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    Val Kilmer in ‘Batman Forever’ Was a True 1990s Moment

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    The actor took only one turn in the famous batsuit. That film, “Batman Forever,” couldn’t be a more representative artifact of its era.In June 1995 a pop confection hit thousands of movie screens. It seemed to embody what both boosters and critics have identified as that decade’s end-of-history nonchalance. It was, of all things, a Batman movie. And holding it together, the sturdy straight man surrounded by abject goofiness, was Val Kilmer, the actor who died at the age of 65 on Tuesday.“Batman Forever” was the third movie in a franchise kicked off in 1989 by the director Tim Burton’s brooding “Batman.” Starring Michael Keaton in the title role and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, “Batman” was, by the standards of the time, dark for a comic-book flick.Burton’s and Keaton’s follow-up, “Batman Returns” (1992), failed to repeat the original’s box-office success. So a new director, Joel Schumacher, was brought in expressly to make what one journalist termed a “Batman Lite.” Schumacher was a fan of Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 western “Tombstone” and tapped him as his leading man.This was not Burton’s Batman. “There’s not much to contemplate here,” the critic Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, “beyond the spectacle of gimmicky props and the kitsch of good actors (all of whom have lately done better work elsewhere) dressed for a red-hot Halloween.”Schumacher favored showy camera angles and a garish color scheme. The villains — Jim Carrey played the Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones was Two-Face — were freely permitted to chew the scenery. Batman’s suit had nipples. The movie was weird.It was also a box-office smash. It broke an opening-weekend record and eventually brought in more than $336 million worldwide, besting its predecessor by tens of millions of dollars.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

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      in Television

      Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper Talk About the Netflix Hit ‘Adolescence’

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      In an interview, the actors Owen Cooper and Stephen Graham explore the social and personal impact of the Netflix hit about a teenager accused of murder.In the three weeks since “Adolescence” arrived on Netflix, the drama about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a schoolgirl after seeing misogynistic content online has soared in popularity. It has also made a star out of Owen Cooper for his portrayal of the teenager, Jamie Miller.Even so, Cooper, 15, had to return to high school in northern England on Monday.In a video interview this week, Cooper said that his first day back was “a bit mad,” with lots of attention from younger children. Tuesday was better, he said, with only “a bit of bother.”As Cooper discussed the complexity of his newfound fame, Stephen Graham, the actor who plays Owen’s father and was also taking part in the interview, sat up, alert. “What kind of ‘bother’?” Graham said, sounding like a concerned parent.Cooper explained that it wasn’t anything serious, just children coming up to him, shouting his name, then rushing off. To which Graham replied with relief and a smile, “Ah, just some silly bollocks.”“The reason I wanted to be an actor,” said Graham, who co-created the show, was “to make dramas that made me think.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesCritics have highlighted that sort of bond between the two actors’ characters as one of the reasons for the show’s success, although it has also drawn praise for stirring debate about whether children’s access to social media should be restricted or smartphones banned from schools.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

    • 125 Shares34 Views

      in Music

      A Concept Album About Dennis Hopper? The Waterboys Made One.

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      The latest addition to Mike Scott’s eclectic catalog features Fiona Apple, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and more exploring the life of the actor and director.In 1977, several years before Mike Scott founded the Waterboys, the band he still leads today, he started Jungleland. At the time, he was an 18-year-old obsessed with music and literature, living in Ayr, a seaside town on the west coast of Scotland. Jungleland wasn’t a band — it was a fanzine named after a Bruce Springsteen song in which Scott wrote about the artists that enthralled him, including the Clash, Richard Hell and the Sex Pistols.Scott, 66, has always worn his enthusiasms on his sleeve, and as the singer, songwriter, guitarist and only consistent member of the Waterboys, he has used his songs to broadcast his passions. The band’s first single from 1983, “A Girl Called Johnny,” is a breathless, saxophone-drenched ode to Patti Smith. The Waterboys’ biggest hit, “The Whole of the Moon,” is an exuberant celebration of the power of inspiration itself.“I like to be absorbed in the things that fascinate me,” Scott said during a video call from his home in Dublin. “Then I go all the way.”This is certainly the case with the Waterboys’ new album, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” due Friday. The record follows the arc of Hopper’s life, from growing up in Kansas through the peaks and valleys of his career in Hollywood to his death in 2010. “It’s not a tribute record,” Scott said. “It’s an exploration. It’s not just Dennis’s story. It’s a story of the times.”It’s also the kind of unconventional turn that has become a hallmark of Scott’s career. In the mid-1980s, “The Whole of the Moon” and the album that spawned it, “This Is the Sea,” showcased the Waterboys’ ability to synthesize Scott’s punk-rock influences and literary aspirations on an arena-sized scale, drawing comparisons with bands like U2 and Simple Minds, and kicking off a mini-movement named after a Waterboys song: big music. But rather than build on this success, Scott reinvented the band, decamping to Ireland, immersing himself in Celtic folk music and making an equally compelling but completely different follow-up album, “Fisherman’s Blues,” in 1988.“It’s just my character,” Scott said. “I want to keep finding new things I can do that I couldn’t do last year. That’s my No. 1 aim. I’m like Sherlock Holmes. If he doesn’t have a case to solve, he gets depressed.”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

