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      ‘Cry Macho’ Review: The Good, the Bad and the Poultry

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      In his latest film, Clint Eastwood drives across Mexico with a troubled young man and a combative rooster.Mike Milo is a former rodeo rider and horse trainer — an ornery old cuss with a complicated past and a soft spot for children and animals. He’s a grouch but also a professional, with a deep knowledge of his craft and a flinty sense of honor. To put it in simpler terms, he’s played by Clint Eastwood.Eastwood also directed “Cry Macho,” in a stripped-down, laid-back style that perfectly suits Mike’s approach to life. Sometimes in Eastwood’s films — going all the way back to “Play Misty for Me” — there’s daylight separating filmmaker and star, a palpable, if often subtle difference of perspective between the laconic, narrow-eyed man onscreen and the sly, adventurous artist behind the camera. This time, maybe not so much. Which is just fine.Mike has a risky job to do but, but he approaches his duties with no particular urgency, preferring to drive slowly and take in the scenery. Eastwood, notionally committed to doing something in the angry-dad revenge-rescue genre, uses the plot (supplied by Nick Schenk and N. Richard Nash’s script, based on a novel by Nash) as an excuse for a leisurely excursion through a picturesque landscape. Mike is on a mission, yes, racing the clock and pursued by dangerous hombres on both sides of the law. But that doesn’t prevent him from rolling into a quiet Mexican hamlet and remarking to his companions: “This looks like an interesting town. Let’s check it out.”Those companions are a 13-year-old boy named Rafo (Eduardo Minett), and Rafo’s prized fighting rooster, Macho, a noble bird who gives the film its title and its theme. Rafo, abandoned by his Texan father and abused by his Mexican mother, is attached both to Macho and to an ideal of tough, strutting masculinity. One of Mike’s tasks is to offer, by precept and example, an alternative way of being a man. Nothing too soft, mind you — this is still Clint Eastwood we’re talking about — but a more patient, less furious approach to life.“This macho thing is overrated,” Mike says. “You think you have all the answers, but then you get older and realize you don’t have any. By the time you figure it out, it’s too late.” What that amounts to is a benign form of fatalism, a humility that the rest of the movie upholds. The button-pushing and liberal-baiting that flared in “The Mule” and “Richard Jewell” aren’t much in evidence here, and the canonical Eastwood persona — the avenger of innocence who dwells in legal and moral gray zones — is in a state of semiretirement. There is evil in the universe, but it might not be entirely his problem.The opening scenes suggest otherwise. Rafo’s father, Howard (Dwight Yoakam), a big shot Texas rancher and Mike’s former boss, dispatches Mike to Mexico to collect the boy. Though Mike doesn’t much like Howard, he feels a sense of obligation, since Howard helped him get back on his feet after a series of personal tragedies.Once across the Rio Grande, Mike finds Howard’s “nutcase” ex-wife in her bedroom, and their son at a cockfighting ring. It’s 1980, by the way. The existence of GPS, cellphones and heavy security on the United States-Mexican border would spoil the atmosphere. Mike, Rafo and Macho light out in a series of Detroit junkers — mostly stolen, though nobody seems to mind — pursued by mom’s nasty boyfriend and the occasional federales.Now and then, Mike calls Howard from a pay phone. The whole project turns out to be more complicated than it seemed at first. “Don’t trust anyone” is Rafo’s mantra. That may be too sweeping, but “don’t trust anyone played by Dwight Yoakam” is a pretty good rule of thumb. As the old man, the boy and the chicken make their way down the highway, you can anticipate the turns the story will take.But not quite. The twists arrive, but not with the impact you might expect. What started as a thriller takes a long detour into the pastoral, as car trouble strands our travelers in a quiet village with a sweet cantina run by a widow named Marta (Natalia Traven). She and Mike get up to some heavy “Bridges of Madison County”-style flirting, while Rafo spends time with one of her granddaughters. There are some wild horses that need breaking, and other animals to look at, and whatever else needs to be dealt with can just wait awhile.Maybe this will make you restless. Maybe you want car chases, gunfights, quotable catchphrases and somber meditations on violence, justice and the American West. If so, there is a whole Clint Eastwood filmography to peruse. This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.Cry MachoRated PG-13. Rough language and behavior. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Wife of a Spy’ Review: Trust or Fear in Love and War?

