerable controversy. We have never been more sensitive to issues of whitewashing, appropriation and representation. Think of Scarlett Johansson being hired for an Asian role. But when gentiles are cast as Golda Meir or Mrs. Maisel or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is little blowback. The superb indie comedy “Shiva Baby” tackles explicitly Jewish themes, but the fact that the lead is played by a Catholic stand-up, Rachel Sennott, barely raised an eyebrow.On her podcast, Sarah Silverman has spoken passionately about how Jewish characters are regularly played by gentile actors, specifically lamenting the lack of meaty roles for women. “The pattern in film is just undeniable,” she said, “and the pattern is — if the Jewish woman character is courageous or deserves love, she is never played by a Jew.”Gentile performers playing Jewish characters include, from left, Felicity Jones in “On the Basis of Sex,” Rachel Sennott in “Shiva Baby” and Rachel Brosnahan in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”Photographs by Jonathan Wenk/Focus Features; Utopia; Nicole Rivelli/Amazon Prime VideoShe delivered this sharp monologue with an ambivalence that also resonated with me. Acting requires an empathetic leap of imagination. Like Silverman, I know that great performers of any religion can and have brilliantly played Jews, and it’s easier to pass as Jewish than, say, African American. But is experience as a Jewish person irrelevant to playing Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof” (as Alfred Molina, who was raised Catholic, did on Broadway) or to embodying Joan Rivers in a biopic? (Before the project fell apart, the gentile Kathryn Hahn was slated to play her.) I think it matters. When a gentile plays a Jew, the results are often more affected, the mannerisms pronounced, which can often mean the difference between someone playing Jewish vs. inhabiting a Jewish character.In his book “Jews Don’t Count,” the British comic David Baddiel argues that casting is one of many issues in contemporary discourse that illustrate how antisemitism is far more acceptable than other forms of bigotry. One need only point to the career of Mel Gibson to find evidence. Part of the reason, Baddiel explains, is that at a time when we are particularly sensitive to power imbalances, what distinguishes antisemitism is that the bigot imagines Jewish people as both low status (rats, venal) and high status (running the banks, part of a globalist conspiracy).Jewish people have clearly been tremendously successful in Hollywood, on Broadway and in comedy, among other artistic pursuits, but that doesn’t erase the specific discriminatory shadow hovering behind their rise. Silverman points to the number of famous Jews who have changed their names. “If Winona Ryder had stayed Winona Horowitz, would she have starred in ‘The Age of Innocence’?” Silverman has asked. “She wouldn’t.”Behind the discussion of gentiles in Jewish roles is the long history of Hollywood anxiety that a work will be “too Jewish,” words that have haunted Jewish artists for generations. The first time Jerry Seinfeld appeared on a sitcom, on “Benson” in 1980, he played a courier trying to sell a joke for the governor to use in a speech. When one flopped (“Did you hear about the rabbi who bought himself a ranch? Called it the Bar Mitzvah”), he asked: “Too Jewish?” Nine years later, a Jewish NBC executive dismissed the pilot for “Seinfeld” as “too New York, too Jewish,” and while it was picked up, the network ordered only four episodes.In the most memorable joke of his breakthrough 1986 Broadway comedy, “The World According to Me,” the comic Jackie Mason said, “You know what’s going to happen after this show: The gentiles are going to say, ‘It’s a hit.’ And the Jews are going to say, ‘Too Jewish.’” Mason delivers this cheerfully, but there’s a bristling undercurrent, a finger wag about self-loathing.Jackie Mason’s accent reflected a bold refusal to assimilate.Mario Ruiz/Getty ImagesMason has always been a kind of guilty pleasure for me. Compared with my favorite comics, he seemed impossibly old-fashioned, not just in his borscht belt rhythms, but also in having bits centered on how fundamentally alien gentiles were to Jews. But listening to him again more recently, I detected a defiance that was, in its own way, radical, even countercultural. His accent itself, which if anything got thicker as he got older, represented a bold refusal to assimilate. The Jewish artists who found mainstream success didn’t sound like him.And when he died last year, with a modest amount of media attention paid to his legacy, it made me wonder about the obstacle course of Jewish success in a country where we are a tiny minority. But I also thought about the role played by Jewish people measuring the degree of acceptable Jewishness, the kind Mason was talking about in his show.WHEN REPRESENTATION IN CULTURE is discussed today, what’s often emphasized is how valuable it can be when children from minority groups see or hear someone like them and how that can expand their horizons. I have never felt this was an issue for me, because there seemed to be an abundance of Jewish people in the arts. Sure, some changed their names or played down their background, but we could tell. I never questioned the idea that Jews had been well represented in popular culture until I read Jeremy Dauber’s book “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” and learned that not one leading character on prime-time television clearly identified as Jewish from 1954 to 1972 and again from 1978 to 1987.That came as a surprise and made me reconsider my 1980s childhood diet of pop culture. Back then, this mainly consisted of the offerings of three television networks, along with the occasional PG movie. This was the era of “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” and I couldn’t think of a single Jewish character on a show I watched until I became a teenager. But a major shift for Jewish representation took place in 1989. That’s when “Seinfeld,” “Anything but Love” with Richard Lewis and “Chicken Soup” with Mason all premiered. (It’s also the year of “When Harry Met Sally.”) What’s striking about this influx of Jewish characters is that only one kind was allowed: A male stand-up with a gentile love interest.“Seinfeld,” left, and “When Harry Met Sally” typified the ’80s pairings of Jewish funny guys and gentile women.Monty Brinton/NBC, via Getty Images; Columbia PicturesIn order to not be too Jewish in the popular culture of my youth, you had to be a funny man interested in someone from another background. For a funny Jewish woman, you had to wait until “The Nanny.”How much did it matter that as a boy I saw no Jewish couples on television? I’m not certain — draw your own conclusions about the fact that I married a non-Jew.But one thing I surely developed as a young Jewish culture vulture were the tools to enjoy work by antisemites. The most formative artists I loved as a kid, from Roald Dahl to Ice Cube to H.P. Lovecraft, have track records of hateful comments toward Jews. I knew this even then.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More