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      ‘Benedetta’ Review: Habit Storming

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      Paul Verhoeven takes us to a nunnery where faith, eroticism and the Black Death make for an unholy good time.Close watchers of Paul Verhoeven’s career might conclude that he was always headed toward “Benedetta,” a movie torn equally between the sacred and the profane. Mania, masochism and a sex toy whittled from a figurine of the Blessed Virgin, they’re all here and more in this tale of a randy nun whose religious visions and lustful cravings are rolled into a single ball of blasphemy. In other words, Verhoeven might have aged (he’s now 83), but his love of the lurid has dimmed not one bit.Nor has his eye for juicy material. Ducking for cover behind the familiar legend, “Inspired by real events” (documented in Judith C. Brown’s 1986 book “Immodest Acts”), the maestro who brought us “Basic Instinct” (1992) and “Showgirls” (1995) plunges us into 17th-century Italy where piety and pestilence are duking it out. Inside the walls of one Tuscan convent, though, all is serene — at least until a statue of the Virgin topples on top of a child novice named Benedetta (Elena Plonka). Immediately, the miraculously unharmed youngster latches on to Our Lady’s bared plaster breast: To Benedetta, earthly and spiritual ecstasy are one and the same.By the time she’s 18, Benedetta (now played by the gorgeous Virginie Efira) is experiencing erotic visions of a naked Jesus, as sexless as a Ken doll, instructing her to remove her clothing. Her suddenly flowering stigmata and belief that she has a hotline to the Almighty have alienated her fellow nuns, especially when she ousts the convent’s calculating Abbess (a sly Charlotte Rampling) by promising to pray the plague away from the terrified townsfolk. So when Benedetta’s dalliance with a fiery novitiate (Daphne Patakia) — who has been given sanctuary from her rapey father and brothers — is discovered, the Church’s response is conflicted. After all, there’s money in miracles.Unable to decide if its namesake is saint or sinner, genuine mystic or false prophet, “Benedetta” is too ambivalent to find focus or resolution. Still, Verhoeven brings more vitality to his work than many filmmakers half his age, and his screenplay (with David Birke) is a tasteless hoot, gleefully cramming the frame with blood, fornication and flagellations galore. Without philosophizing over religious repression — or who gets to adjudicate Divine intent — the movie presents lesbianism as a middle finger to Church power, insisting that bodily pleasures don’t have to be bad for the soul. Should this be Verhoeven’s swan song, that’s a perfectly fine sign-off.BenedettaNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Listening to Kenny G’ Review: Good Sax?

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      Penny Lane’s documentary about the superstar sax player Kenny G shows an artist who can be defensive and self-satisfied almost simultaneously.Despite holding the Guinness World Record for best-selling jazz artist, the saxophonist Kenneth Gorelick, who goes by the stage name Kenny G, may be better known as a punchline than as a musician. “I get it,” he tells the documentarian Penny Lane in Lane’s new film, “Listening to Kenny G.”The movie’s animating question is why a musician who has brought an abundance of pleasure to so many listeners makes so many others almost incoherently angry. Some interviewees, including Kenny G himself, imply that judgments against his work are de facto judgments of the people who love it. That’s a specious conclusion, one which the movie could have unpacked better.But “Listening” is very good at doing other things. As a music industry story, Kenny G’s rise, engineered by the mogul Clive Davis but at times bucked by the artist himself, is fascinating. The analysis of the link between what makes Kenny G a star and what makes him annoying is spot-on — particularly in its treatment of his relationship to jazz. Celebrated artists in that genre like John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk weren’t merely inspired players; they were bandleaders whose musical conceptions stressed instrumental interplay. With Kenny G, his sax is the thing.The sax man’s song “Going Home” is supernaturally popular in China, where it has been adopted as a closing-time anthem. In the documentary, the critic Ben Ratliff, noting this, wryly wonders whether Kenny G’s music is “a weapon of consent.” The movie also gives a funny account of the composer-guitarist Pat Metheny’s enraged accusations of “musical necrophilia” after Kenny G essayed a virtual duet with Louis Armstrong.The saxophonist, often displaying that mix of self-satisfaction and defensiveness which marks artists who’ve received fame and derision in equal measure, remains undaunted. His next album, he announces, will feature another virtual duet, this time with a jazz giant who was distinctively divisive in his own time, Stan Getz.Listening to Kenny GNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      ‘14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible’ Review: Climbing at a Breakneck Pace

