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Steven Seagal, the actor best known for playing hard-bitten cops and commandos in action movies, has agreed to settle charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose that he was being paid to promote a cryptocurrency investment on his social media accounts.The S.E.C. said on Thursday that Mr. Seagal, who lives in Moscow and holds both Russian and American citizenship, was promised $250,000 in cash and $750,000 worth of cryptocurrency from the company Bitcoiin2Gen in exchange for endorsing its initial coin offering, a crowdfunding strategy that involves creating and selling the virtual currency.In 2018, Facebook and Twitter accounts belonging to Mr. Seagal posted several times about the coin offering, calling him the “worldwide ambassador” for the company, the S.E.C. said. The posts did not disclose that Mr. Seagal, 67, was being paid for the promotions. The S.E.C. said that Mr. Seagal, who is also a trained martial artist, had 6.7 million Facebook followers during the time that he posted about the cryptocurrency company.The S.E.C. noted that Mr. Seagal’s posts about the coin offering came more than six months after the commission announced its decision that initial coin offerings — like initial public offerings of stocks — may be considered sales of securities and are subject to federal securities laws. Anti-touting provisions in those laws require individuals to disclose the amount of compensation they will receive in exchange for promoting a security.In a February 2018 news release, Bitcoiin2Gen called Mr. Seagal a “Zen Master” and said that the actor’s personal mission to lead people “into contemplation” and “enlighten them in some manner” aligned with the company’s objectives of creating a decentralized payment system.A spokesman for Mr. Seagal, Christopher Nassif, said in a statement on Thursday that the actor entered into an agreement allowing people associated with Bitcoiin2Gen to post on his social media accounts about the cryptocurrency, but that Mr. Seagal eventually became “concerned with the bona fides of the product” and terminated his relationship with the company. He was only paid part of the agreed-upon fee.Mr. Seagal agreed to settle the charges by paying back that part of the fee, $157,000, as well as a civil penalty in the same amount, the commission said. He also agreed to refrain from promoting any securities for three years.Mr. Nassif said that Mr. Seagal saw the agreement as “simply a case of someone paying a celebrity for the use of his image to promote a product,” and that he had fully cooperated with the S.E.C.’s investigation.Over the course of his acting career, Mr. Seagal’s parts have often highlighted his physical prowess, such as a firefighting specialist for an oil company in “On Deadly Ground” (1994), and a former C.I.A. operative-turned-police officer in “The Glimmer Man” (1996). In 2018, however, before he started promoting the cryptocurrency, Mr. Seagal accepted a very different role, this time from the Russian government: special representative to improve relations with the United States. (Russian officials said that the position was unpaid.)With the S.E.C. agreement in place, Mr. Nassif said that Mr. Seagal “looks forward to continuing his life’s work as an actor, musician, martial artist and diplomat.” More

First, you would have seen a flier, an advertisement for a human force-field experiment or a camera that took pictures of the past. Had you called the number printed at the flier’s bottom, you would have been directed to the 16th floor of a high-rise in San Francisco’s financial district and told to an unlock an office door.So began your “induction process” to the Games of Nonchalance, an art project-cum-social experiment that ran in San Francisco and Oakland from 2008 to 2011 and sent an estimated 7,000 people on a series of avant-garde scavenger hunts. Some participants didn’t know if they had stumbled onto a game or some grand conspiracy. Others feared being lured into a self-help cult.Now, in a wily example of art imitating art imitating life, that immersive experience has been reimagined as “Dispatches From Elsewhere,” a 10-episode scripted series created by Jason Segel, beginning Sunday on AMC.“This one just felt particularly magical in the way that it all came together,” Segel said, speaking by telephone from a park bench in Burbank, Calif.It was also, he added, “super, super hard.”Given the extreme slipperiness of the source material, that checks out. Created by an artist and former data manager named Jeff Hull, the Games of Nonchalance were an alternate-reality game that blurred fact and fiction, leading participants into an elaborate drama in which rival organizations called the Jejune Institute and the Elsewhere Public Works Agency fought for control of esoteric technology.For three years, players followed clues tucked into anonymous phone calls and pirate radio broadcasts, tasked with sabotaging the Jejune Institute and tracking the whereabouts a young woman named Evalyn Lucien — or Eva, as in “Eva Lucien” — who was somehow involved and said to have disappeared in 1988.Some treated Nonchalance as a lark, a goof. Others approached it with fanatical seriousness. Segel discovered it after seeing “The Institute,” a 2013 quasi-documentary by Spencer McCall that was in on the ruse, raising more questions about the phenomenon than it answered.