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      In this latest work by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a Japanese couple’s relationship is shaped by the forces of churning nationalism that surround it.There are a lot of commonplace story elements in “Wife of a Spy.” Childhood friends divided by the beating of war drums. A glib, secretive husband and a distrustful wife. And so on. Combined with its period setting — the movie begins in 1940, at a silk inspection center in Kobe where a British fellow is picked up for questioning — viewers might therefore expect a fairly conventional dramatic thriller.But the director and co-writer here is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose approaches to story and genre are always unusual. Soon into its machinations, “Wife of a Spy” begins to thrum with unusual intensity.The husband, Yusaku (Issey Takahashi), who is in the import-export business and had dealings with the Briton, gets a visit from the military as a result. As it happens, the officer, Taiji (Masahiro Higashide), was a childhood friend of both Yusaku and his wife. While Taiji is initially friendly, at a time when Japanese nationalism is swelling, he is also suspicious and disapproving, telling his old friend that he’s too familiar with Westerners, and is rather suspiciously westernized himself.Yusaku is a camera buff, and soon we see him filming a 16-millimeter amateur movie. It’s a heist picture, in poetic noir style, starring his wife, Satoko (Yu Aoi), and his nephew and employee Fumio (Ryota Bando). But his enthusiasm for shooting isn’t purely aesthetic.On a business trip to Manchuria, Yusaku and Fumio surreptitiously film the pages of a notebook filled with details of atrocities committed there, mostly on captive Chinese subjects, by the Imperial Japanese Army: experiments on human subjects, vivisection and more.Satoko learns, piecemeal, of her husband’s activities on the trip. At this point Kurosawa’s movie starts nodding to Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” albeit understatedly. Adding to her anxiety is her knowledge that a woman came back from Manchuria with Yusaku and Fumio and that she later turned up dead in the harbor.Initially Satoko believes her husband to be a traitor. But once she understands his heart and his aims, she assists him, and they begin living as a truly committed couple for the first time.While Kurosawa’s last film, “To the Ends of the Earth,” was a slow-brewing journey to a young woman’s epiphany, “Wife of a Spy” is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated. As the couple’s best-laid plans hit increasingly hair-raising and heart-sinking setbacks, the movie’s denunciation of war, and its implicit condemnation of contemporary Japan’s blind-eye attitude toward its wartime crimes, becomes more bracing. And the movie’s finale is a masterful evocation of catastrophe that has a low-key echo of Kurosawa’s 2001 horror masterpiece “Pulse.”Wife of a SpyNot rated. In Japanese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blue Bayou’ Review: No Direction Home

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      Justin Chon’s immigration melodrama counters its soggy storytelling with deeply felt performances.“Blue Bayou” opens on a close-up of Antonio LeBlanc (played by the writer and director, Justin Chon) interviewing for a job. Born in South Korea and raised from a child by adoptive parents in Louisiana, Antonio needs to supplement his income as a tattoo artist to support his wife (Alicia Vikander), his stepdaughter, Jessie (Sydney Kowalske), and an imminent new baby. It is immediately clear, though, that the unseen interviewer is less concerned with Antonio’s felony convictions than his origins.In its unsubtle way, “Blue Bayou” strives to draw attention to the precarious limbo inhabited by foreign-born adoptees whose citizenship was never finalized. When an innocent argument in a supermarket lands Antonio on the wrong side of two police officers — one of whom (Mark O’Brien) is Jessie’s biological father and the other (Emory Cohen) no more than a bundle of boorish clichés — the incident heralds a series of escalating threats to a life that’s already far from secure.These give the film a slow, sad drip of inevitability that’s lightened by the warmth and naturalism of Chon’s performance. Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction, as does a wonderfully low-key Linh-Dan Pham as an ailing Vietnamese American who befriends Antonio and tugs at his Asian identity. In these moments, we see a man with one foot on land and the other on water, his memory haunted by the image of his birth mother and a far-off lagoon. And as the faces and fates of real-life adoptees scroll past in a moving coda, Chon forces us to acknowledge how easily those who believe themselves settled can become in an instant displaced and dispossessed.Blue BayouRated R for racist language and violent law enforcement. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I Am Not Alone’ Review: Looking Back on an Uprising