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      A documentary follows the Nepalese mountaineer Nirmal Pirja as he tries to add cultural depth to the sport’s highs.As the mountaineering genre continues its ascent into the mainstream, there’s a thesis awaiting a graduate student about male climbers and their mothers, wives or partners. Touched on in the Oscar winner “Free Solo” and summer’s “The Alpinist,” those relationships get screen time in “14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible,” about the Nepalese climber Nirmal Purja, known as Nimsdai, and his attempt to summit the world’s 14 highest peaks in seven months. (The previous record was seven years.) While his wife, Suchi Purja, charmingly attempts to explain her husband’s embrace of risk to civilians, it’s his ailing mother who underscores more tender lessons about her son’s drive but also about the mortality we all face.As a young man, Purja enlisted in his country’s legendary armed forces, the Gurkhas, and later joined the United Kingdom Special Forces. He seized on the climbing endeavor, which he called “Project Possible,” as a way to highlight the contributions of Nepalese mountaineers, who are more than the Sherpas to Western expeditions. Early on, the project’s four other climbers — Mingma David Sherpa, Geljen Sherpa, Lakpa Dendi Sherpa and Gesman Tamang — get introduced as vital characters. They are as devoted to Purja’s seemingly mad mission as he is.Much of the documentary’s climbing footage was taken by Purja and his team. The director Torquil Jones uses those images, as well as fresh interviews (the alpine legend Reinhold Messner waxing beautifully existential) and some vivid animation to craft a documentary exploring themes of generosity, danger, drive and national character.In widening its aperture — from the ascents to visits to Purja’s childhood home as well as brief dives into Nepal’s history — “14 Peaks” expands a genre often focused on the feats of individuals to celebrate lessons about vast dreams and communal bonds.14 Peaks: Nothing Is ImpossibleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The 10 Best Podcasts of 2021

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      Shows about Chippendales, a notorious Hollywood bomb, the search for the perfect pasta shape and the immediate aftermath of 9/11 are among those worthy of your attention.It would be impossible for anyone to listen to each of the hundreds of thousands of podcasts that published new episodes in 2021, let alone rank them. But even within that distressingly bountiful landscape, these shows — personal and ambitious, argumentative and entertaining — were worth a detour.‘9/12’It’s not easy to find something new to say about Sept. 11, which is what makes this provocative and creatively reported series from Dan Taberski (“Missing Richard Simmons,” “Running from Cops”) such a striking listening experience. The show begins with a crew of reality-show contestants who set sail on a six-week, 18th century-themed voyage in August 2001. The sailors’ relative inability to engage with the wider world initially prevented them from forming hard impressions of the attacks, a state of innocence that Taberski sets out to recreate. Backed by a stunning score from the jazz composer Daniel Herskedal, “9/12” uses little-memorialized stories from the “War on Terror” years (a Pakistani grocery store owner in Brooklyn who advocates for his detained and desperate neighbors; the staff of The Onion versus a climate of anti-humor) to challenge conventional wisdom about what it all meant. (Listen to “9/12” from Pineapple Street Studios/Amazon Music/Wondery.)‘Forever Is a Long Time’Ian Coss’s five-part meditation on the improbability of lifelong commitment couldn’t have been more personal. Motivated by lingering doubts about the durability of his own marriage, he interviewed divorced members of his family and their former spouses about why theirs fell apart. Each episode tells a different love story from beginning to end, with Coss gathering evidence like a single-minded detective. The details he uncovers — and, at the end of each episode, sets to music in an original song inspired by the couple — quietly reflect the irreducible mysteries of human intimacy. (Listen to “Forever Is a Long Time” by Ian Coss.)