“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I’ve been looking for,’” he said. The CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” had reached its nine-season end, and Segel was in the midst of what he called a “moment of existential crisis.” He no longer knew what kind of artist he was or wanted to be.The Games called out to the kid in Segel who had read portal fantasies and still longed to be told that he had been selected for some great endeavor — the kid who had ignored the rides at Disneyland in favor of roaming around Frontierland in a cowboy costume.“It came to me right at the moment I needed it,” he said.The inception of “Dispatches” mirrored the trickiness of its real-world inspiration. Soon after viewing the film, Segel contacted McCall, who put him in touch with Hull, whose production company had co-produced “The Institute.” Hull, Segel said, hung up on him. I checked this out with Hull. “Yeah, go with that,” he said.Then a cryptic email arrived. Its contents: an address in San Francisco, a date, a time. A week or two later, Segel drove up the California coast and found himself participating in the first chapter of a new project, The Latitude Society, which had him sliding down a hidden passage into an occult library and then back into the street, following clues from one local business to the next.“For that hour, I felt anonymous” he said. “I felt like I was a kid playing pretend.” Later, another email arrived. This one read, “You have divine nonchalance.”Hull had approved the project.The Games of Nonchalance had grown out of Hull’s coursework for a master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts at San Francisco State University. While in school, he had begun to think about how he could use different media — maps, voice mail messages, installation art — to create narrative.“Divine nonchalance” was a feeling he had wanted the game to cultivate in its participants. He described it as “a kind of naïveté, almost like a childlike relationship with the world around you — that freedom from inhibition that sparks creativity and inspiration and allows random beauty to occur.”Hull had designed the game in hopes of creating a psychic shift that made the ordinary world seem more magical. After visiting the “induction center,” a player might have been led to unearth a buried treasure, walk blindfolded through a chapel or dance on a street corner with a man dressed as Big Foot.The lines between where the game ended and reality began sometimes smudged. McCall’s film describes at least one debilitating injury and a lot of unhealthy obsession. Several players seem to experience profound breaks with reality. One player says he broke into a stranger’s home in search of answers. None of that may be true.For a while, Segel envisioned making “Dispatches” a feature film, but he eventually realized that he wanted to write a series; asking audiences to show up at the same time each week felt a little more participatory. While developing the script, he had moved to a farm in a small town an hour or so outside of Los Angeles, which had informed the way he thought about the project — and about everything else.“I think that changed my life,” he said. “I felt like a part of a community. The real thing has been just trying to feel a part of the world around me.”He also decided to focus less on the project’s mythology than on its participants — ordinary people who willingly took a plunge into the unknown. His character is an Everyman with a dead-end job who, like Segel, faces an existential crisis. The other major characters, played by Sally Field, Andre Benjamin and the newcomer Eve Lindley, come equipped with their own interior calamities. Segel wanted to investigate what had led them to the game and how and why each person played it.“A lot of stories are about someone finding out that they’re extraordinary,” he said. “And this whole thing, it’s this idea that we can all be ordinary together and that it’s beautiful.”Based on early episodes, the result is genre-hopping, form-bending and tonally eclectic. Benjamin, who plays a man convinced that Nonchalance is more just than a game, said he hadn’t known the series was based in fact until he was filming Episode 8. He had a go at defining the show.“It’s fantasy, it’s kind of sci-fi, it’s drama, there’s a love story underneath, there’s mystery, there’s tragedy, there’s kind of everything,” he said. “It’s really a trip.”Production incentives prompted a change in setting from the Bay Area to Philadelphia — a good choice, Segel said, because of Philadelphia’s Rocky Balboa grit and its thousands of public murals. As Hull had done with the Games, producers tried to incorporate as much local street art and ephemera into “Dispatches” as they could. The cast and crew were in constant motion.“That by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of work was exciting, was rich, was risky as hell,” said Field, who plays another participant, a woman seeking meaning after her husband falls ill.Other challenges were tonal. “If you go too goofy you lose people, and it feels fraudulent,” said Mark Friedman, the series’s showrunner. “And if it stays too grounded, it’s not fun enough.”Hull, who along with McCall is a co-executive producer, had visited the writers’ room to answer questions and share anecdotes. He wasn’t worried.“I think the show is going to be plenty real and plenty strange,” he said.Segel, Hull and Friedman hinted that the series, like the game, may encourage audience participation. There were cagey mutterings about Easter eggs and other elements that might reward close attention and rewinding, and about a possible real-world component. Pressed for more, Segel was unbudgeable.“I’m sitting here with giant smile on my face,” he said over the phone. “You can’t see because we’re not in person.” Which seemed at least a little mean.But the show’s creators hope also to delight the viewer who doesn’t want to play along, who would never have pulled the flier or danced with Big Foot. (Friedman counts himself among them. “I’m, like, scared to dance at a wedding,” he said.) Television, like life and alternate-reality art projects, can have its own surprises.When I told Benjamin that I had seen the first four episodes and was honestly baffled as to where the series would go, he laughed. “Oh you are in for it,” he said. “I’m telling you, you’re in for it.” More

