Movies

The New York Times has published its popular 36 Hours column for nearly 20 years, helping readers plan weekends in far-flung destinations all over the world.For many of us over the past month, our grand plans have shrunk down to small ones, as have the physical spaces we occupy.While we can’t travel for pleasure right now, the spirit of travel — our curiosity, empathy and sense of adventure — can’t be confined.With all of this in mind, and to continue our 36 Hours column, we called out to our readers for ideas of what people could do over a weekend, wherever they are in the world (even if they are homebound), that embraced the ethos of travel.We received (and read!) more than 1,400 submissions from all over the world — from Guangzhou to Zurich, Sydney to Buenos Aires, and across the United States.Below is our first reader-sourced 36 Hours column. We hope it moves you. The responses have been edited for clarity, style and length.Friday1) 5 p.m. Happy hourMake a plan to meet your neighbors at a distance — each of you bringing your respective libation — and yell across the fence, from your fire escape, across the street or out your window about how much you’d rather be enjoying that same drink at some chic bar.— Kai Romero, San FranciscoMake a Cazuela cocktail (one of Guadalajara’s signature drinks), because it is a great way to get some vitamin C and a little bit of tequila. Pour grapefruit soda into a bowl, add in some slices of fresh grapefruit, orange and lime, throw in a shot of reposado tequila and a pinch of sea salt. The outcome will be the most refreshing drink you’ll ever try.— Lorena Kunz Salim, Guadalajara, Mexico More

The title of this movie isn’t kidding. To answer your first question, “How lazy is this Susan?” here’s how lazy: While slumped on her sofa, she squeezes ketchup packets into her navel, creating a receptacle in which to dip her takeout French fries.Extreme sloth is not the only distinctive characteristic of this aimless middle-aged Susan. There’s also the fact that she’s played by a man, Sean Hayes, who’s best known for his work on the TV comedy “Will and Grace.” Hayes wrote the screenplay with his co-star, Carrie Aizley, and Nick Peet directed. Just as the drag performer Divine made a point of playing Edna Turnblad as a “real” woman in John Waters’s 1988 “Hairspray” (a challenge John Travolta took on in the 2007 musical remake), here Hayes attempts embodiment rather than imitation.[embedded content]Technically, his work here is better than serviceable. But to what end? The character is a caricature of a suburban type, with a fractured clan that makes a big show of hewing to homespun Christian values (Susan’s niece recites a Bible verse before giving a birthday present to Grandma) and sitcom-cartoonish aspirations. For instance, Susan and her best friend, Corrin (played by Aizley), think their rendition of “Blister in the Sun,” with Susan on flute, is going to blow everyone away at the local talent show.The proceedings, which also include Susan falling hard for a smarmy “Jumpoline” proprietor played by Jim Rash, are professionally executed. Yet the movie’s pace seems glacial. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed a bunch of fish into a barrel and didn’t bother to shoot them.At one point Susan says to a neighbor, “You have polio and diabetes? God can be such a hater sometimes.” Yes, and on occasion to movie reviewers especially.Lazy SusanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Opening Day has come and gone, and there’s no sign when Major League Baseball will return with new games. But fans needn’t despair. You could watch all 18½ hours of the director Ken Burns’s definitive 1994 documentary “Baseball,” streaming for free on the PBS website (and the four-hour 2010 sequel, “The Tenth Inning,” on Amazon Prime). Or you can catch a Murderers’ Row of great baseball features readily accessible online. Here, in alphabetical order, are my picks for the 10 best of the last 50 years.1976‘The Bad News Bears’Ignore the inferior sequels and the remake — and the politically incorrect insults of mini-bully Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes): The director Michael Ritchie’s satire of America’s win-at-all-costs mentality is the ultimate Little League movie. (Sorry, devotees of “The Sandlot.”) The role of the booze-guzzling coach Morris Buttermaker fits Walter Matthau like an old mitt, and music from Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” provides a classy counterpoint to the profane antics of the hurler Amanda Whurlitzer (Tatum O’Neal), the thuggish slugger Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley) and the rest of the lovable misfits.Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Fandango Now, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.[embedded content]1973‘Bang the Drum Slowly’“Raging Bull” isn’t the only classic sports movie Robert De Niro has made. In baseball’s answer to “Brian’s Song,” he chews tobacco, if not the scenery, as a terminally ill catcher who stays on the roster thanks to the undying friendship of an ace pitcher (Michael Moriarty). Vincent Gardenia makes a credibly gruff manager, and while the fictional team is named the New York Mammoths, sharp-eyed viewers will recognize the locations as Shea Stadium and the old Yankee Stadium at their grittiest.Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Fandango Now, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1976‘The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings’Before they became fixtures of the “Star Wars” universe as Lando Calrissian and the voice of Darth Vader, Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones joined forces for this exuberant comedy about a barnstorming squad in the days of the Negro Leagues. But the real scene-stealer of this movie is an uproarious Richard Pryor as Charlie Snow, an outfielder who tries to break the color barrier by posing as a Cuban named Carlos Nevada, then a Native American named Chief Takahoma.Available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1988‘Bull Durham’Any movie that starts with the line “I believe in the church of baseball” surely deserves the highest praise. It’s spoken by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon), a sexually sagacious English professor who comes between the veteran catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) and the phenom pitcher Ebby Calvin LaLoosh, a.k.a. Nuke (Tim Robbins), in this witty romantic comedy. The writer-director Ron Shelton, a real-life former minor leaguer, brings verisimilitude to the script and reveals what’s really discussed during mound conferences — wedding presents for teammates.Available to stream on IMDb TV, the Roku Channel, Tubi and Vudu; or to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1988‘Eight Men Out’The scandal-plagued 2019 Houston Astros had nothing on the Chicago White Sox — or Black Sox, as they came to be called — of a century earlier. Though eight team members were acquitted on charges that they threw the 1919 World Series, they were banned for life from baseball. The writer-director John Sayles movingly depicts “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) and Buck Weaver (John Cusack) as unjustly accused and saves one of the best roles for himself. He forms a two-man Greek chorus with the historian Studs Terkel playing the sly sportswriters Ring Lardner and Hugh Fullerton.Available to stream on the Roku Channel, Tubi and Vudu; and to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1989‘Field of Dreams’Major League Baseball plans to pay tribute to this gem by hosting a game between the Yankees and the White Sox on Aug. 13 in a temporary 8,000-seat park near the production’s original location in Iowa. In this enchanting film, a farmer (Kevin Costner) builds a diamond in his cornfield after hearing a disembodied voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come.” “He” turns out to be both Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) and the farmer’s long-estranged father (Dwier Brown), and “Field of Dreams” perfectly captures the magical thinking in which so many die-hard fans indulge.Available to rent or buy on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1992‘A League of Their Own’After his recent coronavirus diagnosis, Tom Hanks wrote, “Remember, despite all the current events, there is no crying in baseball.” That aphorism, delivered so indelibly by Hanks as the cantankerous manager Jimmy Dugan, is only one of many reasons the director Penny Marshall’s poignant comedy-drama about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League endures. At the movie’s heart is the loving rivalry between the sisters Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty), who find a new sense of self-worth on the diamond as male players are away fighting World War II.Available to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1989‘Major League’This raucous comedy about a ragtag Cleveland Indians club is generally considered the favorite baseball movie of Major League players. Maybe that’s because it’s populated by so many recognizable archetypes who are — to paraphrase the droll announcer Harry Doyle (Bob Uecker) — “just a bit outside” the bounds of normality. Among the most colorful are the vainglorious Roger Dorn (Corbin Bernsen), the superstitious Pedro Cerrano (Dennis Haysbert), the cocksure Willie Mays Hayes (Wesley Snipes) and the aptly nicknamed Ricky Wild Thing Vaughn (Charlie Sheen).Available to stream on Fubo, or to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.2011‘Moneyball’Brad Pitt radiates move-star charisma as Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s executive who figured out how to compete against big-market teams despite having a fraction of their payroll in this thoroughly entertaining adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction best seller. As the soft-spoken numbers cruncher who converts Beane to the gospel of sabermetrics, Jonah Hill proved for the first time he’s a top-rank actor. And watch for an endearing turn by a pre-“Guardians of the Galaxy” Chris Pratt as a journeyman infielder.Available to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.1984‘The Natural’A baseball movie never looked or sounded better, thanks to Caleb Deschanel’s painterly cinematography and Randy Newman’s soaring score. The director Barry Levinson’s masterful adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel casts Robert Redford in the title role as the superheroic slugger Roy Hobbs, yet it’s the deep roster of skilled character actors — including Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Wilford Brimley and Richard Farnsworth — who set off the dramatic fireworks.Available to stream on Netflix, as well as IMDb TV and Crackle, or to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. More