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      in Music

      The Conductor Joana Mallwitz Mixes Intensity With Approachability

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      Joana Mallwitz, one of Germany’s fastest rising stars, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut in “The Marriage of Figaro” on Monday.The conductor Joana Mallwitz rehearsing at the Met.The conductor Joana Mallwitz apologized for arriving late for her interview at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, but she had needed to catch her breath after rehearsal. “Conducting is sweaty business,” she said, as she settled into a straight-backed posture on a sofa in the press lounge, her striking hands with long fingers elegantly crossed at the wrists.On Monday, Mallwitz, 39 — the music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest rising classical stars in her native Germany — makes her Met debut with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” She has been in close relationship with that opera since her first job, at 19, at Theater Heidelberg, a small house where her duties included “everything that one does as Kapellmeister,” she said: rehearsing singers, playing the continuo part on the harpsichord and, when needed, jumping in at short notice to conduct a performance.“You develop a relationship with such a work,” she said of “Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”“You develop a relationship with such a work,” Mallwitz said of “The Marriage of Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAt the end of that afternoon’s rehearsal she had worked with the orchestra on minute details in the overture, finessing dynamic contrasts and highlighting the shock value — “like rock music,” she told the musicians — of the loud outbursts that interrupt the garrulous bubbling fast notes. The key, she said afterward, was to “bring a certain energy into the sound that doesn’t become hard when the playing gets louder.”Working with the Met musicians, she said, was a joy because after fine-tuning a small section, “they are able to feel what my style is and transfer it” to the rest of the piece. “They’re able to pick it up because mentally, too, they are virtuosos,” she said. “It’s incredible what this orchestra is able to deliver in terms of tempo and transparency and diversity of effects. You want to draw on all of that but also achieve a combination of lightness and drama.”Lightness and drama, approachability and uncompromising seriousness in her approach to a score — these are at the heart of Mallwitz’s striking rise to prominence in a profession long dominated by men. In 2014, at 28 she became the music director of Theater Erfurt, the youngest conductor to hold such a position in Europe. In 2018, she took over the leadership of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution that had also served as a springboard for the conductor Christian Thielemann when he was 23. In her second season there she was voted best conductor of the year by a jury of German critics. A celebrated run of Mozart’s “Cosí Fan Tutte” at Salzburg in 2020 catapulted her to international attention.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 Shares32 Views

      in Music

      Lucy Dacus on the Art of Frames (and Busting Out of Them)

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      The singer and songwriter chats about the movies (“Paris, Texas”), music (SZA) and books (“Healing Back Pain”) that shape her world as she releases her fourth LP.In the music video for “Ankles,” the first single from Lucy Dacus’s fourth studio album, the singer plays a pleasure-seeking Victorian-era damsel that has escaped from a painting to gallivant around Paris. Her foil is a stern museum guard trying to corral her back into her frame.Dacus came up with the idea as a way to reflect the push and pull between curiosity and restraint in the song. Also, she said, “The song is pretty horny, so it’s not like I was going to recreate what happens.”For Dacus, frames have become a recurring motif. She used one in a video for a song from her second album, “Historian,” when she was a rising indie singer-songwriter. And she poses in one on the album cover for her latest LP, “Forever Is a Feeling.”“Framing is such a huge part of art,” Dacus said. “What are you putting in the confines of the frame? What are you filling in time? What are you putting in front of people?”The shape of “Forever Is a Feeling” emerged when Dacus realized she was writing songs about love. (Then she wrote more of them.) It’s her first solo album since boygenius — the indie-rock supergroup she formed with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker — grew to an arena-size, Grammy-winning band. (Dacus recently revealed that Baker is the subject of one of those love songs.)In a phone interview before flying to Paris to perform, Dacus shared the cultural essentials that help fill her life. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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