“Wendy,” the new film from Benh Zeitlin, opens with tender caresses and shimmers of radiant light. Much as at the start of his smashing feature debut, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the camera is trained on a young girl whose world is filled with wonder, strange rituals and phantasmagoric shocks. In “Beasts,” the girl was called Hushpuppy and she lived in a tumbledown paradise called the Bathtub. Here, the girl is Wendy and she lives in her own ramshackle utopia, one that borrows a little from “Beasts” and, more generously and unproductively, from J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.”There are other similarities between Zeitlin’s two films, including sumptuous cinematography and a rousingly propulsive score, a rabble of charming children and nods at our environmental crisis. With its exquisite, near-cubistic close-ups of a toddler in a woman’s arms, the opener of “Wendy” suggests that Zeitlin has embraced abstraction even more boldly than he did in “Beasts.” Here, the child, a cherub with a halo of dark curls, comes into focus gradually. Like the pieces of an unsolved jigsaw puzzle, she appears in fragments — a downy arm, a prettily lashed eye, a face outlined by honeyed light — that sweetly suggest she’s very much a work in progress.It’s a lovely start and for the next 50 minutes or so Zeitlin keeps adding more beauty, filling in the background and adding detail as the film pleasantly drifts. Even when Wendy grows older, becoming a rather sober 9-year-old (Devin France), the whole thing meanders, swirling rather than marching forward. Then one night Wendy and her brothers hop a train, coaxed aboard by a laughing boy called Peter (Yashua Mack), and the drift gives way to churn, to chugging wheels, driving music and skin-prickling momentum. Wendy is clearly off on an adventure, ready to take flight. But when the children arrive on a lush volcanic island, the film stops dead in its tracks.The volcanic island is the film’s gloss on Neverland, the enchanted realm where children never grow up. In Barrie’s story this is where Peter reigns, flies through the air, fathers the Lost Boys, fights Captain Hook and provides material for countless hand-wringing treatises about men who refuse to grow up. This is also where Wendy assumes the role that she will embrace when she grows up, one that Peter describes with a deflating announcement: “Great news, boys,” he says. “I have brought at last a mother for you all.” In Barrie’s version, Wendy is soon cooking and caring for the boys, sidelined by the period conventions that Zeitlin thoroughly jettisons.One problem with “Wendy” is that Zeitlin has borrowed both too much from Barrie and not enough. (Zeitlin shares script credit with his sister, Eliza.) He keeps the characters and the names, and underscores the idea of childhood as freedom. He also harps on storytelling and nods at proto-cinematic forms — hand-shadow puppets, wall drawings — but doesn’t give the kids much of interest to do or say. For the most part, he just cuts them loose. They run and shout and sleep. Every so often, the volcano blows its top and someone goes swimming, diving in caves where stalactites glitter and a creature named the Mother sings. There are old people, but they’re a drag.The Mother — an iridescent, whalelike blob with the soulful mien of an elephant — effectively has the maternal role that Wendy assumes in Barrie’s version. It’s a shrewd, modernizing change that frees Wendy from the straitjacket of gender, allowing her simply to be a child rather than a surrogate mom or potential romantic foil. Notably, she and Peter read much younger than either Barrie’s or Disney’s characters, another revision that firmly grounds Zeitlin’s creations in the (false) safety of childhood. There’s also no Tinker Bell, for good and bad, and none of the sexualized jealousies that remind you that girls and women are rarely allowed to get lost.Zeitlin tries to remedy that in “Wendy” by foregrounding the title character and nudging the boys, Peter included, to the side. Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism. When the Mother is imperiled, I had hoped that Wendy would turn into Greta Thunberg, stop blabbing about growing up, and start a revolution or even a small riot. No dice. Instead, she and the others keep yelling and spinning their wheels as Zeitlin — who proves more sentimental about childhood than Barrie — keeps the parts whirring, casting about for meaning that never fully comes.WendyRated PG-13 for unsupervised shenanigans and a severed hand. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. More