‘La Brega’Loosely translated as “the hustle” or “the struggle,” the concept of “la brega” is a point of common heritage and a point of departure in this expansive story collection and love letter to Puerto Rico. Produced in English and Spanish by a collective of Puerto Rican journalists and hosted by Alana Casanova-Burgess, each episode of “La Brega” creates a transporting sense of place. Rich and under-examined American histories abound in its stories of pothole fillers, political activists and basketball heroes who navigate their own versions of the struggle, many of which trace back to the very idea of a self-governing territory in the United States. (Listen to “La Brega” from WNYC Studios/Futuro Studios.)‘The Midnight Miracle’Sound-rich, unpredictable and borderline hypnotic, this star-studded conversation show from Dave Chappelle, Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli is much more than a celebrity podcast. The three hosts, longtime friends and collaborators, are joined by a revolving cast of funny and thoughtful guests (David Letterman, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart) who wax extemporaneously about subjects falling generally under the banners of art, philosophy and politics. Inventive sound design — voices and scoring seamlessly enter and exit the central conversation — makes it feel like the world’s most interesting dinner party. (Listen to “The Midnight Miracle” from Luminary/Pilot Boy Productions/Salt Audio.)‘One Year: 1977’Produced and hosted by Josh Levin, a former host of “Slow Burn,” “One Year” takes that show’s forensic historical lens and zooms both in and out, attempting to capture a year of life in America by focusing on its distinctive icons, manias and controversies. As with all good history, its most haunting episodes — including one focusing on a quack treatment for cancer that became a deadly phenomenon among celebrities and science skeptics — resonate uncannily with the present. (Listen to “One Year: 1977” from Slate.)‘The Plot Thickens: The Devil’s Candy’Julie Salamon unearthed a trove of half-forgotten tape recordings to make this podcast adaptation of “The Devil’s Candy,” her classic book on Hollywood filmmaking. That book, first published in 1991, showed readers the doomed production of Brian De Palma’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities”; the podcast puts listeners in the middle of it. On-set interviews with De Palma, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith and a small army of assistants and crafts people resurrect a quixotic effort to mingle high art and dizzying commerce. (Listen to “The Plot Thickens: The Devil’s Candy” from TCM/Campside Media.)‘Resistance’Born in the aftermath of the global Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, “Resistance” is more interested in revolutions of a much smaller scale. The host, Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr., and the producer-reporters Salifu Sesay Mack, Bethel Habte and Aaron Randle find hard-to-shake stories in the circumstances that push individuals off the tram lines of their day-to-day existence. Lesser-known miscarriages of justice are made personal and palpable, as in one episode about a woman fighting to free her incarcerated partner and co-parent, and another about the plunder of an early 20th century oasis for the Black bathers of Manhattan Beach. (Listen to “Resistance” from Gimlet.)‘Rough Translation: Home/Front’The latest season of “Rough Translation,” Gregory Warner’s podcast about the ways cultural conflicts abroad mirror and reframe our own, focused exclusively on an American schism — the “Civ-Mil divide” between civilians and the members of the military who fight on their behalf. Quil Lawrence, NPR’s longtime veterans correspondent, shows how this binary obscures fundamentally human acts of compassion and sacrifice on both sides. His patient eye and ear capture a cast of unforgettable characters, including Alicia and Matt Lammers, whose civ-mil marriage buckles under the weight of compounding trauma, and Marla Ruzicka, an irrepressible aid worker who changed the way the Pentagon handles civilian casualties. (Listen to “Rough Translation: Home/Front” from NPR.)