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    ‘Compartment No. 6’ Review: Strangers on a Russian Train

    A young Finnish woman embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes her (and you) through richly detailed and surprising terrain.When the heroine in “Compartment No. 6” gets into a car with a guy who has been giving her nothing but grief, you may silently shriek: What is she thinking? You may also judge her for what looks like a bad decision or damn the filmmaker for putting yet another woman in hackneyed straits. Vulnerable women and dangerous men are clichés, but they’re also turned on their heads in this smart, emotionally nuanced film that rarely goes where you expect.Set in Russia in what seems like the late 1990s — the Soviet Union has collapsed and our girl uses a Walkman — the film mostly takes place on a train from Moscow to the northwest city of Murmansk. It’s there that Laura (Seidi Haarla), a Finnish university student, plans to see the Kanozero petroglyphs, rock drawings dating back five, six thousand years. Her reasons for going aren’t especially clear. She’s in Russia to study the language and expresses an interest in archaeology. Yet her focus is lasered on Irina (Dinara Drukarova), a flirt who opened her flat and bed to Laura but has stayed behind in Moscow.Travel stories are almost invariably metaphoric expeditions with multiple destinations, not all of them literal. That holds true in “Compartment No. 6,” which is partly the story of a young, vague woman’s journey of self-discovery. Laura is already on the move when you first see her, drifting through a party in Irina’s apartment to the sounds of Roxy Music’s “Love Is the Drug.” In one sense it’s perfect walk-on music: Laura is besotted with Irina. But there’s also something off, even a bit sardonic, about the juxtaposition of Laura, a mousy little blur, and this particular song, with its louche, emphatically unromantic world-weariness.The Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen is a deft fast-sketch artist, a talent that was first beautifully on display in his feature debut, “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki” (2017), about a sweet boxer in love. Minutes into “Compartment No. 6,” you have a rich sense of people and place, and a clear bead on Laura. You see her pleasure and her discontent — you clock the flickering smile and note the nervously bowed head — as she wanders Irina’s flat, a bohemian sprawl filled with books, objets d’art and clever people being clever for one another. Laura tries to fit in, but isn’t anywhere near slick enough.Her sensitive solo act turns into a lively, funny, seemingly incongruous duet soon after she settles into the cramped, dingy train compartment. Her home for much of the rest of the story, it has already been staked out by her fellow traveler, Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov). It’s hostility at first sight, or almost. Initially, they don’t speak to each other — he pulls out a bottle of booze without offering her any — but by the time Laura is making up her berth for the night, Ljoha is plastered. “Russia is a great country,” he all but yells at her, mentioning the defeat of the Nazis before gesturing at the moon: “We went there!”Part of what makes “Compartment No. 6” engrossing and effective is how Kuosmanen plays with tone. In Irina’s apartment, the naturalistic performances, loose camerawork, casual staging and Laura’s visible unease create a sense of intimacy as well as sympathy: All of us have been the awkward guest somewhere. Once the story shifts to the train (the film was shot on moving railroad cars, not soundstages), its claustrophobic spaces and jerky motions help create a threatening intimacy, one that’s compounded by Ljoha’s aggression and Laura’s guardedness. The two characters are equally defensive and mutually antagonistic; yet pinpricks of dry humor also make their belligerence seem more than a little absurd.The days pass and the train stops and starts, other characters enter and exit, and Laura and Ljoha move in and out of the compartment. As they eat, chat and smoke, which they do a lot, their shared enmity starts to fade, giving way to different kinds of gazes, more involved conversations and moments of surprising delicacy and feeling. You could say they enter a period of détente, but although the story evokes a specific historical period — and with it, the transition from the Soviet Union to the new Russia — Kuosmanen steers clear of obvious politics. What interests him are Laura and Ljoha, how they look at each other and don’t, and how by sharing food and talk and a car ride, they reveal themselves.Eventually, the train arrives at its destination and so do Laura and Ljoha, who by then have reached their terminus. In emotional terms, the film reaches its apogee two-thirds in, after Laura loses her camera and all her images of Moscow. She and Ljoha are at the rear of the train, staring out at the foggy night and the softly diffused colored lights of the depot they’ve just left. As the camera holds on this scene of wistful, ephemeral beauty, Laura tells Ljoha about Irina’s life, friends and flat. “I loved it all,” Laura says as darkness swallows the lights. Her voice is filled with longing, but she has already moved on.Compartment No. 6Rated R for vulgar language, boozing and cigarette smoking. In Russian and Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Alec Baldwin Seeks Dismissal of ‘Rust’ Lawsuit

    Lawyers for the actor Alec Baldwin and other producers behind the film “Rust” filed a motion on Monday seeking to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the movie’s script supervisor, who was feet away from the actor on the movie set in New Mexico when he fatally shot a cinematographer.The script supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, said in her lawsuit, filed last year, that she was standing nearby when the gun fired a live bullet that killed the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounded the film’s director, Joel Souza. Mitchell then ran out of the wooden church set that had been the backdrop for the scene and called 911.The lawsuit claimed that Ms. Mitchell “sustained serious physical trauma and shock and injury to her nervous system and person” as a result of her proximity to the shooting. It accused Baldwin of “intentionally, without just cause or excuse,” cocking and firing the revolver in a scene that did not call for it.In Monday’s court filing, lawyers for Mr. Baldwin wrote that he could not have intentionally shot a live bullet from the gun because shortly before it discharged, the movie’s first assistant director called out “cold gun,” indicating that the old-fashioned revolver being used as a prop did not contain any live bullets and should have been safe to handle.“It is completely illogical for plaintiff to contend defendant Mr. Baldwin received a prop gun that everyone including plaintiff and defendant Mr. Baldwin expected to be ‘cold,’ while at the same time stating that Mr. Baldwin’s conduct was intentional in accidentally firing a live round,” the filing said.Mr. Baldwin said in a television interview last year that he did not pull the trigger of the gun while he was practicing on set that day. He said he did not fully cock the hammer of the gun, but pulled it back and let it go in an action that might have set it off.The filing from Mr. Baldwin’s and the production’s lawyers also asserted that Ms. Mitchell’s grievance did not qualify as a complaint under New Mexico’s workers’ compensation law.Ms. Mitchell’s lawsuit targeted the production more broadly for making a series of what she called “cost-cutting measures,” including hiring a 24-year-old armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was just starting out her career as a lead armorer in the industry. Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s lawyer has said that she was dedicated to safety on set; she filed her own lawsuit against the film’s supplier of guns and ammunition.The production’s court filing said that Ms. Mitchell’s allegations relied on “a list of things that she contends, in hindsight, should or should not have been done” to ensure safety on set; the production’s lawyers argued that her case was insufficient and should be dismissed. More