After hopping around his native Australia last fall with his first stand-up show in six years, the comedian Josh Thomas returned home to Los Angeles. Now he’s taking his show on a U.S. tour through March 11, as well as preparing for a potential second season of “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay,” his Freeform show, which debuted in January and is available on Hulu.Working on these projects meant not leaving his house for days at a time, as he read scripts and rewrote jokes, a process he describes as being like “trying to put on a wet bathing suit”Distraction was never far away, though: “Cheer” distracted him from an Oscar party the night of Feb. 9; RuPaul hosting “Saturday Night Live” distracted him from his work; and Twitter distracted him from everything (“Twitter has been a real problem to me,” Thomas explained).Over the course of two housebound days, Thomas tracked his cultural diary. These are edited excerpts from a conversation.Monday MorningOn Sunday night I went to an Oscars party, not an interesting party. You know those nights where you’re out, but you just want to get home to finish your show? Well, I had one of those nights with “Cheer.” So I got home at about 1 a.m. and then I watched the final episode of “Cheer,” just alone, eating leftover curry. I was very drunk and I did cry — when La’Darius’s brother sheds a single tear? That was the end of me.Then when I woke up in the morning, hung over, I watched Seth Meyers’s “A Closer Look” segment from his show the night before. At the moment I’m just addicted to American politics, so I’ll watch pretty much all the late-night show monologues the next morning. I really love Seth Meyers, and his “Closer Look” is great because it gets me in deep a little bit. I like “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” because he’s really funny and “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” is probably my favorite, but she’s only weekly.Then my producing partner Stephanie [Swedlove] called me, because I’ve got to read new writer scripts. Her ringtone is “Work Bitch” by Britney Spears, which always just makes me laugh. On Stephanie’s phone I set it so that when I ring her, “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon plays.I watched a lot of YouTube and then I washed my dog (we sit in the bath together) and I listened to Lizzo. All I really do is listen to Lizzo.And I read the scripts. I like reading new writers’ scripts because you get to see what writers think new shows should be, before they get churned through the industry. And generally their scripts are not about rich people, but a lot of shows on TV, including mine, are about rich people, which I think is interesting.Monday AfternoonAnd then I looked at Twitter. At the moment, I find it really hard to look away from what’s happening in the world. I was off Twitter for four months last year but now I’m back in and it’s just hell, actually. Because Twitter is always telling you what’s wrong with everything and then someone else is like, “Actually that is not the real thing that is wrong with that, the real thing that is wrong with that is this” and it’s suffocating. And then occasionally there’s porn and occasionally something quite whimsical and funny. In many ways, it plays into my ADHD really well.My day was a real hodgepodge: I’ll watch a little something and then I’ll get mad at myself for not working and then I’ll do some work for my stand-up tour and then I’ll decide that it’s very important to catch up on RuPaul Charles hosting “Saturday Night Live.” I mean, if someone gay does someone, then I’ll watch it. And I love RuPaul, obviously.Monday EveningSo I worked more on my standup tour, and then I thought I should watch the Oscars movies. I’m not on the cutting edge of new entertainment. I’m not one of those people that’s going out trying to find the hot new things. So I usually haven’t seen anything until very late.I was going to watch “Parasite,” obviously, but I was watching on my laptop in my bed and I thought maybe that wasn’t the best situation to watch “Parasite” in, so I decided to watch “Judy” because I thought it was going to be fun. It was fine.I’m single, you know, so I watch a lot in the evenings. From 6 p.m. to midnight I’m just watching so much TV. So after “Judy” I watched Conan, and then I watched a new episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is a show that I really like, and then I watched “McMillions,” which is this new HBO thing about McDonald’s. And then I went to bed, finally, around 1 a.m.Tuesday MorningThe next day I did a lot more work. I watched Seth’s new “Closer Look” again. Then I listened to this podcast I was supposed to be a guest on that it turns out I’m obsessed with, called “Off Menu.” It’s about your dream meal and it’s really lovely.And I listened to my Spotify playlist. I only want music that I’ve heard before, I don’t want new music. So I’ve been playing this 24 song playlist on a loop since October. It’s comforting. The theme of this playlist is songs that my ex-boyfriend used to play. There’s no men, only female singers. One of my favorites is “Let’s Go to the Beach” by this Australian band Banoffee. There’s also some Des’ree and “I Try” by Macy Gray.Tuesday EveningThen finally I watched “Parasite,” and the subtitles stopped me looking at my phone for two hours, which was a real thrill. Subtitled movies are going to be my new thing, I think.I also watched the documentary “American Factory,” which is very much about the American working class. I watched the films while the [New Hampshire] primary was happening and so I was watching that via Twitter too. And I watched a bit of Elizabeth Warren’s speech, and read everyone’s opinions. This was interesting because both films have themes of class, which I feel like Americans don’t really talk about much, but in this Democratic primary is really a big deal.So it was a lot of subtitles, and then a lot of ideas about our society and where it’s going, which I really like. I don’t watch a lot of scripted stuff; I like things that feel real. My scripted stuff is as realistic as possible and pretty issues-focused.I watched Julia Louis-Dreyfus on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” If she’s on TV I’ll have a look, of course. And then I went to bed around 1 a.m. again. More