‘The Sporkful: Mission Impastable’Dan Pashman, a longtime food critic and the host of “The Sporkful,” spent much of his career dreaming of something most people wouldn’t think to imagine: the perfect pasta shape. His three-year quest to not only design that shape (he doesn’t think it exists, and he might convince you) but also get it manufactured unfolds like the overachieving love child of earlier audio capers from “Radiolab,” “StartUp” and “Planet Money.” The emotional roller coaster Pashman endures will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to make a hit — edible or otherwise. (Listen to “The Sporkful: Mission Impastable” from Stitcher.)‘Welcome to Your Fantasy’Natalia Petrzela’s sweeping account of the rise and fall of Chippendales — the traveling male strip show that became a global phenomenon in the Spandex-clad ’80s — manages to transcend its noisy keywords: sex, true crime, hidden history. Those things are served, of course, in good measure. But what distinguishes the show is its evocative mood, characters and story. And what a story it is. The stranger-than-fiction odyssey of the troupe’s founder, Steve Banerjee — from immigrant small business owner to green-eyed sex-industry titan to murderous racketeer — is a true American classic. (Listen to “Welcome to Your Fantasy” from Pineapple Street Studios/Gimlet.) More

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      Alec Baldwin Says He ‘Didn’t Pull the Trigger’ in ‘Rust’ Killing

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      The actor said in a brief excerpt from an upcoming interview with ABC News that he had not pulled the trigger when the gun he was holding went off, killing the cinematographer.The actor Alec Baldwin said in an upcoming television interview that he did not pull the trigger of the gun he was practicing with on the set of the film “Rust,” which fired a live round as he held it, killing the film’s cinematographer and wounding its director.“I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them — never,” Mr. Baldwin told George Stephanopoulos in an ABC News interview that is scheduled to be broadcast Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern. The network posted brief excerpts from the interview Wednesday as a preview.The exchange came after Mr. Stephanopoulos noted that it had not been part of the script for the trigger to be pulled in that scene. Mr. Baldwin jumped in: “Well, the trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger.”He did not elaborate on why the gun might have gone off in the excerpt ABC provided.Mr. Baldwin’s account adds another layer of mystery onto the fatal shooting, which took place on Oct. 21 on a set of a church near Santa Fe, N.M. Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver that he had been told contained no live rounds when it suddenly fired, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, and wounding its director, Joel Souza, 48.It still remains unclear how a lethal bullet got into the gun that he was practicing with, and why the crew members who handled it before passing it to Mr. Baldwin failed to detect that it contained a live round when it was supposed to have only dummies.In the clip of the interview, Mr. Baldwin said he does not know why a real bullet — which was not even supposed to be on the property — was loaded into the gun. Investigators are trying to determine whether the supplier of blanks and dummy rounds for the movie, Seth Kenney, sent live ammunition as well, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.There have been some suggestions that there may have been a problem with the gun. The armorer for “Rust,” Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, told a detective that she had loaded it with five dummy rounds before lunch, but that “there was one round that wouldn’t go in,” so she cleaned it out after lunch and added a sixth round, according to an affidavit filed Tuesday.In the ABC interview, Mr. Baldwin grew visibly emotional as he spoke about Ms. Hutchins, saying “she was someone who was loved by everyone who worked” with her.“I think back and I think of what could I have done?” Mr. Baldwin said.This is the first time that Mr. Baldwin has given his full account of what happened to the public. Last month, two crew members who were in the room when the gun went off filed separate lawsuits, naming Mr. Baldwin, the film’s producers and other crew members as defendants. Both lawsuits alleged that Mr. Baldwin should have checked the gun himself to see if it was safe to handle. More

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      Mel Brooks Keeps It Very Light in ‘All About Me!’