    • 175 Shares63 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ Had a Long Journey Back to the Big Screen

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      Almost two decades ago a pair of fresh-faced British sketch comedians armed with a good idea and an able director with a cache of film stock made a charming short film called “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.” The 25-minute outing won a prize at the 2008 Edinburgh Film Festival, was nominated for a BAFTA and announced the arrival of Tim Key and Tom Basden. The two spent the intervening years turning their penchant for absurdist humor into sketch comedy shows, radio episodes, stand up poetry tours and sidekick roles in film and television.But they never returned to Wallis island.Until now. Older, grayer and maybe a little wiser, the friends, onetime roommates and longtime collaborators have expanded their initial concept into a feature film, “The Ballad of Wallis Island.” The film, which ruminates on love and loss, revolves around a musician who is hired by a two-time lottery winner to perform a private gig on an isolated island. It feels like it could have been created only by filmmakers with a little road beneath their feet.“I don’t really regret us not making it 17 years ago, because we just might not have been able to do it right,” said Key, who wrote the script with Basden and plays the rich eccentric, Charles Heath, who prattles through conversations with a stream of nonsensical puns. “I think when we came back to it, we were more ready to make a decent fist of it.”Basden, Mulligan and Key in “The Ballad of Wallis Island.”Focus Features The original director, James Griffiths, returns, and the main conceit of the short remains: The musician, Herb McGwyer (Basden), arrives at the harborless, fictional Wallis Island (portrayed in and around Carmarthenshire, Wales) to perform a concert for his eager audience of one (Key’s Heath). To build out the story, Basden and Key introduce Nell Mortimer, played by Carey Mulligan, McGwyer’s former singing partner and lover from their short-lived duo McGwyer Mortimer. When she shows up on the island unbeknown to McGwyer — whose solo career hasn’t gone as planned — the film gains its emotional heft.“You get a window into what they were like when they were young and into the way that life has or hasn’t messed with their expectations as young people in the music industry, and as a young couple in love,” said Basden, who also wrote the songs for the film. “When you engage with that meaningfully, I think you’re always going to end up having to write about the loss, the heartbreak and the regret that goes with relationships in your 20s.”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 Shares58 Views

      in Music

      Scowl Made Hardcore Purists Angry. Now the Band Is Doubling Down.

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      The punk band fronted by Kat Moss wound its way from a local scene to national attention. Its second album, “Are We All Angels,” unpacks the pain of the journey.Last fall, on the second-floor stage of a cramped tavern called Neck of the Woods in San Francisco, Kat Moss was throwing elbows, shoving men twice her size into a packed circle pit and screaming into a microphone.Moss, the frontwoman for the Bay Area hardcore band Scowl, held her own. In the tight-knit circle of Northern California punks, this sweating, pulsing, tattoo-covered cluster of bodies were her people. Just before midnight, the crowd streamed out of the swampy bar into the cold air, bruised and smiling. In this crowd, stage diving, moshing and the occasional foot to the face all come from a place of love.But as Scowl’s star has risen from a group of underdogs playing house shows across the West Coast to a broader national audience, Moss and her four bandmates have been engaged in a different kind of fight — one with the gatekeepers who believe the band isn’t hardcore enough.The band was blasted on message boards and social media in 2023, accused of “selling out” when it struck a brand deal with a corporate sponsor. (Many hardcore contemporaries have done similar ones.) The group later took heat for putting out what some saw as pop sensibility masquerading as punk. Scenesters chafed when megastars like Post Malone and Hayley Williams of Paramore said they were fans of the group. And some of the most aggressive purists didn’t appreciate Moss’s proclivity for posting beauty tutorials on her personal social media channels. (Her mop of neon lime hair is hard to miss in a crowd.)Scowl isn’t shying away from the conflict. Instead, its members want to push the limits of their sound and what they feel hardcore music can be. With Scowl’s second album, “Are We All Angels” out April 4, the group is moving from the stalwart hardcore label Flatspot Records to Dead Oceans — home to Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski. It has enlisted Will Yip, a producer known for broadening the sound of punk bands. And it has leaned more into a slower, heavier sound with grungy riffs and catchier choruses.Scowl’s members want to push the limits of their sound and what they feel hardcore music can be. Mariano Regidor/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe 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 Shares92 Views