In “Straight Up,” a comedy from the writer-director James Sweeney, the 20-something Todd (Sweeney) develops a theory: Maybe he isn’t gay, as he has always thought. Maybe others’ presumptions of his gayness became a self-fulfilling prophecy.His friends scoff at the idea that he might be attracted to women. His therapist (Tracie Thoms) appears vaguely skeptical. But Todd gets to test the notion when he encounters Rory (Katie Findlay), an aspiring actress. They hit it off with the sort of effortless, hours-spanning conversation that could only happen with soul mates (or, you know, really good friends).[embedded content]Todd warns Rory that people tend to assume he’s gay; she has suspicions of her own. But they otherwise get along wonderfully. And so “Straight Up” becomes the story of a (probably) gay man and a straight woman who try to have something like a romantic relationship.“Straight Up” seems to recognize that such a setup is riper for tragedy than farce. The pair attend a costume party dressed as Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor’s characters from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” — unaware that the couple’s sexual standoff in the original play stemmed from the husband’s repressed homosexuality.Sweeney and Findlay are both likable actors, and a description of “Straight Up” — to say nothing of its title — makes it sound more high-concept than it is. But the movie comes across as a rush of bouncy one-liners and arch formal conceits. You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don’t sound rehearsed.Straight UpNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

We’re introduced to Leigh (Bethany Anne Lind) in her dank auto shop, gazing, panic-stricken, at the body of a man and his spreading pool of blood. The murder, she will later claim, was in self-defense; but, instead of burning, burying or drowning the corpse — an oversight her estranged father (Will Patton), the town sheriff, will furiously berate her for — Leigh wraps it neatly in plastic sheeting and drives it to the man’s home.“He’s in the shed,” reads the note she leaves in the mailbox for his son and girlfriend. “I’m sorry.”[embedded content]Such is the setup for “Blood on Her Name,” a greasy thriller from Matthew Pope that, notwithstanding Lind’s impressive, high-anxiety performance, plays like a checklist entitled “How Not to Get Away With Murder.” Everything Leigh does is stupid, from her carelessness with fingerprints and jewelry, to her inability to keep her mouth or her facial expressions under control. Her teenage son (Jared Ivers) is on parole, his father is in jail, and Leigh has a habit of popping pills and alienating those — like her concerned mechanic (Jimmy Gonzales) — who want to help.Oppressively dark and unrelentingly intense, “Blood on Her Name” packs down-and-dirty performances, and a few surprises, into a tight 85 minutes. Almost everyone here is morally compromised, if not completely lawless, and the movie creates a world where poverty and violence are genetic inheritances. Pope and his co-writer, Don M. Thompson, are most interested in what happens when conscience gets the better of common sense, and human decency asserts itself over the will to survive. In that sense, Leigh’s incompetence isn’t a burden: It’s a kind of hope.Blood on Her NameNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

Vaginal bleeding plays a potent supporting role in Alex Thompson’s “Saint Frances,” unsurprising in a movie this deeply invested in the everyday joys and agonies of being a woman.Covering one difficult, transformative summer in the life of a dissatisfied waitress named Bridget (played by the film’s writer, Kelly O’Sullivan), the movie gently queries our assumptions about what constitutes female success. At 34, Bridget worries that time is running out on finding a career, landing a life partner and, especially, having children. She’s not sure she wants these things, she just knows she’s expected to want them. Her parents hint darkly about her aging uterus, and her younger, more relaxed lover (Max Lipchitz) wonders why she refuses to define their connection as a relationship.[embedded content]Then, almost simultaneously, she makes a momentous life decision and is hired by a mixed-race lesbian couple (Charin Alvarez and Lily Mojekwu) as a nanny to Frances (Ramona Edith-Williams), their precocious six-year-old. Initially a rather inept caregiver, Bridget gradually warms to her lively charge and her stressed-out employers. More important, she begins to make peace with herself.With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, “Saint Frances” weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance. Some scenes can feel forced and even a little hectoring (as when a breastfeeding mother is verbally attacked in a public park). Others, though, are so modestly insightful — and the performers so appealingly natural — that we forgive the occasional heavy hand. Bridget’s bond with the family feels organic and restorative, the movie making the argument that family is wherever you find it. And if Bridget still lacks direction, it could be because she no longer needs one.Saint FrancesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. More