Movies

Sign up for our Watching Newsletter to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox. As the streaming age has expanded and individual services have molded their identities, Hulu has found itself somewhat lost in the shuffle. Thought of first as a repository for new television […] More

Everyone in comedy is now either an internet star or an aspiring one.More so than any other artists, comics adjusted quickly to the new normal, with theaters reinventing themselves as online portals, clubs producing virtual stand-up sets and just about everyone performing on Instagram Live. Jim Gaffigan put his family dinners on YouTube, and Mike Birbiglia live-streamed the development of new jokes with Maria Bamford and John Mulaney. In one of the best pivots, Sam Morril and Taylor Tomlinson, who both recently released stand-up specials, started shooting quick funny videos chronicling a new couple cooped up together in quarantine, and it has grown into a very funny series.But the comedians doing the most assured work online didn’t need to adjust because they were already there, particularly those in the growing genre of “front-facing camera comedy”: short character sketches played directly to the camera. Owing a debt to the hectic editing of Tim and Eric and the influence of the defunct six-second-or-less platform Vine, these videos have gone viral for years, but with comedians and audiences stuck at home, they have replaced the special as the dominant comedy form of the Covid-19 crisis. In the constantly shifting ecosystem of young performers on Twitter and Instagram, the most vital voice to emerge during this anxious, isolating moment is that of Meg Stalter.Stalter, 29, has become essential escapist entertainment, an oasis of invigorating silliness in feeds dominated by wearying tragedy. Part of the reason is her staggering productivity. In the last two weeks alone, she started a new podcast, “Confronting Demons,” and performed nearly nightly hours on IG Live, including comic versions of a cooking show, a magic show, a motivational seminar and a master class on the art of seduction. She has also produced more than a dozen flamboyant new characters, from Cameile Orgasm, the self-described richest person in Beverly Hills, to your aunt who just realized she should be in quarantine — along with a bunch of random experiments like recreating a segment from “Sex and the City” and narrating a scene from a Marilyn Monroe movie.While live in-person comedy has vanished, the Meg Stalter Industrial Complex has filled the vacuum. And though producing such a titanic volume of material from her Brooklyn apartment will inevitably produce uneven results, there is an aesthetic through-line to her comedy, such a signature style that you see online comments refer to people as a Meg Stalter character. So who exactly is that?She tends to be verbose, oddly theatrical, preposterously can-do, the kind of person described as a bit much. Her characters are ordinary eccentrics who drop unusually funny names (like Hannikah) and find epiphanies in the mundane, like the artsy mom who takes up drawing again. She becomes so inspired that she develops a new resentment for her children, despairing that she can’t make anything beautiful since she produced such an ugly son. As ridiculous as her characters can be, Stalter approaches them with warmth. For a satirist, she has a big heart, jabbing her subjects without really going for the kill. There’s even a poignancy to how clueless they are. Think Catherine O’Hara in “Schitt’s Creek.”Typically accompanied by vivid eye makeup and subtle but pitch-perfect background music, her characters have an unexpected glamour, like the Parisian influencer who finds herself endlessly irresistible. “My morning routine is to make love to myself and then break an egg to celebrate,” she says in a buttery French accent. “After that, I like to fill up my bath with milk and look at it. I like to sit on a wooden chair for no reason.”Such absurd riffs tumble out of her mouth as quickly as Robin Williams erupted impressions. Comics tend to be either meticulously careful with language or freewheeling and improvisational, but Stalter somehow manages to be both at once. She often mispronounces words, but then commits to the mistake, making it amusing. Other times, she delights in the goofiest word choice. One of her extravagant characters, a grandly self-regarding femme fatale in her own mind, flirtatiously tells a man on a date: “There’s just one little problem: You were looking even more delicious than the rigatoni.”Then there’s this classic terrible wedding toast gone wrong: “Ezmerelda, you are hot, magic and did I mention hot?” she says, then returning to pasta comedy to address the groom. “Tortellini, you are average, brain-dead and more of a curse than magic. But opposites attract.”On her podcast, Stalter plays a version of herself that’s harsher than any of her characters, a fame-hungry nobody who keeps calling up comics, asking them to appear on her show, and when they turn her down, erupting in hostility. (Chelsea Peretti and Chris Gethard sent themselves up beautifully by insisting on their niceness.)Stalter does some more straightforward parodies like a satire of rom-com clichés, but what distinguishes her from her peers is an unpredictable surreal streak. Her videos start and end abruptly, and don’t build so much as evolve into a series of tangents with pivots that veer off into delightful lunacy. In a sketch about a woman who, in a misguided seduction, invited only one man to her birthday party, she gesticulates to her labored flirtation, then seems to be so delighted by her own waving arms that she makes them the main focus, transforming a conventional premise into deliriously abstract physical comedy.With an exception or two, Stalter has steered clear of focusing on the pandemic, though on Twitter and Instagram, where you can see comments right by her face, fans often