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      This documentary offers a play-by-play account of nonviolent protests that shook up politics in Armenia in 2018.In 2018, the president of Armenia, Serzh Sargsyan, facing term limits, sought to stay in power by having members of his party in the country’s parliament elect him as the prime minister; a constitutional referendum in 2015 had transferred most of the president’s powers to that position. Critics of the right-wing Sargsyan saw that as an autocratic move. In protest, Nikol Pashinyan — a Parliament member and former political prisoner and newspaper editor — started what became a nationwide movement.The documentary “I Am Not Alone,” directed by Garin Hovannisian, offers an account of how, in less than a month, Pashinyan’s efforts to prevent Sargsyan from hanging on grew from a march to a nonviolent revolution. (Hovannisian, in a relationship not made clear in the film, is a son of Raffi K. Hovannisian, who challenged Sargsyan for the presidency in 2013.)The movie interweaves footage of the protests — some professionally shot, some drawn from makeshift sources — with post-mortem interviews. It shouldn’t be a spoiler to say how things turned out, or who is currently Armenia’s prime minister. But because the film includes retrospective interviews with both Pashinyan and Sargsyan, it courts a sense of mystery about which one succeeded.The talking heads, who discuss events in the past tense, sap the protest material’s momentum, and a score by Serj Tankian (who appears as a commentator) is unnecessarily manipulative. It’s also difficult to watch the parts concerning one of Pashinyan’s early gambits — he wanted protesters to stop the parliamentary session during which Sargsyan’s election as prime minister would occur — without thinking of the Capitol riot in the United States, no matter how much the circumstances differed.I Am Not AloneNot rated. In English and Armenian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. On virtual cinemas. More

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      Pauli Murray Should Be a Household Name. A New Film Shows Why.

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      The lawyer, activist and minister made prescient arguments on gender, race and equality that influenced Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.When the lawyer, activist, author and educator Pauli Murray died in 1985 at the age of 75, no obituary or commemoration could contain all of her pathbreaking accomplishments. A radical and brilliant legal strategist, Murray was named a deputy attorney general in California — the first Black person in that office — in 1946, just a year after passing the bar there. Murray was an organizer of sit-ins and participated in bus protests as far back as the 1940s, and co-founded the National Organization for Women. Murray was also the first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest. In 2012, she was sainted.Murray has been saluted in legal, academic and gender-studies circles, and in the L.G.B.T.Q. community. But her overarching impact on American life in the 20th and now 21st centuries has not been broadly acknowledged: the thinking and writing that paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education; the consideration of intersectionality (she helped popularize the term “Jane Crow”); the enviable social circle, as she was a buddy of Langston Hughes and a pen pal of Eleanor Roosevelt, and worked on her first memoir alongside James Baldwin at the MacDowell Colony in the first year it allowed Black artists.Murray was devoted to feminism and the rights of women even as, it turned out, she privately battled lifelong gender identity issues. She should be a household name on par with Gloria Steinem or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, both of whom cited her work often. Instead Murray is an insider’s civil rights icon.Now a documentary, “My Name Is Pauli Murray,” aims to introduce Murray to the masses. Made by the same Academy Award-nominated filmmakers behind the surprise hit “RBG,” it uses Murray’s own voice and words as narration, drawn from interviews, oral histories and the prolific writing — books, poems and a collection of argumentative, impassioned and romantic letters — that Murray meticulously filed away with an eye toward her legacy. And the film arrives at a moment when the tenacious activism of people of color, especially women, is being re-contextualized and newly acknowledged, at the same