Steven Soderbergh, after shooting his 2018 feature “Unsane” with an iPhone, declared smartphone cinema to be the future.” Yet the technology is also a window on the recent past, as shown in the largely unknown masterpiece, “The Uprising,” a 2014 film by the British journalist and documentarian Peter Snowdon.Snowdon shot no footage to make “The Uprising.” The movie is entirely composed of material found on YouTube. It is an anthology of vernacular videos (to use Snowdon’s phrase) made nine years ago in Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt during the Arab Spring.“The Uprising” isn’t the first such anthology. Huang Weikai’s 2009 documentary “Disorder” is a lurid compilation of amateur video recordings of traffic accidents and other instances of urban chaos shot in Guangzhou, a focal point of the Chinese economic miracle. “The Uprising,” which Snowdon has said chronicles “popular self-documentation on an unprecedented scale” is more violent and political. It is also more ethical. Snowdon credits all the footage and has maintained that each clip was edited to respect its integrity “without the feeling of betraying or falsifying or misrepresenting.”Working with the French documentary filmmaker Bruno Tracq, as well as a small army of translators, Snowdon has taken about 100 videos and distilled the Arab Spring into a weeklong imagined revolution. “The Uprising” jumps from country to country, tracking a revolt from the initial rallies through violent confrontations with the police, the euphoria inspired by the fall of an autocratic regime, to the army’s attempt to restore order and the seizure of power.As if to suggest political upheaval as a force of nature, Snowdon frames the action with smartphone videos of tornadoes approaching an Alabama suburb. That idea is reinforced by the film’s closing quotation from the 19th-century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin that uses the metaphor of a cyclone to warn that “centuries of injustice, ages of oppression and misery, ages of disdain of the subject and poor, have prepared the storm.”The film’s narrative structure is made evident by a series of chapter titles that count down seven days. Still, the story is overwhelmed, at least on a first viewing, by the immediacy of each video. Crowds march, chant, hold rallies and hold forth for the camera — airing grievances, offering analyses and expressing the elation of a leaderless revolt. Other comments can be heard above the general clamor: “The world must see this.”Stones are thrown, tanks drive into crowds. In the most brutal videos, people are shot down in the street; in the most ecstatic, the crowds break down the prison walls or breach state security. Paraphrasing one of the most popular American street chants, the movie might be subtitled, “This is what revolution looks like.”There are moments of respite. In one scene, rambunctious teenagers use a captured bazooka to fire potatoes and onions into the sky; in another, a young man sits amid the rubble of an apartment apparently shelled by government forces and performs a comic routine. “Is Al Qaeda living in my hair?” he asks insistently. “What wrong did the poor carpet do? What was the crime of the cushions?”Turning the Arab Spring into an invented revolution even as it presents specific incidents from an actual one, “The Uprising” demands an active viewer. Throughout, there are multiple things to consider. One of the citizen-made videos Snowdon found and incorporated, documents and annotates the way in which events in the street are being televised into his living room.Attention is continually divided between the imposed narrative and the truth of individual moments. Awareness shifts between the events being witnessed and the spatial position of the witnesses. The viewer has the option for analysis. While these images are immensely powerful seen projected onscreen, the advantage of watching “The Uprising” online is the ability to freeze and re-examine scenes.Snowdon has argued that the smartphone is less an extension of the eye than of the arm, a tool used not only to record but to act. Visceral almost by definition, vernacular video has its own wildly spontaneous visual vocabulary — light smears, hyper kinetic movement, jolting angles, inadvertent “artifacting,” in which the image is distorted when a visible anomaly is introduced.The 1950s television series “You Are There,” had TV newsmen report on dramatized historical events. “The Uprising” shows a heady history being made in the streets. “These days the people have a supernatural awareness of their responsibilities,” a young bystander tells the camera. “This is the real Egypt.” (At the same time, “The Uprising” has the uncanny effect of letting the viewer imagine the unfolding of the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution.)More than a bystander, the camera runs along with the crowd, recording the frenzy and the daring. The cubistic jumble of images is exhilarating but given the presence of dead bodies, bloody streets, live firing, panicky screams and shouts, it can be hard to watch — precisely because it is real rather than staged.“I came to understand that I was making a film about these images, not about the revolution,” Snowdon has said. “The Uprising” documents not only the Arab Spring, but also the promise of vernacular video and the internet’s potential as a medium. It is a memory that functions as a prophecy — one of the great movies of the still-young 21st century.“The Uprising” has its own site (theuprising.be) and may also be found on Vimeo (vimeo.com/66820206). Both offer English subtitles. No passwords are necessary. More

When my parents call me these days to ask what’s new, I have nothing to tell them. I live alone, and I’ve been sequestered in my apartment for almost three weeks. Monday is Wednesday is Saturday.But when my friend Brian texts me for the latest gossip, I tell him that yesterday, just before midnight, I met a ghost on my island who gave me a bidet.That sort of unlikely exchange happens all the time in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a cheerful and funny video game for the Nintendo Switch that has become a social-media sensation in the era of social distancing. The premise is simple: You’re tasked with transforming a small, cartoony island into a bustling village. There is no kidnapped princess or planet on the brink of war, but you get to go outside, which is even better.Two weeks into quarantine and I’ve come to consider this a legitimately meaningful social interaction pic.twitter.com/KGK7WGe2Us— Tom Zohar (@TomZohar) March 28, 2020