say she helps them deal with isolation or even the virus itself. On Wednesday night on IG Live, with her hair in a bun surrounded by a beaded necklace, she played a loony psychic (“I followed an owl here and the rest is history”) who invited people to appear on a split-screen and have their futures told.One woman talked about losing her job and another slightly shaken teenager expressed worry about how the current chaos would change her college prospects. Stalter assured both that things would work out, that we’re in this together, and appeared increasingly aware of the cathartic purpose of her comedy. In one psychic reading, she seemed to get emotional comforting a girl, breaking character and saying: “I know this is a funny character but it’s more than that,” she said, adding. “People need magic right now.”In that moment, Meg Stalter sounded a bit like a Meg Stalter character. She also was speaking a truth. But she returned to artifice quickly, shifting into the inherent optimism of the voice of a mystical figure who believes enough in the future to read it on tarot cards.Six More to WatchThese funny men and women are especially good at “front-facing camera comedy” on social media.Eva VictorWith more than 300,000 followers on Twitter, she’s arguably the biggest star of this form, a magnetic performer whose motormouth characters evoke the comic anxiety of Roz Chast cartoons. Find her here on Twitter and here on Instagram.Alyssa LimperisGifted at accents and impressions, she has been hilarious recently as herself, capturing the hostility of a couple cooped up in at home and the difficulty of conversation over FaceTime, a crossover collaboration with Eva Victor that went viral. Find her here on Instagram.Noah FindlingA rising star with a knack for finding the right detail, particularly in beta male character types: the needy boyfriend, the younger sibling in a fight. Find him here on Instagram and here on Twitter.Carmen ChristopherA standout in New York’s weird comedy scene, he posted two very funny videos this month, satirizing Vice News and the life of a comic in quarantine. Find him here on Instagram and here on Twitter.Chris CalogeroHis cliché movie types (every expert hacker, the brutally meta character inserted into every horror film for a decade after “Scream”) are hilarious sketches that double as sharp movie criticism. Find him here on Instagram and here on Twitter.Grace KuhlenshmidtLeaning less on quick cuts than taut, maniacal monologues, she has a gift for hilarious snapshots of the unhinged, the deluded and the startlingly vengeful. Find her here on Twitter and to a lesser extent, here on Instagram. More

Lucia Bosé, an Italian actress in neorealist films of the 1950s who walked away from her career to marry the Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín, only to return to acting after they separated, died on Monday in Segovia, Spain. She was 89.Her death was announced on social media by her son, the singer and actor Miguel Bosé. Roberto Liberatori, who wrote a 2019 autobiography of Ms. Bosé, said the cause was pneumonia.After she won the Miss Italy beauty pageant in 1947, Ms. Bosé traveled to Rome and drew the attention of the directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Giuseppe De Santis. In 1950 she appeared in De Santis’s “Under the Olive Tree” and Antonioni’s first feature film, “Story of a Love Affair,”One of her most prominent parts was as Clara, a would-be actress who marries a film producer played by Gino Cervi in Antonioni’s “The Lady Without Camelias” (1953). The producer’s jealousy drives Clara into a film that ultimately bombs.Clara’s “vacuity is so intense and so destructive that it drives her to marry a man she doesn’t love, have an affair with a shameless celebrity-collector and to believe that she is a serious actress,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review in The New York Times in 1981, when the film played at the Public Theater. “Ms. Bosé is as appealing as the essential emptiness of Clara allows,” he added.Ms. Bosé traveled to Spain to film Juan Antonio Bardem’s “Death of a Cyclist” (1955), where she met Mr. Dominguín, Spain’s foremost bullfighter and a celebrity who was profiled by Ernest Hemingway in a series of articles in Life magazine in 1960 that eventually became the posthumously published book “The Dangerous Summer.”They married quietly in Nevada that year, and Ms. Bosé played important characters in two more films, Luis Buñuel’s “That Is the Dawn” and Glauco Pellegrini’s “Symphony of Love” (both 1956), before she stopped acting to raise their family. Ms. Bosé interrupted her retirement for a cameo in Jean Cocteau’s “The Testament of Orpheus” (1960) with Mr. Dominguín and Pablo Picasso, a family friend.Ms. Bosé and Mr. Dominguín separated in the late 1960s, causing a scandal in the conservative Spain of Francisco Franco. She soon returned to acting, appearing in modest roles in films like Federico Fellini’s “Fellini Satyricon” (1969), Jeanne Moreau’s directorial debut, “Lumière” (1976), and Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987).Ms. Bosé was born on Jan. 28, 1931, in Milan to Domenico Bosé, who worked on an industrial farm, and Francesca Borlani, a homemaker. She grew up in the city, sheltering in a small town in Lombardy when it was bombed during World War II.After returning to Milan she studied at a vocational school and worked at a bakery before winning the Miss Italy pageant — the future actress Gina Lollobrigida was a contestant — and moving to Rome.In addition to her son, her survivors include two daughters, Paola and Lucia González Bosé; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Raphael Minder and Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting. More