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      Mel Brooks has been responsible for so much in the American comedic canon, for so long, it sometimes seems he is, if not 2,000 years old like one of his most indelible characters, maybe 200. He’s actually 95. A baby! (Another one of his indelible characters, from “Free to Be…You and Me.”)Your favorite Brooks work might be “The Producers,” which — in a feat of dizzying creative refraction and exponential profit — he made first as a movie about a musical in 1967, then as a musical based on that movie in 2001, and then as another movie based on the musical in 2005. Or you may prefer “Blazing Saddles,” a Western spoof; or “Young Frankenstein,” a horror spoof; or the self-explanatory “Silent Movie,” in which the only character to speak was Marcel Marceau, the famous mime. Personally I most adore “High Anxiety,” an Alfred Hitchcock spoof; and reading Brooks’s new memoir, the product of an extrovert who must have found lockdown torturous, only amplified that affection.When invited to a lunch of roast beef with Yorkshire pudding by Hitchcock, one of his idols, to discuss the film project, Brooks replied, “Yes, sir, I’ll be there with bells on.” Then he showed up with some jangling around his ankles — the kind of broad comic gesture that by then, in midcareer, was his calling card in both art and life. Given the Master of Suspense’s blessing, Brooks went on to re-enact the shower scene from “Psycho,” with newsprint pouring rather presciently down the drain in lieu of blood; and broke character as a nervous psychiatrist to sing his movie’s title song in the manner of Frank Sinatra. But it was his exaggerated enactment of that shrink’s fear of heights, à la Scottie Ferguson in “Vertigo,” that feels most resonant and telling.Brooks himself reads as the opposite of acrophobic: scaling the icy pinnacles of Hollywood without anything more than a pang of self-doubt, using humor as his alpenstock. Fear of heights is closely related to fear of falling; falling (not failing) was a measure of achievement for Brooks and his cohort. Before it was an acronym, they embodied ROFL, forever collapsing to the ground in mirth.The youngest of Kate Kaminsky’s four sons, Melvin grew up poor in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was coddled and adored, especially after his father died of tuberculosis. “I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again,” he writes. “Until I was 5, I don’t remember my feet touching the ground.” Despite the “brush stroke of depression” that resulted from losing a parent, he appears to glide right over life’s inevitable vicissitudes. When something goes wrong, he wonders “what to do, what to do?” — and then solves the problem. If it goes really wrong? “I’ll spare you the details.”Mel BrooksBrooks started as a drummer, and percussiveness, driving toward the “rim shot,” would become another comedic signature. Enlisted in the Army during World War II, he grabbed a cuff of Bob Hope’s trousers to get an autograph and parodied Cole Porter in a Special Services show at Fort Dix. (“When we begin to clean the latrine….”) After discharge he started writing for Sid Caesar’s variety shows, where the brotherly atmosphere of his youth was reenacted with staff that included Neil “Doc” Simon and Woody Allen. The troubled, intense Caesar once dangled Brooks outside a hotel window in Chicago. “I was very calm,” Brooks writes.In his epic “History of the World, Part I” (Hulu just ordered Part II), he plays Torquemada, a fearsome leader of the Spanish Inquisition, darting down a spiral stone staircase — like “Vertigo” in reverse — and bursting into a song-and-dance number with full chorus. Later in the sketch, nuns strip to bathing suits, synchronize-swim with the devout Jews they’re trying to convert and then rise up — Happy Hanukkah! — balancing on the prongs of a giant menorah, sparklers on their heads. If Porter, another idol, wrote “you’re the top / you’re the Colosseum,” Brooks went over the top and smashed the pillars.Hitler is the villain the author most daringly appropriated, from the work-within-a-work of “The Producers” to the disguise in “To Be or Not to Be,” a remake of the Ernst Lubitsch film, in which Brooks starred with his second wife, Anne Bancroft. This still offends some people. “Blazing Saddles” does, too. Brooks, who gave the now-controversial comedian Dave Chappelle an early break, casting him in “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” does not concern himself in these pages with changing norms in the industry that has rewarded him so handsomely. Perhaps named for “All About Eve” but less of a bumpy night than a joy ride, “All About Me!” takes humor as an absolute value, something that “brings religious persecutors, dictators and tyrants to their knees faster than any other weapon,” something that can win over a classy lady like Bancroft. Its 460 pages rattle along like an extended one-liner.Humor can also, of course, be a defensive scrim for difficult emotions. Brooks doesn’t name his first wife, Florence Baum, though their marriage lasted nine years and produced three children; he and Bancroft, who died in 2005, had a fourth. He would prefer to kvell over the talents of his frequent collaborators Madeline Kahn, Gene Wilder and Carl Reiner, than linger on, or even mention, their departures from this crazy world. As the old song goes, he accentuates the positive. “Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye,” he writes. And there’s probably already a prank planned for his own inevitable ascent to heaven. More

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      How Did Live Ammunition Get on the 'Rust' Film Set?