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    The Black List, Founded in Hollywood, Expands Into Theater

    The Black List, an effort to boost the careers of undiscovered writers by drawing attention to high-quality unproduced scripts, was formed 17 years ago with a focus on Hollywood. Now the organization is looking to extend its work into theater.The project’s leadership announced Tuesday that it would begin inviting playwrights and musical writers to share their work with gatekeepers in the theater, film and television industries, with the goal of helping them find representation, get feedback and land productions in the theater world or jobs in the film and television world.Four well-regarded nonprofit theaters, Miami New Drama in Florida, the Movement Theater Company in New York, Victory Gardens in Chicago and Woolly Mammoth in Washington, have each agreed to commission a new play or musical from a writer whose work surfaces through the project. The commissions are $10,000 each.“Our fundamental belief is that there’s a lot of amazing playwrights whose opportunities don’t befit their talents,” said Franklin Leonard, who founded the Black List. “If we can rectify that, that’s something we should do.”The Black List started as an annual survey of scripts that Hollywood executives liked but hadn’t turned into films, and the organization says that 440 of those scripts have since been produced. Then the Black List added a for-profit arm that allows writers to post scripts online to bring them to the attention of industry professionals, and which also allows writers, for a fee, to seek script evaluations from readers who work in the industry.(Evaluations cost $100, of which $60 goes to the reader.)Leonard said he and Megan Halpern, the Black List executive spearheading the theater expansion, have been talking with theater industry leaders for months about the idea of broadening the Black List’s scope, with the goal of helping undiscovered playwrights and musical theater writers find work in theater and, possibly, also in film or TV.“What we’ve heard is that people want to find new playwrights, but the reality of wading through the slush pile is insurmountable,” he said. More

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    Jenna Ortega Gets Her Thrills From Radiohead and ‘Paris, Texas’

    The scream queen talks about her latest film, “The Fallout” on HBO Max, dancing in public and driving in the dark.There’s horror, and then there’s terror. Jenna Ortega now knows the difference.Since her introduction to the macabre as a child in “Insidious: Chapter 2,” the former Disney star, now 19, has shrieked her way through “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” “Scream,” now in theaters, and the upcoming “X.”“Horror to me, it’s kind of like a second home,” Ortega said. “It’s so comfortable, because you’re not trying to impress anybody.”But her latest role, in “The Fallout” — Megan Park’s examination of trauma in the aftermath of a school shooting — out Thursday on HBO Max, was an exercise in paralyzing silence.Ortega plays 16-year-old Vada, who early in the movie hides in a bathroom stall with her classmate Mia (Maddie Ziegler), hands over mouths and sobs stifled, as a gunman picks off his targets outside; any sound could give away their location. What’s not said in the wake of the violence is nearly as excruciating.“With a film that weighs a lot emotionally, it can be very, very draining,” Ortega said of her first time leading a movie, which is why shooting “Scream” on the heels of wrapping “The Fallout” was a relief.The Return of ‘Scream’Twenty-five years after Wes Craven’s original picture, the franchise is back with another sequel. Review: The latest “Scream” is a slasher movie so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else, our critic writes. A Familiar Cast: The film brings back Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette. Here is what the actors had to say about their reunion. The Legacy of ‘Scream’: The reason the original endures is that, for all its humor and self-awareness, it’s an actual horror movie.From the Archives: Read what Janet Maslin wrote of the film when it first came out in 1996.“The incredible thing is that people who are on horror sets tend to be a fan of horror — they love the blood and the gore and the monsters,” she said. “You wake up and, ‘Oh man, I can’t wait to go to set and get stabbed.’ It’s incredibly exhilarating.”Ortega now finds herself faced with another daunting task: to reimagine the deadpan, smart-mouthed Wednesday Addams as a teenager in “Wednesday,” Tim Burton’s upcoming horror comedy for Netflix.“It’s terrifying,” Ortega said in a late-night video interview from the set in Romania, her hair long and black with a fringe and her eyes ringed in dark circles. Still, Ortega was determined to go big. “Just give it your all, even if it’s too much,” she said.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Antique shops I consider myself an amateur antiquarian book collector. I developed a fascination with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and I found a collection of his essays from 1879. And not only was I obsessed with the way it looked, but the pages smelled different, the texture was different, and I realized, “Oh, I want to protect this book.” I like having to take care of something, but it’s much easier than a plant because plants can die.2. Wim Wenders’s “Paris, Texas” The first time I watched “Paris, Texas” was the first time I was emotional over a film. It’s just aching with vulnerability. I haven’t seen a lot of slow-burn movies, so I wasn’t expecting it to be as heartbreaking as it was. It doesn’t explain itself too much. You follow Travis [Harry Dean Stanton], and you slowly peel back the layers. Every time I watch it, I forget where I am.3. Avocado rolls I went vegetarian, and any time people asked me what my favorite food was, I’m so indecisive I couldn’t give them an answer. So I would say, “Oh, I love avocados.” And people would say, “But that’s not a meal.” Well, I love sushi and I love avocados, and now it’s my go-to. You know how kids always go with