time that many of the battles they fought are still raging.This is especially true for Murray, whose views on gender, race, sexuality and equality were generations ahead of their time. In 2020, the A.C.L.U. won an anti-discrimination case that built on Murray’s work. “She challenged racism, sexism, heterocentricism, colorism and elitism,” Anita Hill, the lawyer and educator, wrote in an email. “It has taken me 20 years to discover the extraordinary breadth of her contributions to law and social justice.”When the directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen decided to pursue a documentary about Murray, the first interview they booked, in 2018, was with Ginsburg, whose work had introduced them to the weight of Murray’s achievements. In the film, Ginsburg smilingly calls Murray “feisty.” Roosevelt, Murray’s longtime friend, chose “firebrand.” The more the filmmakers learned, the more astounded they were that Murray was not better known.“We just thought, why didn’t anybody teach us about this person?” West said.“We really think of this documentary as the beginning of the conversation,” Cohen added. “This is a starting point, because there’s so much to say.”Laverne Cox and Chase Strangio in a scene from the documentary. Strangio credited Murray’s work with laying the groundwork for an A.C.L.U. case against L.G.B.T.Q.  discrimination.Amazon StudiosIn some ways, the central tension of Murray’s life was the degree to which Murray’s ideas were dismissed, and her unyielding belief that they would eventually be accepted. Murray’s law school thesis strikingly argued against “separate but equal.” A decade later, Thurgood Marshall borrowed from its framework to win Brown v. Board before the Supreme Court. “What I say very often,” Murray quips in the film, under a broad, impish smile, “is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.”Though she lived humbly, Murray, who called her preferred method of persuasion “confrontation by typewriter,” was long aware of her own exceptionalism. She published a memoir in 1956 about her family’s complicated, multiracial history, and held teaching positions across the country and in Ghana, advancing views on how to attain equity. But each step toward a broader audience, a bigger platform, was hard-won. Like Hill, Murray was a professor at Brandeis University — but Murray had to fight for tenure, the documentary shows, even though she was the first Black person to receive Yale Law School’s most advanced degree, doctor of juridical science.In 2017, Yale named a residence hall after Murray, but Hill noted that when she herself was at Yale Law in the late 1970s, she couldn’t recall Murray’s name even being mentioned. “I chalk the near erasure of her contributions as an activist, author, scholar — of law, African studies, African American studies, and gender studies — to sexism and racism combined and separately,” Hill said.Murray was a nomad. She went “wherever her cause took her,” said Karen Rouse Ross, her great-niece. After college, Murray, who often dressed androgynously, hopped trains, then joined the labor movement. Settling into life as an itinerant activist and lawyer, Murray transported enough books and papers to fill floor-to-ceiling shelves and a wall of filing cabinets. In her 70s, living in an apartment in Baltimore, Murray kept up the habit of typing away on her Remington into the wee hours, books piled on the floor. “She had a white coffee mug like you would get at a diner somewhere, constantly filled with black coffee, and she smoked unfiltered cigarettes,” Ross said. “That’s who she was, all night long.” When Murray’s papers were donated to Harvard, they filled 141 boxes.Talleah Bridges McMahon, a producer of the film, was shocked when she started sorting through them. Instead of the drafts of speeches and other public-facing documents she thought she’d find, there was a trove of private correspondence between Murray and her inner circle, including doctors. “There were complete conversations,” she said, and decades of journals. Some had pages ripped out or words blacked out. “These are curated records,” McMahon said. “The more I saw that, the more I understood that everything we were seeing is what Pauli wanted people to see.”Murray’s great-niece Karen Ross, left, the producer Talleah Bridges McMahon, the filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West and Ross’s daughter, Kyrah Boyce. Amazon StudiosThat included Murray’s nearly lifelong sense of being misgendered. Among the letters were those to doctors imploring them for help. “My life is unbearable in its present form,” she wrote, according to the film. Murray sought out hormone treatment, which was denied, and even underwent exploratory surgery because she was convinced (wrongly) that she had undescended testes.But