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      Investigators are trying to determine whether a supplier who was supposed to provide the movie with blanks and dummies may have sent live rounds.ALBUQUERQUE — Detectives investigating the deadly shooting on the set of the film “Rust” are trying to determine whether Seth Kenney, who was supposed to provide the production with blanks and dummy rounds, may have sent live ammunition as well, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.The focus on Mr. Kenney came to light in a warrant issued to search his business in Albuquerque, called PDQ Arm & Prop. Investigators sought the search warrant after crew members told them that ammunition for “Rust” came from various sources, including Mr. Kenney, who has also done business out of Arizona and California.The fatal shooting took place on Oct. 21, when the actor Alec Baldwin was practicing drawing a gun he had been told contained no live rounds, when it went off, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, and wounding its director, Joel Souza, 48.Immediately after the shooting the film’s prop master, Sarah Zachry, inspected the box of ammunition on a props cart on the set and discovered that some cartridges “did not rattle,” according to an affidavit for the search warrant filed Tuesday in Bernalillo County.Dummy rounds are often distinguished from live rounds by replacing the powder inside with a ball bearing, giving the round a distinctive rattle when shaken.The fact that the cartridges did not rattle suggested there were other live rounds on set, Ms. Zachry told a detective, according to the court document.“Sarah said this led her to believe some of the other rounds in that box were live ammo,” according to the affidavit, which was signed by Detective Alexandria Hancock of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office.The affidavit details efforts by investigators to trace the source of all the ammunition used in the production.Ms. Zachry said the ammunition on the set had come from “various sources,” according to the affidavit, including from Mr. Kenney; Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the film’s armorer, who was said to have brought some from a previous production; and from someone identified only as “Billy Ray.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed told investigators that the guns and ammunition used on the “Rust” set had been supplied by Mr. Kenney, according to the affidavit.On Oct. 27, as the police executed a search warrant on the set, Mr. Kenney told investigators that he had provided the production with dummy rounds and blanks that came from a company called Starline Brass, the affidavit said. Two days later, it said, Mr. Kenney called back to say “he may know where the live rounds came from.”In that call, Mr. Kenney told the police that a couple of years ago he had received “reloaded ammunition” from a friend, the affidavit said. “Reloaded ammunition” can refer to ammunition that has been reconstituted from the brass casing of a fired round by adding a new bullet, primer and powder, according to Clay Van Sickle, a movie industry armorer.Mr. Kenney declined to comment in response to a phone call.Mr. Kenney told investigators that in this case, he believed the ammunition had been reloaded because the cartridge of a live round had the Starline Brass logo on it, and Starline Brass “only sells components of ammunition, and not live ammunition, and therefore it had to be a reloaded round.”Starline, which is based in Sedalia, Mo., did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Another lead on where the live round might have originated came from Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s father, Thell Reed, a weapons expert who has worked and consulted on a number of films.The detective said that she received a statement from Mr. Reed in mid-November saying that he had worked with Mr. Kenney on another set in August or September where the actors were trained “for live fire with firearms, conducted on a firearms range,” and that Mr. Kenney had asked him to bring extra live ammunition in case they ran out.“Thell stated he did bring an ‘ammo can’ with live ammunition from a friend,” the affidavit said, “and this ammunition was not factory made rounds.” Mr. Reed said that the can had contained “approximately 200-300 rounds,” the document said.Mr. Reed told the police that when the production was over, Mr. Kenney had taken the remainder of the ammunition that had been in the can back to New Mexico.“Thell stated this ammunition may match the ammunition found on the set of ‘Rust,’” the affidavit said.Suspected live ammunition was among the items taken during a search of the set the day after the shooting, and identified during processing by a crime scene technician, Marissa Poppell, according to the affidavit. More