chicken tenders and French fries? Those are my chicken tenders and French fries.4. My Sony headphones I just got them. They’re noise canceling. The sound is amazing. I never have to talk to people when they’re on because they’re big and bulky. I’ve been called “perpetual headphone head” by multiple people because I always have them around my neck. I could not imagine walking around life all day without some sort of background music. Even just feeling the weight of the headphones on my chest brings me some sort of relief.5. Mathieu Kassovitz’s “La Haine” If I were ever going to direct something, it would have to be similar to this. You feel like you know the characters. It exudes life. It’s three boys in Paris talking about police brutality and the struggles they go through in their days. Something that strikes me about this film is that it’ll always be relevant. That’s kind of unfortunate, but I think that there’s something meaningful about that because of how much energy it has.6. Radiohead’s “OK Computer” I was shooting a film called “X” in New Zealand, and I became really, really close friends with Jim, one of the P.A.s [production assistants] on set, who was a huge Radiohead fan. Jim had said that his favorite album was “OK Computer,” and he explained to me the impact that it had on him as a kid growing up. And it became pretty much the only thing I listened to. I was out of the country by myself for the very first time. I had just turned 18 so had that newfound independence. You’re slowly becoming an adult and the world becomes scarier, to be so far from home and learning to do things on my own. So I think because I’m so nostalgic for that time in my life, that album will forever hold immense significance.7. Driving I couldn’t sleep because of the time difference going from Eastern Europe to the West Coast of the U.S. So I was going out every night and driving, and I realized that’s probably when I’m happiest. I’m not talking to anybody. I’m focused. I can roll down the window and taste outside. It’s a freedom that I wish I could experience all the time. That’s another thing, too: You capture some insane views. You become very observant because there’s nothing else to do, especially when you have nowhere really to go.8. Outkast Childhood — that’s what I associate them with. I’ve been listening to them more because, to be honest, I’m very, very tired, and listening to Outkast in the morning is a nice way to wake myself up. My favorite album, at least right now, is “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.”9. Dancing in public One time, I had just arrived in this sleepy town. It was raining really badly, and I ran out into the middle of the street. I had my headphones on, and “You and Me” by Penny & the Quarters was playing. I just started swaying to it, and then I started spinning to it, and I ran into the grocery store, and I came around the corner, and I saw this old woman. And she was laughing at me, and we both just started dancing together right next to the watermelon. And then when the song was over, I did a bow and she did a bow, and we went our separate ways.10. Charlie Kaufman I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything of his that I haven’t liked. Oftentimes you get that question, “If you could play any character in the world, who would you play?” And I always say, “I don’t know exactly who that would be. I just know that they would be written by Charlie Kaufman.” He’s one of those people where you hear his words or you hear the message he’s trying to get across, and that’s when you realize things about yourself. More

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    ‘Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes’ Review: Hello, It’s You

    In this time-travel comedy, a cafe owner and his friends discover a portal that allows them to see two minutes into the future.More goofy than gripping, Junta Yamaguchi’s sci-fi farce, “Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes,” is a time-travel tale dotted with philosophical musings and romantic expectations. Yet however cleverly constructed and enthusiastically executed, this debut feature — shot on an iPhone in a single location — rarely surmounts the twistiness of its premise and the repetitiveness of its setups.After closing his cafe for the day and retiring to his flat upstairs, Kato (Kazunari Tosa) is stunned to see himself on his television screen, apparently speaking from the linked monitor in the cafe — and from two minutes in the future. Kato and his delighted cohort waste no time in exploiting this marvel, racing up and down stairs and backward and forward in time to interrogate their near-future selves. And when fun experiments with lottery scratch cards have been exhausted, the group’s temporal tinkerings become infinitely more complex and consequential.
    While there is much to admire in this scrappy, micro-budgeted debut feature, its sci-fi shenanigans are too convoluted and its visuals too claustrophobic to sustain interest. Yamaguchi’s skillful editing (he also acted as cinematographer) makes the tumbling momentum of Makoto Ueda’s script appear seamless, and the young, mostly theater-based actors are charmingly eager. Yet the movie’s darkest and most interesting insight is addressed only glancingly as Kato and his friends, with growing unease, realize that their foreknowledge is programming their present behavior.That awareness of the unwelcome implications of seeing one’s future is soon subsumed by the movie’s more preposterous concerns, including the arrival of the time-travel police with memory-wiping powder. Bemused viewers, however, may feel they’ve been sniffing that all along.Beyond the Infinite Two MinutesNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    Jonathan Freeman, Jafar in ‘Aladdin,’ Hangs Up His Cobra Staff

    He is, as Iago puts it in the classic Disney film, the “all-mighty evil one.”“A vile betrayer!” the sultan says.And, for a brief time, as he himself proclaims, “the most powerful sorcerer in the world!”(MUAHAHAHA!)Jonathan Freeman first voiced the Disney villain Jafar in the animated “Aladdin” movie back in 1992, continued to sneer in the subsequent films and then went on to originate the role in the Broadway production, which opened in 2014. He has wielded his cobra staff in hundreds of performances since, playing the role for nearly eight years.The show’s director, Casey Nicholaw, left, surprised Freeman during his final curtain call.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThat is until Sunday night, with the show that he decided would be his last.Backstage that evening, Freeman’s dressing room was mostly cleared out. The walls were bare, the day bed was gone. Tokens of appreciation included flowers, gifts of alcohol and a note of thanks from the ushers.An insert in the Playbill alerted audience members that Freeman would be taking his “final bow” in “Aladdin.” The show said he is the only person in the Disney universe to have brought an animated character he voiced, to life, onstage — a capstone to a career that includes credits in 11 Broadway shows.Freeman and Don Darryl Rivera, who plays Iago the parrot.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesOne of the evening’s many hugs from members of the cast and crew.