With its low-stakes emphasis on making friends and decorating your house, Animal Crossing plays less like a traditional game and more like a lifestyle simulator. You could liken it to “The Sims,” except in that long-running series, you supervise mercurial characters who will throw fits when ignored and even pee on the floor in defiance. (“The Sims” also lets you kill characters off. You’ll want to.)Nothing is all that urgent in Animal Crossing, where the goals are breezy and can be put off indefinitely. New rooms can be added to your home once you pay off debts to the real-estate baron Tom Nook — a raccoon tycoon who wears Tommy Bahama button-downs — but if you’d rather spend your play sessions gossiping with the island’s bevy of anthropomorphic animals, go right ahead.You’re encouraged to check in with the game every day, since the island runs in real time: 3 p.m. in real life is 3 p.m. in the game, and different events are possible depending on the time or even the day of the week. That sort of sustained commitment is why I had resisted previous installments in the Animal Crossing franchise: As I grew out of my teenage years, I preferred shorter games that would more easily slot into my busy life.But now that we’re all trapped inside by the coronavirus, time has slipped off its hanger and lies in a heap on the floor. Why not spend a half-hour every morning — well, I always say it’ll be a half-hour, and then suddenly it’s dinner — in the company of some charming cartoon characters on my digital island?I downloaded Animal Crossing: New Horizons on a recent Friday night and named my island Akbar, in honor of the neighborhood bar my friends and I frequented before the quarantine. One of my fellow island-dwellers, a small cat named Rudy, greeted me with a present: “This denim hat,” he told me, “is so Akbar.” How did he know?Over the next few days, the game became a balm. Whenever the crushing tonnage of real-world news was too much, I would check into Akbar, where I could simply collect shells on the beach, watch a meteor shower or encourage a teal squirrel named Nibbles to pursue her dreams of pop superstardom. Right now, it helps to look for the little pleasures wherever you can find them, and Animal Crossing is packed full, each precious incident serving as a bite-sized mental-health break.Slowly, the island became a digital substitution for my real life. The photo app on my phone filled up with Animal Crossing screen captures instead of events I’d actually experienced, and though my friends still couldn’t meet me at the real Akbar, they could visit my island simply by connecting their Switches to the internet. I started to worry less about the state of my real-world apartment — why bother putting my shoes away if there’s no one coming to visit — and instead found joy in rearranging the rooms of my video-game house before inviting someone to my island to behold it.That home can be decorated by crafting new furniture or buying swatches of wallpaper from the island’s local store, though my living room is still very much a work in progress. The wall is striped yellow, the carpet is polka-dot, and most of the furniture is coated in the color of Pepto-Bismol. Transposed to real life, the room would either be eye-searingly hideous or irresistibly Instagrammable, but I love to show it off, just as I love to visit other people’s islands for company and inspiration.After flying to my friend Karen’s island this weekend, she quickly led me to her prize possession, a bed carved into a gigantic, champagne-colored clamshell. (Has there ever been anything so luxurious?) The discovery that you could scan real-world pictures into the game unlocked a further level of customization: I built a hilltop mural of the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho holding two Oscars, while my friend Carder decorated his living room with mug shots of arrested Real Housewives.The digital desire to keep up with the Joneses adds an interesting jolt of class tension to Animal Crossing, and as I started earmarking ever more elaborate furniture to buy, I stumbled on an island bedecked with some of the most expensive items in the game. The houses were straight out of Williams-Sonoma, the beaches were filled with enough toys to satisfy even the most pampered celebrity child, and clothing shops had been built there, which Tom Nook never told me about. Had Animal Crossing opened an outpost in the Hamptons?My friend told me that instead of playing at the game’s normal pace, where big events are often gated off until you reach a certain day, he kept changing the time and date in the Switch’s internal software, skipping ahead one day, then two, then many more until he finally amassed enough to live in the lap of luxury. In the Animal Crossing community, that controversial move is called “time-traveling,” and while not technically illegal, it’s sort of like listening to a podcast on double speed or pouring a glass of Soylent for dinner: You get the same nutrients, but where’s the fun?Of course, I understood the impulse behind it: At a time when no one knows how long we’ll continue to be kept in our homes, who wouldn’t seize the chance to exert a little control over the future? But it’s exactly that uncertainty that encourages me to take Animal Crossing at its own pace. If the real world continues to get worse before it gets better, then at least I’ve preserved a miniature escape to help get me through it.So the beaches of Akbar remain underdeveloped, my kitchen still lacks a refrigerator, and Nibbles is not yet the pop star she dreams of being. Does any of that make me anxious? Nah. Right now, I’ve got time. More