this anguish was largely hidden. Murray’s romantic life also existed almost entirely behind closed doors; even some family members were not aware of her relationships. She never lived with her longtime partner, Irene Barlow, whom she met at a law firm where both worked. But the letters show a deep connection and a sense of playfulness around their secret love: They used code names, and Barlow sometimes signed her missives “007,” with the 0s drawn as eyeglasses.As private as Murray was, “there was a certain faith or trust that we would eventually understand what was happening,” McMahon said.Some activists in the film use “they” pronouns for Murray because even though that language wasn’t in use then, it opens up possibilities for Murray’s identity and preferences now. “I do think it’s important to not confine Pauli to the time Pauli was living,” McMahon said.Family members, including Ross, the executor of Murray’s estate and founder of the Pauli Murray Foundation, use she/her pronouns for their relative; Murray used them, too. Born in 1910 as Anna Pauline, Murray later chose the neutral nickname Pauli — another moniker the filmmakers rely on. In this article, The New York Times is using Murray’s name as much as possible, and adhering to the family’s choice for pronouns.Some scholars feel that it was Murray’s sense of in-betweenness that shaped her then-radical thinking about the intersection of race, gender and more. It helped ignite the realization that race and gender norms are socially constructed, and “made her increasingly critical of boundaries,” as one biographer, Rosalind Rosenberg, says in the film.For Murray, there was an urgent need to be understood in all she encompassed. “Most of her life was, ‘You will see me, you will hear me!’” Ross says in the film. Some of that fervor, Ross added in an interview, shifted after Murray made the surprise decision, late in life, to become an Episcopalian priest. Murray’s focus moved from agitating for change, to listening for healing.But Murray remained committed to creating equality: Preaching in Baltimore, she had a service full of girls as acolytes, which was not typical then. She would say to them, “Ladies, are we living up to our full potential?” her niece recalled. “That was very important to her, that she inspired other women to be all that they could be.”For the filmmakers and others who followed in Murray’s footsteps, that legacy shone brightly. “I think of her courage in the face of disappointments,” Hill said, quoting a line from Murray’s poem “Dark Testament”: “Hope is a song in a weary throat.”“Even though Murray knew that the odds were often against her success, she kept fighting for what she believed was right,” Hill continued. “It takes a lot of courage to be hopeful.” More

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      ‘Nightbooks’ Review: A Fairy Tale Horror Fit for Kids

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      Genuine scares elevate this modern take on Hansel and Gretel, which follows a bright boy who is held captive in an evil witch’s apartment.In the children’s horror movie “Nightbooks,” a preteen boy is held hostage by a malevolent witch. Alex (Winslow Fegley) is a bright kid whose passion lies in writing scary stories. At the start of the movie (on Netflix), Alex renounces the hobby, fearing it makes him a freak show. On his way to burn his notebooks, however, he is lured into the enchanted apartment of Natacha (Krysten Ritter), who threatens to kill Alex unless he spins her a new tale every evening.For Alex, Natacha’s home is a dark and sinister prison, but it is also a Victorian wonderland. Venture through the right door and you might find a vast library, a magic garden or a unicorn forest. Alex soon befriends Yasmin (Lidya Jewett), another child held captive in the space, and together the Hansel and Gretel pair plot their escape.Several moments in “Nightbooks,” directed by David Yarovesky and based on a book by J.A. White, are genuinely frightening. During some sequences, particularly those that center a creepy-crawly menace called a Shredder, I was tempted to cover my eyes. The director David Yarovesky has a knack for tricks of light — shadows, neon night vision and motion cast in silhouette — and the movie is at its most deliciously chilling when it favors visual flair over jump scares.In its balance of kid-centric themes and unsettling images, “Nightbooks” follows a path paved by horror standouts like “Coraline” and the early works of Tim Burton. Yarovesky’s fairy tale spookfest ultimately doesn’t measure up to the moody ingenuity of those reference points, but its devotion to frights makes it memorable.NightbooksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Here’s Why Norm Macdonald Was Comedy Royalty. It’s Not ‘S.N.L.’

