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      in Movies

      ‘The Interview’: Change Can Be Beautiful. Just Ask Will Ferrell and Harper Steele.

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      How well do we know our friends? Our neighbors? Ourselves? In the new documentary “Will & Harper,” which opens in select theaters on Sept. 13 and will stream on Netflix starting Sept. 27, the superstar comedian Will Ferrell and his best friend and frequent collaborator, Harper Steele, take a New York-to-California road trip together to try to answer those questions.Listen to the Conversation with Will Ferrell and Harper SteeleThe superstar comedian and his best friend and collaborator discuss the journey that deepened their friendship.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppHitting the highway on a quest for meaning is a classic American story, but it hasn’t been told in exactly this fashion before: Steele is a trans woman who came out to her friends, including Ferrell, two years ago. That was after years as a comedy writer, many of them at “Saturday Night Live,” where they both worked and where Steele eventually became a head writer. The two friends explained to me that the show wasn’t always the easiest environment, though they have different reasons for saying so. They also experienced some ups and downs on their cross-country drive, which gave them a chance to talk through what Steele’s transition means for their friendship and to get a clearer sense of how their fellow Americans feel about transgender identity.As you might expect, the film’s soul-searching often comes wrapped in laughs. But given the politicization of trans rights, even situations the duo set up for silly comedy can turn tense. There’s a key scene in the documentary in which Steele and Ferrell stop for what they hope is a goofy eating challenge at a rowdy Texas steakhouse. It does not wind up being goofy.That scene, and this emotionally wide-ranging film, evoked feelings in me that work by Will Ferrell hasn’t before. (And I say that as someone who will happily argue for the deeper resonance of his gloriously idiotic “Step Brothers.”) But as “Will & Harper” the movie and Will and Harper the people attest, change can very often be a good and necessary thing — a funny one too.The hard-hitting first question: How did you become friends? Ferrell: We became friends at “Saturday Night Live.” We were hired in the summer or fall of 1995, and we were all this brand-new group. No one knew each other, and one day Harper and I went to lunch. A very pivotal lunch for me. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      With New FX Sitcom ‘English Teacher,’ Brian Jordan Alvarez Takes Another Leap

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      For over a decade, Brian Jordan Alvarez has been bootstrapping his way across platforms and screens big and small, collecting fans and followers.In the early days, he starred with friends in short comedic sketches he posted on YouTube. Then in 2016, on a paltry budget of around $10,000, he created “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo,” a five-part comedy web series about a misfit group of queer friends in Los Angeles. Alvarez wrote and directed it, and starred as the title character.“Caleb Gallo” quickly found an audience. It was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival that year, earned a Gotham Award nomination and topped IndieWire’s list of best web series of 2016, edging out Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” The next year, Alvarez landed a recurring role in the three-season revival of “Will & Grace,” as the fiancé, then husband, of Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes).In 2023 he leveled up again, starring alongside Allison Williams in the horror comedy box office smash “M3gan” and reaching new heights of virality with a stable of absurdist face-filtered characters. The most famous of them, the bug-eyed, duck-lipped pop star TJ Mack, delighted millions on TikTok and Instagram with the earworm “Sitting” (pronounced “Sittim”).Alvarez plays an English teacher at a high school in Austin, Texas, who is navigating relationships and discussions of hot-button topics.Richard Ducree/FXNow Alvarez is taking another major leap: “English Teacher,” a feel-good sitcom with an edge that he created and stars in, debuts on FX on Sept. 2.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Adam Sandler’s ‘Love You’ and Other Netflix Specials to Stream Now