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesAfter the performance ended, cast and crew members took a moment to honor Freeman during the curtain call.“I just had to come tonight to just acknowledge this wonderful man,” the show’s director, Casey Nicholaw, said. “We’re really going to miss you here so much.”Freeman, 71, replied, “No one wants to see a villain cry.” He added that “nobody does this on their own.”Then Freeman formally passed his cobra staff — “by the power vested in me by Mickey Mouse,” he said — to Dennis Stowe, the Jafar standby who will assume the role this week.After a few short speeches backstage, where most crew members were wearing T-shirts that featured Jafar’s silhouette, and many hugs, Freeman sat down for an exit interview in the nearby Disney Theatrical offices.“I rediscovered time during the pandemic,” Freeman, 71, said. “And what I discovered about rediscovering time was that it was very nice to have it.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesThese are edited excerpts from that conversation.You’ve been some version of Jafar for 30 years. How are you thinking about letting go of Jafar — and letting go of a part of yourself a little bit?After it appeared that the show was going to be successful and Disney wanted to have multiple productions, it’s kind of like this little island of Jafar that I lived on by myself for a while, it kept breaking off and splintering off. And I was happy and thrilled, to be honest, just to be able to know that I had gotten to a certain place where it becomes some kind of a template that could be reproduced by other people. So that’s nice — that’s nice to know it’s still going on.“I never thought of him, to be honest, as anything but a Disney villain,” Freeman said of his character. “It had to do with the arch of the eyebrow, it had to do with the sneer.”An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhy leave now?Well, actually, when we started the 2020 season year — our year really starts in February — I was thinking that maybe it would be my last year doing it.And then the pandemic happened, and then there was nothing. No one knew — was it going to be two months, six months? So, I think I thought, “Well, if they start again, I can’t not go back and try to pick up the pieces” because I would just be evaporating then in the middle of this pandemic. It would just be too weird. And I didn’t want to leave right before the holidays because that means putting the company into rehearsals. And so I thought wait until after the first of the year and February is the end of the contract anyway. It just seemed like the right time.In addition to the cobra staff, Freeman’s costume includes a cape, rings and cuffs.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesWhat do you think you were able to bring to Jafar onstage that perhaps you could not in voicing him for the movie?When we first started in Seattle [a pilot production of the show in the summer of 2011], there was only myself and one other person in the room who was connected to the original project, which was [the composer] Alan Menken. So when we got the first read-through, it was like a glass of cold water in my face, because I was hearing new voices doing these characters that I’d been hearing for so many years.With new voices came new ideas, and people were physically different in it. So I had to figure out how I would fit in. And I did kind of have to do a little bit of re-creation.It’s showtime: Freeman in an elevator at the New Amsterdam Theater, on his way to the stage.An Rong Xu for The New York TimesHow do you think your view of Jafar — and “Aladdin” — evolved over the years?As far as Jafar goes, I never thought of him, to be honest, as anything but a Disney villain. I never thought of him as being North African, Middle Eastern, Asiatic, South Asian. I never thought of any of those things. I always thought of him as being a villain. The makeup that I put on was never meant to be race. It was always villain’s makeup. It had to do with the arch of the eyebrow, it had to do with the sneer.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    The Tao of Wee Man

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Some of the earliest hours of my life have been spent with Jason Acuña. The pattern of our days was established at our first meeting: I would contrive to arrive before him to whatever sunrise activity Acuña, better known as Wee Man, had planned for us, and he would already be there, shouting a greeting in his psyched-up Southern California drawl. The first time I was late to being early, he was going to teach me how to skateboard. I found him in the middle of a friendly conversation with a man who appeared to be living in a car. Acuña was giving him some free merchandise from his sock line.Thick light-compression socks occupy a larger share of Acuña’s attention and interest than that of the average American adult for the same reason that skull stickers do: He is a skateboarder. To spend a few days with Acuña, who is 48, is to inhabit a parallel version of California — seemingly even more densely populated than the real California — where everyone is a professional skateboarder, or works for a skateboard company, or works for a different skateboard company, or is a skateboard photographer, or is a pioneer of skateboarding, or invented some crucial component of skateboards, or ran a skateboarding magazine, or doesn’t do any of that but can still kickflip.All the people in the parallel California know one another, as well as 10 billion other people whose skateboarding-related activities (past, present, future) they spend a not-insignificant amount of time catching one another up on. Everyone is nice, or at least no one is not nice. This whole thing — skateboarding et cetera — absorbs a great deal of Acuña’s time but is (mostly) not really his job, and certainly not his primary source of income, though it is true that Acuña’s passion for skateboarding et cetera is directly responsible for the comfortable lifestyle he now leads, a lifestyle that affords him the ability to at “any moment” receive a phone call from a friend saying, “ ‘Hey, let’s go to Italy’” and immediately, or at the latest tomorrow, go, something he says he has done multiple times.On a gray Orange County morning, over chilaquiles, I asked Acuña, “What would you say is your job?”“Me?” he asked. And then said in a tone of genuine wondering, “I don’t know!” He owns businesses, he reasoned, which makes him a businessman. He amended this to “entrepreneur,” a title both grander and somehow less formal; Willy Wonka famously oversaw an industrial chocolate-manufacturing operation, but you wouldn’t call him a businessman. “I don’t have to be anywhere or anything,” Acuña said. “Obviously, we made four ‘Jackass’ movies. And we did pretty OK with those.”Tabling, for a moment, Acuña’s offscreen business ventures — which include the socks, a partnership in an international taco chain and owning an event space regularly rented out to film episodes of “Dateline NBC” — his job, on and off for the past 22 years, might be described as: enactor of hypotheticals. It has been his work both to learn and to demonstrate, on camera, what would happen if: he and his friend were glued together with powerful adhesive; he kicked himself in the head; he was slapped in the face with a humongous fish; a bull came charging at him and all he had to shield himself was a yoga ball; he had a parachute strapped to his back and there was a huge fan.