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      He may have been best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” but he should be really remembered for decades of club sets and you-can’t-miss-this clips.My favorite Norm Macdonald joke — and trust me, there’s serious competition — is one he told as anchor of Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1990s. Papers in front of him, he reported with a cheer: “Yippie! Jerry Rubin died this week.” Looking down, he apologized for his mistake and tried again: “That should read: ‘Yippie Jerry Rubin died this week.’”Silly, dark, ruthlessly concise, this gem is a model of craft, and like many of Macdonald’s bits, it proves how the smallest change in tone, language or, in this case, exclamation mark can radically shift meaning, providing the kind of jolt of surprise that produces belly laughs.Macdonald, who died Tuesday of cancer, maintained a studied modesty about his work. He said that his act had no substance, that it was all “gossip and trickery.” And he claimed without self-pity that he would be remembered only for his few years at “Saturday Night Live,” not his decades of stand-up, which he referred to as “a shabby business, made up of shabby fellows like me who cross the country, stay at shabby hotels, and tell jokes they no longer find funny.”He described his life as a sprint to outrun the wolves of irrelevancy. “They caught and devoured me years ago,” he wrote in his 2016 quasi-memoir, “Based on a True Story.”Whether he believed this about himself doesn’t matter (Macdonald was a very skillful liar) and there is some merit to his points about stand-up and his credits, but the ornate way he beats himself up hints at a deeper truth: Macdonald was not only one of the funniest comics of his generation, but also a sneaky aesthete who elevated stand-up, helping shift its cultural prestige over the past few decades into an art deserving respect.His legacy is not clear from his level of stardom or even his list of television shows and specials, although he has some signal accomplishments, including an early stint as a writer on “Roseanne” and one of the best Netflix specials of the past decade, “Hitler’s Dog, Gossip & Trickery.” Macdonald’s greatness is not on his IMDb page so much as in the number of you-have-to-see-this moments, the kind that friends tell you about at parties and then send you the clip the next day.Many of these came from talk shows, where he was a hall-of-fame guest. He told one of the most justly revered jokes in late-night history on Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight” show, a preposterous masterpiece of literary suspense-building about a moth in a podiatrist’s office. Another moment on the couch from the same show went viral decades later: He interrupted an interview with the actress Courtney Thorne-Smith to savagely insult Carrot Top, the star of the movie she was promoting, a brutally hilarious act of sabotage.Macdonald had other talents. When it comes to parodies of roasts, he stood alone, turning intentionally awful jokes at the roast of Bob Saget into disorienting performance art that remains one of the funniest bits of anti-comedy you will ever see. And on “Saturday Night Live,” he may have been at his best on the Weekend Update desk (ultimately getting fired after his jokes about O.J. Simpson), but he also delivered several singular impressions, including a version of David Letterman that was both accurate and far too bizarre to be realistic.Letterman proved to be a key figure in Macdonald’s career, a champion of the stand-up’s work (the talk-show host said no one was funnier) who booked the comic on his show’s final week. Macdonald, breaking from his trademark acerbic style, ended on a surprisingly moving tribute, displaying an emotional side that usually only lurked under the surface of his comedy.In a column from 2017, I argued that what distinguished Macdonald’s comedy was his sensitivity to language, his peculiarly poetic brand of plain talk. He made stylish turns of phrase and folksy flourishes seem conversational and offhand. A lover of Bob Dylan, Macdonald was also a sponge for influences, borrowing and repurposing figures of speech or unusual words to create funny-sounding sentences.But describing him as merely a master of joke writing misses his quickness, wryly deadpan