      in Theater

      In ‘Streetcar,’ Patsy Ferran Gives Blanche a Nervy New Read

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      The London-based actress has been heralded as one of the most talented of her generation. Still, she worried audiences would balk at her “very unconventional Blanche.”Patsy Ferran will not judge a book by its cover. But covers are important to her. “See?” she said, palming a copy of a Barbara Kingsolver novel at a Brooklyn branch of McNally Jackson bookstore. “Such a good cover. Aesthetics do matter.”Ferran, a London-based actress, is currently starring in Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, just up the road from the store. A latecomer to reading for pleasure, Ferran picked up fiction, particularly American fiction, during the pandemic lockdowns and has yet to put it down. Currently working her way through Percival Everett’s “James,” with Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” cued up next, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t buy any more books. But the shelves were calling.“I kind of explore cities via book shops,” she said. “That and good coffee.”In the store, Ferran, lively, shrewd and lightly self-deprecating, (“I do my own glam,” she said wryly as she shook out her hair from a woolly hat) picked up and put down several recent paperbacks, enthusing about their feel. “British paperbacks are so stiff, you have to crowbar them open, which I hate,” she said. Ferran decided that she might buy just one. Or two. Certainly not more than three.Ferran is starring opposite Paul Mescal in Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which is running through April 6 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesFerran, 35, made her professional debut just after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in a production of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.” More stage roles followed, including her first lead, as Alma in “Summer and Smoke,” also by Williams, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. “This young actor is a genuine marvel, as hilarious as she is heartbreaking,” one critic wrote of the performance. Soon she was recognized as one of the most talented stage actresses of her generation.Small and quick, with dark, curling hair, Ferran was an unusual choice for Blanche. A great American heroine, “an aging Southern belle who lives in a state of perpetual panic about her fading beauty” in Williams’s words, Blanche is typically played by willowy, languorous blondes. (Recent New York Blanches include Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson). Ferran knows this. She worried that audiences would dismiss her as the wrong cover for this particular book.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

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      in Music

      Bon Iver Is Happy (and Sexy) Now. It Took a Lot of Work.

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      What you notice right away on “Sable, Fable,” Bon Iver’s fifth studio album and first since 2019, is its directness, its brightness and, in some places, its lust. Justin Vernon — the band’s frontman and creative engine — is singing more directly than ever before, and the production captures hope, thrills and a kind of unselfconscious exultation.These have not typically been hallmarks of Bon Iver albums, known as elegant but abstract statements of emotional claustrophobia and fantastical catharsis. They have made Vernon, 43, a much-lauded folk mystic, and also an in-demand collaborator for in-the-know superstars — including Kanye West (now Ye), Taylor Swift, Charli XCX and Zach Bryan.But those same qualities have also pigeonholed Vernon and his music as vessels for pain and anxiety — his own and, as it turned out, a lot of other people’s as well.Eventually, the weight of that burden became overwhelming. “I think there was a good 10 years where it felt like somebody had a boot on my chest from before I woke up until after I fell asleep,” Vernon told Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli in a recent interview on Popcast, The New York Times’s music podcast.During the pandemic, Vernon began reckoning with the fact that Bon Iver — as acclaimed, popular and crucial to his social ties as it had become — might have been keeping him down as a person.So he made some changes: He wound down Bon Iver as a touring outfit; he quit smoking cigarettes (after a five-day rehab); and he began spending time away from his Wisconsin home, in Los Angeles, with no agenda other than to decompress.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