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      The star is in fine, filthy form under the direction of Josh Safdie (“Uncut Gems”). Hannah Berner and Langston Kerman also deliver standout hours.Adam Sandler, ‘Love You’(Stream it on Netflix)When Barack Obama made a reference to the size of Donald J. Trump’s, ahem, crowd size, in his speech last week at the Democratic National Convention, he brought a category of lewd joke into the absolute center of the mainstream. This unlikely achievement owes a debt to Adam Sandler, who has been consistently committed to the art, at least since writing a dirty rhyme in a classmate’s middle-school yearbook.Now 57, Sandler is still at it, and judging by his new special, “Love You,” he hasn’t lost a step. Before he became a huge star, Sandler made proudly filthy and beloved comedy albums full of irreverent sketches that chronicled subjects like an extremely long bout of urination. This new special can feel like a throwback to that era. If anything, age allows new avenues for potty humor. Have you considered the bountiful comic implications of how botoxing away the wrinkles on a penis could lead to mistaking a flaccid member for an erect one? Adam Sandler has.“Love You” begins with Sandler heading to a stand-up show and everything going wrong. His car’s windshield gets busted, and then he requires a last-second costume change. There are tech issues. From his car to the dingy hallway backstage, we see him, via frenetic, crooked camerawork, being bombarded by people making demands — some annoying, others disturbing, all gradually ramping up a vague sense of anxiety.If it feels as if it’s a sequel to “Uncut Gems,” that may be because the special is directed by Josh Safdie, who along with his brother, Benny, made that jittery, giddily caffeinated drama, a high-water mark of late-career Sandler. Whereas Benny Safdie followed that up by collaborating with Nathan Fielder on the TV show “The Curse” to push his genre-blurring style in more narratively complex directions, Josh wasted no time putting his mark on the aesthetic of another comedy star.Sandler’s last special, “100% Fresh” (2018), was a key stage in his transformation from critically dismissed superstar of man-child comedies to widely beloved éminence grise. He hasn’t exactly matured — that would destroy his comedy — so much as allowed sentimentality to overtake the humor. He had help from family. His wife (who shows up at the end of the new special) and daughters are now as much regulars of his work as Chris Rock, David Spade and his old friends from “Saturday Night Live” are.Sandler’s family and old friends are regulars in his work. His pal Rob Schneider gets a cameo in his special doing an Elvis impression, the sweaty Vegas version.NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Mitzi McCall, Comedian Who Confronted Beatlemania and Lost, Dies at 93

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      She and her husband had the bad luck to make their “Ed Sullivan Show” debut the same night as the Beatles. They bombed. But their careers would recover.In the decades after they made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” on Feb. 9, 1964, the comedy team of Mitzi McCall and her husband, Charlie Brill, had a successful career. They performed in nightclubs and on television; both individually and together, they acted on television, in films and onstage.But that single appearance remained an indelible memory for the couple: It was also the night the Beatles made their American TV debut, and that was all that the screaming young fans in the audience cared about. Their nearly three-and-a-half minutes in the national spotlight came moments before the Beatles returned for their second set. They bombed — in front of 73 million viewers.“We just about wanted to kill ourselves,” Ms. McCall told The Washington Post in 2004.“I think it’s hysterical,” Mr. Brill said in a phone interview. “We laid the biggest egg of all time.”Ms. McCall died on Aug. 8 in a hospital in Burbank, Calif. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by Mr. Brill.When their manager, Mace Neufeld, told Ms. McCall and Mr. Brill that they were going to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — a Sunday night staple that at the time was often a steppingstone to stardom — it seemed like the type of break a young act needed. And when Mr. Neufeld told them that they would be on the bill with the Beatles, Ms. McCall later recalled, “We weren’t really sure who they were.”Ms. McCall and Mr. Brill in a 1967 publicity photo. They performed together until the mid-1980s.via Brill familyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      How to Survive (and Maybe Conquer) the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

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      Nadia Quinn had been warned about bringing her show of wacky comic songs to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Facebook groups, Reddit posts and friends suggested that taking on the 77-year-old festival as an unestablished performer was too daunting.One episode of “Baby Reindeer,” the hit Netflix series that took off at the 2019 Fringe, mines the humiliation that Richard Gadd, the show’s creator, faced performing there in a pub. With nearly 3,500 shows and with comics and clowns vying for attention throughout the month of August, how would Quinn find a venue, housing and people to fill her seats for even a week? She had never even been to the festival, which has the potential to turn unknowns into stars.“Everyone is telling me you can’t understand the Fringe until you go to the Fringe,” Quinn said earlier this month before flying to Scotland from New York. “I’m hoping to make the right decisions and I’m very excited, but I also feel like throwing up every day, which I guess is part of the process.”You may have seen Quinn, a vibrant, vocally gifted actress in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” or on Broadway in the 2010 production of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” Maybe you’ve seen her on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” or in TV commercials, or at 54 Below, the Midtown cabaret venue. She has worked in New York for 22 years, performing original songs with Aaron Quinn, her husband. (A recent one, about making bongs out of just about anything, was a huge hit on TikTok before censors took it down.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Hannah Gadsby: Woof’ Review: A Comic’s Pet Themes