delivery and, most of all, a unique level of commitment. He did not bail out of jokes and never pandered. You see this in his Bob Saget roast: the conviction to push through despite the confusion of the response. He pleased the crowd without being a crowd-pleaser. And no one had a nimbler and more assured sarcastic voice, which he used to find humor in ambiguity. There was a wonderfully odd moment on David Spade’s talk show a few years ago when Macdonald told Jay Leno he was maybe the best talk-show host ever, and no one, including Leno, seemed to be able to tell if he was being sincere.There’s a lot of fun to be had in this liminal space between earnestness and just kidding. One of Macdonald’s most impressive feats is writing an entire memoir that remains there. It’s one of the greatest comedian memoirs but also a pointedly frustrating mix of fact and fiction, cliché and originality. It’s very funny, sometimes tedious, occasionally wise. The title, “Based on a True Story,” isn’t just a gag. It’s rooted in his faith that, as he puts it, “there is no way of telling a true story. I mean a really true one, because of memory. It’s just no good.”Just because you can’t tell a really true one doesn’t mean that art can’t get closer to the truth. In an interview with New York magazine, Macdonald balked at the trend toward confessional art, saying he thought art was supposed to be about concealment. That was revealing.The fact that he struggled with cancer for a decade was something he certainly didn’t advertise in his work. His death came as a shock to many. But clues were everywhere. Death has been among his favorite subjects in recent years. In a great viral moment, he delivered one of the earliest and best comedy club sets about the coronavirus. It was at the Improv in Los Angeles in March 2020 right before venues were shutting down. “It’s funny that we all now know how we’re going to die,” he said. “It’s just a matter of what order.”At the start of his memoir, he tells a story about reading on his Wikipedia page that he had died. Then he imagines if it were true, laughing until a thought stops him cold. “The preposterous lie on the screen before me isn’t that far off,” he wrote. This seemed like jokey melodrama when I first read it, but now it hits differently.Macdonald once talked about an uncle dying of cancer, skewering how we now describe people suffering from that disease as “waging a battle” because that means the last thing you do before you die is lose. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure that if you die, then the cancer also dies at the same time,” Macdonald said on Comedy Central. “That to me is not a loss. That’s a draw.” More

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      Art Metrano, Actor and Comic Once Felled by an Accident, Dies at 84

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      He had built a career in stand-up comedy and in film and TV, but a fall from a ladder left him with a personal struggle.Art Metrano, a comedian and actor who appeared in more than 120 television shows and films, including the “Police Academy” movies, before a fall from a ladder left him severely injured, an ordeal he turned into a one-man show he performed all over the country, died on Sept. 8 at his home in Aventura, Fla. He was 84.His son Harry confirmed his death. The cause was not given.Mr. Metrano first gained attention with a spoof magic act. Introduced as the Amazing Metrano or with some equally grandiose appellation, he would come out and perform a series of tricks that weren’t really tricks. He’d present each hand to the audience, index finger raised, then bang his hands together behind his back and present them again — now, two fingers on one hand would be raised, none on the other.The schtick got him appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and assorted other programs in the early 1970s. By then he was also building an acting career, having landed small parts on “Mannix,” “Bewitched” and other series in the late ’60s; that run continued in the ’70s with “Barney Miller,” “Movin’ On,” “Starsky and Hutch” and dozens of other shows.The 1980s brought more acting work, including a recurring role on “Joanie Loves Chachi” and, in 1985, a part in “Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment,” a follow-up to the hit 1984 comedy. He played Mauser, a career-driven officer who becomes a captain and is the butt of jokes; in one scene, he shampoos his hair with epoxy resin. He reprised the role in 1986 in “Police Academy 3: Back in Training.”Carol Rosegg/Everett CollectionBut Mr. Metrano’s career was interrupted one September day in 1989. He and his wife at the time had put a house up for sale, and he stopped by to check on it in advance of a showing by a real estate agent. They had work done on the pool, and he noticed that as a result there was gray cement spray all over the back walls and balcony. He decided to hose the gunk off.