“Jackass 2.5” (2007).Paramount Home EntertainmentAnswers are predominantly variations on the theme “It would be painful.” It is the métier of Acuña to convey on video, with bugged out or scrunched up eyes, doubled-over body, temporarily discolored skin, shrieks, moans and groans, the flash-quick process by which nerve endings, in response to what the body perceives as an intolerable degree of mechanical, chemical or thermal stimulus, telegraph frantic warnings of “danger” and “pain” to the spinal cord and, thence, to the brain. The work is compiled under the franchise name “Jackass.” For three seasons, from 2000 to 2002, it was a television series that aired on MTV. Beginning in 2002, it has also been, sporadically, a theatrical film. The first three “Jackass” movies have earned a reported lifetime gross of more than $300 million. A fourth movie, “Jackass Forever,” will be released in February, after 11 months of pandemic-related delays.Unlike some of the other “Jackass” players, Acuña has rarely made headlines over the past 20 years. He has not amassed (or squandered) the greatest fortune. But Acuña is the cast member for whom “Jackass” fame has been rendered most inescapable. He has a form of dwarfism known as achondroplasia; his distinct physical appearance — the “Jackass” team agrees he is by far the most recognized of any of them, even more than Johnny Knoxville — makes him the only member whose mere presence in the world in his off-hours instantly identifies him. He told me he has been recognized in public at least once every day, for decades. At 22 years, the boyish franchise is now older than some of its stars were for their TV debut. On the precipice of a fourth film, the bodies and faces on the posters having visibly entered middle age, it’s hard not to wonder: What has it been like to live as one of the guys from “Jackass”? Acuña knows best. No one has spent more time doing it.As we were leaving the skatepark, Acuña was approached by a stranger with a request. Within seconds, he was shouting into a man’s phone: “Hey, Natalie! What’s up? Wee Man here! I just wanted to tell you: Happy Wednesday WOOOO!”It is often said that jazz is the only true American art form. For roughly a century, this was true. Then, in the 1990s, in West Chester, Pa., a teenager named Brandon Margera, better known as Bam, began making and distributing videos of himself and his friends performing skateboarding tricks intercut with clips of them executing pranks and low-tech, high-risk stunts. At the same time, on the West Coast, a small crew of people associated with Big Brother magazine — a coarse, influential skateboard publication that also produced video compilations with similar antics — had the idea to package these bursts of mayhem into a TV show. It would be sort-of hosted by a charismatic Tennessean and aspiring actor working under the stage name Johnny Knoxville (who was not himself a skateboarder but who was willing to shoot himself in the chest with a gun on camera to “test” the functionality of a bulletproof vest, which was just as good). It would unite the combustible forces of the two daring groups into one explosive ensemble.“Jackass” needed the infrastructure of American suburbia to exist: well-kept supermarket parking lots as vast as oceans, abandoned at night but illuminated for safety, divided by neatly planted ornamental bushes, encircled by curbs — curbs into which shopping carts could be rammed as violently fast as possible, upending human cargo. It needed middle-class parents who could attend to their offspring’s first few rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, leaving those children nourished and carefree, with endless hours of empty time. It needed chain stores whose corporate anonymity made their property fair game for destruction. It needed camcorders to become so cheap and accessible to the average person that children could be given total unsupervised access to them. It needed skateboards, a terrifying American invention.The thing about skateboarding for a few seconds slowly in a straight line is that it requires you to overpower your body’s every screaming instinct, and lean forward, into apparent danger, rather than drawing backward, into presumed safety. Leaning back will cause the board to shoot out in front of you at supersonic speed, leaving you behind to crash thunderously to the ground — on your ass, if you’re lucky.“It’s the craziest thing,” Acuña said 20 minutes into my crack-of-dawn skateboard lesson. After starting me at Step 1, he moved me back to a step even earlier than 1; I was clinging to a wall while shakily propelling myself forward along level concrete. When dropping in on the enormous U-shaped structures called vert ramps, Acuña said, even seasoned skaters might impulsively rear backward, away from the sheer plunge. But this urge, bred in humans over the millenniums before skateboards existed, is their peril. “Even going into a ramp, you lean all the way forward, because the board is going to catch up with you, no matter what.”Acuña is a master of this counterinstinctual logic. He zoomed through the morning fog around the skatepark in long, confident loops, like a winning game piece being pushed across a board. Skateboarding is, essentially, a bad and dangerous idea that luck and determination can render mildly to moderately survivable. Of course it spawned “Jackass.” The franchise is broadly predicated on the belief that the human body, captured on video in unusual circumstances, is sufficiently entertaining to satisfy audiences for upward of 90 minutes, without the need for additional plot lines, back story or even much dialogue. Illustrating this theory required characters who were willing to do anything with their bodies (Steve-O, who once shot a bottle rocket out of his anus), or show a tremendous amount of their bodies (Chris Pontius, who is willing to be completely naked all the time), or who had bodies that were in some way different than average and were game to emphasize that difference onscreen.“Jackass: The Movie” (2002).Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection“Jackass Number Two” (2006).Paramount PicturesAcuña was born in a United States Army field hospital in Livorno, Italy, when his parents, George and Dagmar, were both 20. The doctor delivering him noticed that his head seemed big relative to his newborn body. He worried Jason had hydrocephalus — “water on the brain” — a serious, potentially fatal condition, and had him whisked away for two days of tests. The doctor knew George, who worked in the hospital as a cook. On the third day, the doctor called him with good news: Jason did not have hydrocephalus. But he did have a condition called achondroplasia, he explained, which affects the body’s cartilage. A mutation on one gene of the fourth chromosome slows the development of cartilage into bone, leading to shorter-than-average bones and, therefore, shorter-than-average people.George had known somebody with dwarfism, an old high school classmate named Kevin. One day when Jason was an infant, George happened to spot Kevin at a bus stop. George asked if he might come over for dinner, to speak with George and his wife “about what to expect.” Kevin agreed, and he and George have kept in touch for the rest of Jason’s life. He advised, as best George can recall, that Jason would turn out just fine. As Jason grew up, George admired his son’s natural ease with others. “He was never afraid to be around everybody,” he said. “He’s got a beautiful smile.”On a winter morning in California, sitting in a beachfront park between two faux-lighthouse edifices, Acuña recalled how, when he was a child, his mother learned of an annual conference held by Little People of America, a support organization for people with dwarfism. She thought he might enjoy the opportunity to meet other kids like him. The hypothesis proved incorrect.“I came back and I go, ‘Mom, I don’t want to go to these things anymore,’” he said. “I’m like: ‘That’s not what my life’s about. I have friends.’”“I don’t think anybody in the world needs to like — ” Acuña noticed a bald man jogging on the beach. “ ‘Well, I’m a bald guy so I need to go hang out with bald people.’ No, he doesn’t care. He’s a dude. He’s a jogger, he wants to hang out with more joggers. Skateboarder, hang out with skateboarders.”Acuña’s achondroplasia, coupled with his inclination to make himself ultravisible, helped him stand out as a skater. An inveterate disrupter in class, he always bloomed under attention. Earning notice for being famous, he said, “felt just the same as looked at for being little. So that feeling never changed.” He told me he began being sponsored by local skate shops when he was 14. At age 19, he appeared in the fifth issue of Big Brother in a feature that spotlit him for, he said, “being a little-person skateboarder” who was “very talente — or talented, you know. I don’t want to say ‘very talented.’” The article, which also contained an interview with Pancho Moler, another skateboarder with dwarfism, was titled “Wee Men.”Acuña’s “Wee Man” nickname was coined by a warehouse employee at World Industries, the skateboard company that produced Big Brother. Teenage Acuña and his friends were frequent visitors to the company’s factory and warehouse space for reasons obvious to skateboarders, but which are unable to be logically articulated to the wider world. Every time Acuña showed up, he said, the employee — whose brother owned World Industries — “would yell to everybody: ‘Hey, everybody, Wee Man’s here! Wee Man’s here!’” Acuña says he always loved the nickname. His family embraced it, too. George Acuña does home inspections, and sometimes when he completes a job, he’ll tell the prospective Arizona homeowner the house “was just inspected by Wee Man’s dad.” So shocked is the average person to receive this honor that George must pull up personal photos on his phone to prove he really does know his son.There is a comment on a 10-minute YouTube video titled “Best jackass compilation – PART 2 😜😜😜👍🏆” that poignantly elucidates the je ne sais quoi of “Jackass,” and that has been rewarded with more than 1,000 likes: “Really good friends getting paid to do the stuff you and your friends talk about doing while drunk. These guys deserved every dime they got. They don’t make things like this anymore.” They do still make things like this, of course: The fourth “Jackass” movie, for instance. But it is also true that the fourth film, while thematically identical to all “Jackass” that preceded it, is eons from the franchise’s early days in its production budget, filming conditions and cast demography.Initially, for the TV show, cast members were paid per segment. Acuña recalled the amount was in the arena of $500 to $700; Jeff Tremaine, a creator of “Jackass,” who has directed the franchise since the beginning, said he was pretty sure it was under $1,000, unless the stunt “was something life-threatening.” By the third season, Acuña said, “we knew we were pretty popular. We were hearing, like, Shaq was having ‘Jackass’ parties at his house.” A push for higher pay, and the freedom to execute ideas that were deemed too expensive or outrageous for television, resulted in “Jackass: The Movie.” Acuña’s first salary payment from the first film amounted to a figure he cited as “above $20,000, under $100,000” — enough, he said, that when he received the check, he was like: “Oh, my God. I’m OK now.” Earning a living as a professional haver of skateboard-adjacent fun was no longer a precarious dream.Jason Acuña in Newport Beach, Calif.Chris Buck for The New York TimesThe fourth film will be the first “Jackass” without two important onscreen presences: the valiantly jolly Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash in 2011 — his bearded face is tattooed on Acuña’s calf in tribute — and Bam Margera, whom Paramount fired in August 2020. The studio claimed that Margera, who has struggled with addiction, was dismissed for breach of contract after he stopped complying with a sobriety-and-wellness program mandated in his employment agreement. Margera disputed this and filed a lawsuit claiming wrongful termination. The saga has been messy both in and out of court. In videos on his Instagram page and TMZ, Margera denounced his former co-workers and encouraged fans to boycott the movie.“Bam, just — he needs to take care of his health,” Acuña told me. “We’ve all tried for him.” We were sitting on a public bench, watching a sea lion surface and submerge in Newport Bay. A man had just asked Acuña to sign one of the $2 bills he carries around with him, for his celebrity-signed $2 bill collection. “He’s doing good from the last I’ve heard. Because he’s not on social media. He’s not doing anything crazy,” he said. “When he was on the phone more, and on social media, it wasn’t good for him.”The societal terrain over which “Jackass” gleefully rides roughshod has likewise been radically transformed in the 10 years since the last movie. The franchise has long outlived most contemporaries. Only a handful of the cultural phenomena that debuted at the same intersection of two centuries as “Jackass” still survive: “Survivor” is one, actually. “Law & Order: SVU.” “Rick Steves’ Europe.”The delights of “Jackass” have long derived from carte-blanche obnoxiousness — the enthusiastic ruination of a miniature-golf course, or a toilet in a hardware store, or a parent’s slumber, or a friend’s haircut, with no consequences. But while physical comedy is ageless, the context in which it occurs can make it fall rapidly out of fashion. It was never, for instance, socially acceptable to sneak up behind unsuspecting Japanese people and startle them by banging a tremendous gong — but it’s difficult to imagine this segment from the first movie being greenlit, or even pitched, 20 years later, for the fourth. The audience’s tolerance for Americans amusing themselves in this way has considerably diminished.But two qualities intrinsic to “Jackass” have facilitated its dependable profitability across two decades. First, it embraces the lighthearted, preposterous violence American audiences have enjoyed since the earliest “Looney Tunes” shorts; a trompe l’oeil bicycle-path gag in the new “Jackass” replicates nearly exactly a gag from Wile E. Coyote. But what keeps the brutality on “Jackass” from feeling sadistic is its emphasis on whole-group participation. Every member is both Coyote and Road Runner. Scenes of terror invariably end with good-natured laughter all around. The temporary nature of the suffering makes “Jackass” bearable. Consent makes it fun.