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      In a soul-baring new show at the Edinburgh Fringe, the Australian stand-up leans once again into fears, anxieties and mental health worries.The title of Hannah Gadsby’s new stand-up show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is “Woof,” but the Australian comic has a very specific type of dog bark in mind. It sounds like something between a burp and a cough. It’s impossible to spell, but if you had to, it might go something like “peuh.” Gadsby says it typically signals that the animal is about to go into a frenzy. As a metaphor for Gadsby’s state of mind, it’s inauspicious. Should we be concerned?Well, yes and no. For the most part, Gadsby’s new routine, at the Underbelly through Aug. 25, is a chill affair. Gadsby is on genial form, taking acerbic pot shots at Taylor Swift (“a can of Coke masquerading as a sorority cult”) and social media (“where neurotypical people go to experience the worst of autism”). There’s some pleasingly risqué material about the sex lives of lesbian soccer players that is too graphic to discuss here.But when the focus turns inward, the vibe shifts. Gadsby describes a sense of discombobulation and a kind of existential vertigo that comes with having achieved fame and fortune relatively late in life.“My bed is so comfortable,” Gadsby says, “and that keeps me up at night.”This is, of course, nothing new — there is always a lot of Hannah Gadsby in a Hannah Gadsby show. “Nanette,” the 2018 Netflix special that catapulted Gadsby from relative obscurity to stardom, drew heavily on harrowing personal experiences of gendered violence. “Douglas” (2020) explored Gadsby’s autism diagnosis. An online run-in with Netflix bosses, over a routine by Dave Chapelle that critics described as transphobic, cemented Gadsby’s status as a culture war lodestar, and inspired the 2024 comedy showcase, “Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda.”The story of that career trajectory is inextricable from the oeuvre itself, making Gadsby something like the Rachel Cusk of comedy. This inevitably brings a certain anxiety about shelf-life, and the specter of demise haunts this set. Gadsby, who uses they/them pronouns, notes that this is their first Fringe appearance in seven years, and playfully suggests that returning to the festival — known for showcasing up-and-comers — is a fall from grace. Later, Gadsby imagines angry Swifties ending their career. “There’s nothing more feminist,” they quip, “than getting canceled by other feminists.”Gadsby also fears they might be too low-key, or too idiosyncratic, to command sustained attention. “I’m not the right person for this success,” they say — but most famous people have felt this way at some point. Besides, that whimsical nature is precisely what people like, and in our increasingly fragmented mass culture it doesn’t really matter if your material doesn’t work for everyone. There are many publics.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Perry Kurtz, Comedian Who Appeared on ‘America’s Got Talent,’ Dies at 73

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      Mr. Kurtz, who was killed in a hit-and-run on Thursday, honed his routine over decades and eventually became a recognizable face at comedy institutions.Perry Kurtz, who worked stand-up comedy circuits for decades and appeared on “America’s Got Talent” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” died on Thursday night in a hit-and-run in Los Angeles. He was 73.A daughter, Zelda Velazquez, confirmed his death. Mr. Kurtz was crossing Ventura Boulevard when he was struck by a car, according to the authorities. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and the driver was later arrested.Mr. Kurtz was a familiar face in long-established comedy halls, such as the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, but rose to prominence on the national stage with an appearance on “America’s Got Talent” in 2013 in which he performed a rap wearing a silver suit that gleamed like a disco ball.The performance did not go over well with the judges, who eliminated him from the competition, but it fit a campy persona that Mr. Kurtz embraced.On “The Late Late Show With James Corden” in 2018, Mr. Kurtz walked onstage wearing thick suspenders and a Hawaiian shirt, a keytar hanging around his neck. He proceeded to play “Louie Louie,” made famous by the Kingsmen, using his tongue.“In 1979 I moved to San Francisco to pursue my dream,” Mr. Kurtz said in a 2022 interview with Shoutout LA. “Since then, the only job I’ve had is making people laugh.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Peter Marshall, Longtime Host of ‘The Hollywood Squares,’ Dies at 98

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      He played straight man to all manner of celebrities, asking questions on what was for many years the most popular game show on television.Peter Marshall, who coaxed cheeky rejoinders from celebrities like Burt Reynolds, Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers and Paul Lynde as the longtime host of “The Hollywood Squares,” for years one of the most popular game shows on television, died on Thursday at his home in Encino, Calif. He was 98.His wife of 35 years, Laurie Marshall, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Marshall, an actor, singer and comedian with an authoritative baritone, hosted “The Hollywood Squares” from 1966 until 1981. The show brought him four Daytime Emmy Awards.“The Hollywood Squares,” which stuffed celebrity guests and risqué humor into a daytime game show, was a variation on tic-tac-toe, played by two contestants on a set that featured a grid of nine squares rising above the stage, a celebrity guest seated in each.A contestant would choose a square, Mr. Marshall would ask the star inside it a question, and the star would usually respond with a quip — a zinger, in the show’s parlance — before giving a serious answer. The contestant would then tell Mr. Marshall whether he or she thought the star had answered correctly, and the square would be won if the contestant was right. The first contestant to complete a line won the game; the first to win two games won cash and prizes.The center square was reserved for the funniest celebrity; the comedian Paul Lynde occupied it for much of the show’s run.Mr. Marshall, center, with an early group of “Hollywood Squares” panelists. From left: Wally Cox, Abby Dalton, Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam.NBC, via Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More