“I grabbed the ladder that was leaning against the wall and set it firmly against the balcony,” he wrote in a memoir, “Twice Blessed” (with Cynthia Lee, 1994, later retitled “Metrano’s Accidental Comedy”).Something went wrong, and Mr. Metrano fell from the ladder, hitting the ground head first and snapping his neck. He couldn’t move. He lay there, imagining the scene if he were still lying there when the real estate agent showed up.“I’d look up and say, ‘Hi, I’m the owner,’” he wrote in his book. “‘I just broke my neck, but not to worry. House looks great, eh? Nice gourmet kitchen!’”The humor was characteristic of the way he later told the story in print and onstage (a neighbor eventually came to his aid before the real estate agent arrived), but the injury was serious. He had broken several vertebrae, and permanent paralysis was a possibility.“When you’re lying paralyzed in a hospital bed,” he said during the stage show, “your past becomes your constant companion because your future is a question mark.”At first he could neither move nor speak, but he was eventually able to talk again, and to walk, sometimes with the help of a crutch. Within a few years he was telling his story in a one-man show written with Ms. Lee that was performed, under various names, across the country.When it played in Manhattan in 1996 at the Union Square Theater under the title “The Amazing Metrano: An Accidental Comedy,” Vincent Canby, in The New York Times, said that Mr. Metrano “gives new meaning to the term stand-up comedy: it isn’t the comedy that amazes, but the fact that Mr. Metrano is standing up.”“‘The Amazing Metrano’ is therapeutic, inspirational theater,” Mr. Canby wrote. “Mr. Metrano is now publicly working through his trauma, finding resources in himself he never knew he possessed.”Arthur Mesistrano was born on Sept. 22, 1936, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bensonhurst section of that borough. His father, Aaron, worked in the garment industry, and his mother, Rebecca (Russo) Mesistrano, was a homemaker.He played football at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and attended the College of the Pacific in California on a football scholarship, but left college to return to New York to study acting and work on his stand-up comedy. He moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting in 1958.In his book, he told of trying to worm his way into show business by taking a job selling a phone system that enabled busy people to speed-dial numbers; that got him onto studio lots.“That was the plan,” he wrote, “sell the product, make some money, meet producers and directors, and then show them my 8×10 glossy and phony résumé.”It appeared to work, because by 1960 he was getting small roles. In 1971, he landed a leading role in a CBS sitcom, “The Chicago Teddy Bears,” though the show was short-lived. He had another leading role in a 1986 sitcom, “Tough Cookies,” but that show too didn’t last, either.Mr. Metrano in a publicity photo with the actor Craig T. Nelson in 2001. Mr. Metrano was a guest star on the CBS crime drama “The District,” starring Mr. Nelson. Tony Esparza/CBSAfter his accident, he continued to get occasional TV roles, including on “L.A. Law,” “The District” and “Party of Five.”Mr. Metrano married Rebecca Chute in 1972; they divorced in 2005. His survivors include his wife, Jamie Golder Metrano; two children from his first marriage, Harry and Zoe Bella Metrano; a daughter from an earlier relationship, Roxanne Elena Metrano; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.In 1977, Mr. Metrano reached out to a son he had fathered when younger but who had been given up for adoption. That son, Howard Bald, now a rabbi, performed a memorial service for him over the weekend in Florida. More