“Jackass: The Movie” (2002).Paramount/Getty Images“Jackass Forever” (2022).Paramount PicturesIn December 2019, in anticipation of a fourth movie, the “Jackass” team began filming test shoots with potential new cast members to “see if they would fit with the group,” Acuña said. One of the primary concerns, he said, was that the advanced ages of what Paramount has branded the “legacy cast” — in their early 20s and 30s when the show premiered — would “have an effect” on their willingness and ability to pull off the signature stunts. One of the most jarring visual elements of the film is that Johnny Knoxville’s hair toggles between a fetching silver (now, according to Knoxville, its natural color) and an improbable jet-black dye job between scenes. Cast additions altered the appearance of “Jackass” in another, even more obvious way: Two of the five newcomers — Davon Wilson and Eric Manaka — are the first Black performers featured in the primary cast. Another, Rachel Wolfson, is the first woman.Testing out new members “was weird,” Acuña said from behind the wheel of his Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, a vast white luxury camper van, the tall clearance of which prevents Acuña from taking it through some drive-throughs. “At first,” he said, “the original of us were like, ‘We don’t need anybody else.’” He still feels this way to some degree but acknowledges that the world has changed. “Gender stuff and, you know, things like that.” He doubts the show as it existed in 2000 could debut now on television. “When we first started, there was never going to be a girl in it,” he said. “We didn’t think it was funny for girls to get hurt. For us, it was like, ‘That’s not funny’ — hurting a girl.” Now, paradoxically, it would be in poor taste to not hurt a girl on “Jackass” — and so they do.Acuña skates early in the morning; sometimes after dark. Otherwise, he is hindered by all manner of questions and requests. (In the hours I spent with him, fans initiated interactions about a dozen times.) He appreciates the easy community of skateboarding. When he goes somewhere new, he pinpoints a local skate shop. At that store he will, inevitably, meet a person planning to skate at another location, if he’d like to come along — at which place he will meet more people planning to skate somewhere else, and so on forever.‘You could travel around the world and still not leave Costa Mesa!’Acuña enjoys being a cog in the perpetual motion machine of skateboard society because he is implacably antsy. He gets anxious, he said, if he does not launch himself into an activity after waking. The occasions when he must rest to recover from injuries (from skateboarding — or “Jackass”) torment him. To Acuña, waking hours constitute the period in which he must tire himself out before bedtime. He careers through the day like Animal the Muppet through a Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem drum solo.Acuña’s mission to burn off his energy is expedited by extreme organization. (“He is 1,000 times neater than the average person walking the earth,” says Preston Lacy, a “Jackass” co-star whose size discrepancy with Acuña is frequently employed to comedic effect.) Determined that I not experience one nanosecond of boredom during our time together, he mapped out complete days of activities for us and chauffeured me to most of them in his Sprinter. Most of the things I did in 2021 were accomplished in a three-day stretch with Jason Acuña. Engagements included: learning to skateboard; going to Starbucks, where he requested they make me a hot chocolate “with a little pizazz,” and they did; going to the beach; having lunch and making sure the music wasn’t too loud for customers at a branch of his restaurant, Chronic Tacos; embarking on a driving tour of his town that he loves, Costa Mesa (“You could travel around the world and still not leave Costa Mesa!”); one disgusting hour of hot yoga where the perfectly balanced Acuña flowed through poses like mercury in a maze; driving an hour to the Dogtown Skateboards warehouse to talk about skateboard colors; buying tacos for the Dogtown employees; driving back to Costa Mesa for “a fabulous doughnut”; looking at a Ferris wheel; taking a kickboxing class, during which Acuña executed burpees and star jumps at double the rate I could; visiting the workshop of the skateboard designer Paul Schmitt, who is known as the Professor and under whose supervision Acuña, standing on a bucket, cut out a new prototype for his upcoming special-edition deck; helping two strangers locate a table at In-N-Out; dropping off a sock donation at Two Felons skate shop, where Acuña exclaimed, “Oh, daaaaaaang!” after one of the proprietors demonstrated the zoom capability of his phone camera; and, of course, snapping dozens of pictures of various vanity plates we encountered.Taking pictures of vanity plates is one of Acuña’s joys in life. “I got it!” said Acuña, glancing at his phone screen after spotting a “GRINDER7” plate while driving. “Pretty pro at this,” he explained, and added, giggling: “This is what I do for a living! I drive around collecting private plates.”“I nailed it,” he said, after snapping a photo of a plate that read “BWAYNE.” “Nailed it!” he said, photographing a plate he guessed read either “Flippin’ John” or “Filipino John.” “Nice!” he said, appreciating a plate that read “MOMONLY.” “IMNUTS2!” he said, reading a plate that said, “IMNUTS2.”“Jackass” fans take a selfie with Acuña in Newport Beach, Calif.Chris Buck for The New York TimesOn one of our drives around Orange County, Acuña spotted a rare natural wonder of the California roadway. “Oh!” he gasped as he approached a stoplight. “We’re going” — his voice dropped to an awed whisper — “side by side to another Sprinter!” Acuña peered, beaming, into the window of the gunmetal van alongside us.In his Sprinter, Acuña uses detachable pedal extenders to operate the gas and brakes. It’s estimated that 90 percent of children with achondroplasia in Italy, his birth country, take surgical means to acquire extra height. The method is arduous: a yearslong series of procedures in which children’s bones are systematically broken, and then pulled apart, typically at a rate of one millimeter per day, for several months. The process is controversial and unpopular in the United States. Acuña’s mother learned of the technique when he was a child, he said, and because their relationship was “very open,” shared the information with him. He thought it sounded “torturous.” Not to mention all that downtime.The most scared Acuña remembers ever being was in 2005, when he spiral fractured his right femur while skateboarding. “My whole life just flew right in front of me,” he said. He didn’t have time to foresee his death as he was plummeting through