Stuart Gordon, a director best known for lavishly lurid horror films with a piercing sense of humor, notably the cult favorite “Re-Animator,” died on Tuesday in Van Nuys, Calif. He was 72.His wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, an actress who appeared in many of his films and with whom he founded the Chicago-based Organic Theater Company, said the cause was multiple organ failure brought on by kidney disease.Mr. Gordon’s generally low-budget films often combined the body horror of John Carpenter or David Cronenberg’s films with the titillation found in Roger Corman’s. He said that surprising moviegoers was an important part of his work, and he did his best to exceed the everyday terrors of many slasher movies.“There is a side of me that likes to break through clichés and wake people up,” Mr. Gordon told Rolling Stone in 1986.Before turning to film, he directed experimental plays at the Organic Theater Company in the late 1960s. The company produced original works, like the comic-book-themed trilogy “Warp,” one-third of which briefly made it to Broadway in 1973; it also staged the first production of David Mamet’s breakout play, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” in 1974.“Re-Animator” (1985), Mr. Gordon’s first feature film, was based on a serialized story about human revivification by H.P. Lovecraft. He wrote the adaptation with Dennis Paoli and William Norris.The movie centers on Herbert West, a medical student played by Jeffrey Combs (he would become a stock player of sorts for Mr. Gordon) who discovers a chemical reagent that returns dead bodies to life. His experiments with it yield ever more grotesque results, culminating in a gang of marauding undead. One unforgettable scene involves the severed head of a reanimated corpse and a captive young woman.“Re-Animator” was released without a rating, so the more gruesome and graphic bits were not censored, resulting in a limited run in theaters. But it reached a much broader audience on video, and many critics loved it.“‘Re-Animator’ has as much originality as it has gore, and that’s really saying something,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times when the movie opened in New York theaters. The film, she added, “has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality” and even “a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 percent of any ordinary moviegoing crowd.”Mr. Paoli, who also worked with Mr. Gordon on later Lovecraft adaptations, said in a telephone interview that the humor-horror hybrid in “Re-Animator” and other Gordon films was similar to that in his theater work, which often straddled the line between the serious and the hilarious.“If you watch someone laughing and you don’t hear them, it looks like they’re screaming,” Mr. Paoli said. “The fact is they’re both releases of tension, and Stuart was a genius at storing up that tension and then releasing it over the line in one direction or another.”That same combination of mordant comedy, graphic violence and cosmic horror turned up in Lovecraft derivations like “From Beyond” (1986), about a doctor who uses a device to see into alien dimensions and whose pineal gland bursts through his forehead; and “Dagon” (2001), about a village of human-fish hybrids who enjoy procreating with people and sometimes skinning them.Not all Mr. Gordon’s films were creature features. He, Brian Yuzna and Ed Naha came up with the story for the hit Disney film “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” (1989), and he was an executive producer of the sequel, “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid” (1992).He also made science fiction films, like “Fortress” (1992), about a high-tech prison in a dystopian future; and nightmarish dramas, like “Stuck” (2007), about a woman who crashes into a homeless man with her car while intoxicated, then drives home with him trapped in her windshield and barely alive.Mr. Gordon adapted the work of other authors, like Edgar Allan Poe (“The Pit and the Pendulum,” 1991) and Ray Bradbury (“The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” 1998). He returned to the work of Mr. Mamet with the film version of his one-act play “Edmond” (2005), about a man, played by William H. Macy, who renounces his strait-laced life and goes on a wild tear that ends with murder and a long prison sentence.To Mr. Gordon, the goal of supposedly highbrow theater was not much different from that of a blood-soaked horror film. “I have never separated art from having a good time,” he said in 1986.Stuart Alan Gordon was born in Chicago on Aug. 11, 1947, to Bernard and Rosalie (Sabath) Gordon. His father was a supervisor at a cosmetics factory, his mother a high school English teacher. He graduated from high school in Chicago before studying theater at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.At the university Mr. Gordon formed Screw Theater, an experimental troupe that incensed the college authorities with a 1968 production of “Peter Pan” that featured a nude dance sequence.Mr. Gordon and Ms. Purdy, who was in the show, were arrested after the second performance, and the university demanded that Mr. Gordon submit future scripts in advance and allow faculty members into every rehearsal. Mr. Gordon declined and left the university.He and Ms. Purdy married later that year, then founded the Organic Theater Company in Wisconsin. In 1969 they moved to Chicago, where the company first staged shows in a church.“Re-Animator” has lived on, spawning several comic book adaptations, film sequels (with which Mr. Gordon was not involved) and a stage musical, which he directed and for which he co-wrote the book.Mr. Gordon lived in Valley Glen, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters, Suzanna, Jillian and Margaret Gordon; a brother, David; and four grandchildren.Mr. Gordon maintained that his creative brand of violence was less detrimental to viewers than the comparatively sanitized killings in many action movies.“Violence should horrify,” he said in 1986. “If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong with it. It should not be seductive.” More