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      Uzo Aduba Adjusts Her Mood With Playlists and ‘The Real Housewives’

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      The actress talks about sports, her latest film and return to the stage, and why a clean, white pair of Converse All Stars is the shoe for almost any occasion.Before she was scooping up Emmys for “Orange Is the New Black” and “Mrs. America,” Uzo Aduba was winning medals as a star sprinter at Boston University. So when the script arrived for “National Champions,” about a battle between the National Collegiate Athletic Association and student football players demanding fair compensation for their talents, Aduba was fast onboard.“I am myself an N.C.A.A. collegiate athlete and recipient of a scholarship and have known, sadly, many people who have been a part of the system and have benefited positively, of course, from the academic element — and who have also had longtime needs they’ve not been able to meet,” she said. “So I understood the complexity of the issue and the conversation.”In “National Champions,” Aduba plays Katherine, a fixer hired to use whatever means necessary to get LeMarcus James (Stephan James) — a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback who incites a players’ strike three days before the national championship — back in the game.But just as nobody is the villain in her own story, Aduba prefers to think of Katherine as a survivor tasked with a thankless job. The same could be said of her title role in the Broadway production of “Clyde’s,” about the ex-con proprietor of a truck-stop diner where all the cooks have done time.Some may call Clyde the devil, but “I think she is really a reflection of every obstacle and aggression that our society holds for women like her,” she said. “She is a direct reflection of the world.”Calling from her dressing room between performances, Aduba discussed her cultural necessities, like getting into character with a playlist, winding down to “The Real Housewives” and curling up in a cozy robe, no matter where she is. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Real Housewives” I watch all of them, let me start there. Asking me, “Do I have a favorite?” feels like asking me, quite frankly, if I have a favorite child. They all have different tasks, different stories, different energies. It honestly feels like Grecian-level drama, just so over the top. So big, their troubles. All the emotions are huge. They just announced they’re going to do a “Real Housewives of Dubai,” and, sight unseen, I’m in.2. Sunglasses I love the personality of them, and what you’re choosing both to see and let be seen. I have some that are totally a reflector or super dark and nobody can see my eyes, but I can see out. I have some that are super faint, and we both can see each other. I have some that are really fun with a design on the frame. They’re a subtle way of showing personality. But if I’m out and about, and somebody wants to stop and talk, I usually wind up putting them up on my head so that we can meet eye-to-eye — so that we’re talking to each other, not just like you’re talking to me.3. Live theater I feel like whether you’re onstage or in the audience, you are a part of the show. I think the audience is a huge character in the production who has their own role as well, whether we know it or not. The actors and the designers and everybody, especially when we’re in previews, are informing story based on the audience’s role. That’s that final critical piece. Here in “Clyde’s,” when we were in rehearsal, obviously we could hear the play. But we can’t really know the play until that final actor-character comes into the space. And that’s the part of the audience.4. The New York Times Basic Pesto recipe This was not a New York Times plug. [Laughs] I legit have the screenshot on my phone, and it is a legit household favorite. The only thing that I add to it is a meat because it doesn’t call for any meat in your recipe. So I’ll either add grilled chicken that I’ll cook on the stovetop or a grilled turkey sausage or a vegan sausage. Take your recipe and add meat.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More