the air — the fall wasn’t that high. But lying at the bottom of the ramp with his foot facing the wrong direction, Acuña became “very panicked.” Terror-stricken. Brief, far-spaced work commitments on “Jackass” were what afforded him the freedom to spend most of his life doing whatever he wanted, i.e., skateboarding et cetera — exactly this. He was due to begin shooting the second “Jackass” movie in three months. If he got hurt while having fun, he couldn’t get paid to get hurt for work. “I was like, ‘I just royally effed this up,’” he said.Doctors put a titanium rod in his leg, and Acuña threw himself into physical therapy. He was on set in time. And on time. He’s the most on-time person people who meet him will ever meet.Easing the Sprinter down a picturesque residential street, Acuña told me that skateboarders “very literally” see the world differently. He was hunting for a parking spot but also, in the back of his mind, deconstructing the block into an arrangement of angles, curves and curbs. “That’s not just a set of stairs, to walk up into the house to me,” he said, indicating paved steps. “That’s where I can go up and down on my skateboard.”“I always do it,” he said.Analyzing his environment for reservoirs of fun is second nature to Acuña, who, seeking a good time, always finds it. Anywhere he goes, people are happy to see him. He can go to Italy whenever he wants, and he can travel the world without leaving Costa Mesa. He loves being Wee Man.I asked what his job would have been if he hadn’t managed to make a career out of “Jackass.” He stopped what he was doing — which was whistling — and thought for a few seconds. “I think I would have just been a guy that grew old and worked at a skate shop,” he said. His tone suggested this was an almost equally desirable outcome. It’s sort of already what he does, for no pay. He threw back his head and boomed in an old-timey prospector voice: “ ‘Wee Man,’ they called him!”Caity Weaver is a writer at large for the magazine and a writer for The New York Times’s Styles section. She last wrote about Cher and “Moonstruck” for the magazine. Chris Buck is a photographer known for his distinctive portraits. His sittings include Jay-Z, four presidents and Grumpy Cat. He last photographed Seth Rogen for the magazine’s cover. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Promised Land’ and a Janet Jackson Special

    ABC debuts a new drama about a wine-country power struggle. And a four-part documentary about Janet Jackson debuts on Lifetime and A&E.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 24-30. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMARCH 8 p.m. on CW. This new, eight-part docuseries takes a close look at the prestigious marching band at Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black university in Texas. Some of the more than 300 band members share the sacrifices they make to be a part of the group — which, in 2021, was ranked eighth among all H.B.C.U. Division I bands by the ESPN publication The Undefeated — while balancing a busy college life.PROMISED LAND 10 p.m. on ABC. A wildly successful, family-run wine business is at the center of this new drama series, which is set in California’s Sonoma Valley region. Here, familiar power-struggle themes are paired with an exploration of immigrant experiences. The family that controls the vineyard is led by a self-made patriarch (played by John Ortiz) who has achieved an archetypal American dream. The show also follows a group of new immigrants who, in Monday night’s episode, cross into the United States from Mexico in search of their own version of that dream.TuesdayWAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) 6 p.m. on TCM. Looking for a suspenseful heart racer that might make you gasp or shriek? Audrey Hepburn earned her fifth and final best-actress Oscar nomination for her performance in this edge-of-your-seat classic, in which she plays a woman who, after being blinded in a car accident, takes possession of a doll that’s stuffed with heroin. A group of clever gangsters (played by Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna and Jack Weston) go through horrifying lengths to get it. “The tension is terrific and the melodramatic action is wild,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his 1967 review for The New York Times.WednesdayI CAN SEE YOUR VOICE 8 p.m. on Fox. Can you tell if someone can sing without ever hearing a single note? This music guessing game puts that deceptively complex question to the test. One contestant must tell the difference between good and bad singers using a lip-sync challenge, a series of questions and other unorthodox methods. Whichever singer the contestant picks reveals their vocal abilities in a duet performance with the episode’s special musical guest, which could result in either an epic collaboration or a laughable catastrophe. The comedian Ken Jeong hosts, and the actress Cheryl Hines and the TV personality Adrienne Bailon-Houghton serve as the show’s permanent “celebrity detectives.”ThursdayAna de Armas and Daniel Craig in “Knives Out.”Claire Folger/LionsgateKNIVES OUT (2019) 7 p.m. on Syfy. After directing “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the filmmaker Rian Johnson wrote and directed this thrilling, star-studded whodunit. The mysterious death of an acclaimed novelist, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) at a sprawling estate leads a master detective (Daniel Craig) to investigate the members of the novelist’s flawed family. “‘Knives Out’ is essentially an energetic, showy take on a dusty Agatha Christie-style murder mystery with interrogations, possible motives and dubious alibis,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. In addition to Craig, the ensemble cast includes Ana de Armas, Chris Evans and Jamie Lee Curtis.GROWN-ISH 10 p.m. on Freeform. In this coming-of-age comedy spinoff of the ABC hit “black-ish,” Zoey Johnson (Yara Shahidi) and her friends come back to their fictional California university as upperclassmen. Expect a fresh take on the hardships that come with entering adulthood — student loans, work-life balance, bad breakups and the rest — during the current fourth season. This show was created by Kenya Barris (who created “black-ish”) and the comedian Larry Wilmore.FridayJanet Jackson in the new documentary “Janet Jackson.”LifetimeJANET JACKSON: PART 1 & PART 2 8 p.m. on Lifetime and A&E.The life and legacy of the powerhouse performer Janet Jackson is the subject of this new two-night, four-hour documentary special. Expect an intimate look at Jackson’s more than 40-year career, told through newly surfaced footage, home videos and interviews with Jackson’s friends and collaborators, among them Mariah Carey, Paula Abdul and Missy Elliott. The documentary’s creative team presumably had plenty of access: Jackson herself is one of its producers, alongside her brother Randy Jackson, who was a member of the Jacksons. “This is my story told by me,” Janet Jackson says in a trailer, “not through someone else’s eyes.” The first two parts will air simultaneously on both networks on Friday night; the second half will follow on Saturday night.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More