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      Taylor, Billie, Demi, Blackpink: The Pop Star Documentary Boom

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      It used to be that stars had to be reliably famous for a long time before documentary cameras chased them around. But everything is filmed now, anyhow, and pop stars are embracing this sort of serious treatment at earlier phases in their careers.In recent years, that’s meant entries from Taylor Swift, who used it to reset her public politics; Billie Eilish, who reinforced her relentless chill; Shawn Mendes and Ariana Grande, who mostly preened; and Blackpink, which took the chance to reveal more than the usual K-pop group.Perhaps the most extreme example is the current YouTube docu-series “Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil,” a stark and sometimes harrowing retelling of the pop star’s trials with addiction and sexual assault.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the documentary boom parallels the rise in social media self-documentation, how art is deployed in service of purported authenticity, and what happens when the person being documented is more in charge than the director.Guests:Simran Hans, a film critic at The ObserverCaryn Ganz, The New York Times’s pop music editor More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu and More in April

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our twice-weekly Watching newsletter here.)Ann Skelly in “The Nevers.”Keith Bernstein/HBONew to HBO Max‘Exterminate All the Brutes’Starts streaming: Apr. 7The filmmaker Raoul Peck, perhaps best-known for his Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” tackles his most ambitious project yet with the four-part cinematic essay “Exterminate All the Brutes,” based in part on Sven Lindqvist’s book of the same name about Europe’s domination of Africa and in part on the scholarly work of the historian and Indigenous rights activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Relying on a mix of clips from old movies and new dramatizations of historical incidents — all overlaid with the director’s discursive narration — Peck considers how pop culture and the literary canon have shaped the narratives around Indigenous people and their colonial invaders. Equal parts informative and provocative, this project is aimed at changing the way viewers think about who history’s heroes and villains are.‘The Nevers’Starts streaming: Apr. 11There’s a bit of steampunk and a lot of X-Men-like energy in “The Nevers,” a semi-comic action-adventure series created by Joss Whedon, the man behind “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly.” Whedon’s contributions have been downplayed by HBO’s promotional departments, in part because he left the production in the middle of its first season — and perhaps because of recent accusations of mental abuse from his past employees. Nevertheless, “The Nevers,” set in Victorian Britain, very much feels like one of his shows, with its alternately angsty and witty characters. Laura Donnelly plays Amalia True, a superhero who leads a team of strange and powerful women referred to by London aristocrats as “the touched.” As the ladies tackle supernatural phenomena, they also clash with an establishment that wants to keep them marginalized, because of what they can do and because of who they are.‘Mare of Easttown’Starts streaming: Apr. 18Kate Winslet plays a dogged small-town Pennsylvania police detective with a messy home life in “Mare of Easttown,” a crime drama created by Brad Ingelsby, a screenwriter of the films “Out of the Furnace” and “The Way Back.” As with Ingelsby’s movies, this mini-series uses a pulpy premise — a murder mystery — as an entry point to a complex and absorbing study of a place at once familiar and unique. The director Craig Zobel and a top-shelf cast (including Jean Smart as the heroine’s opinionated mother and Julianne Nicholson as her former high school basketball teammate) capture the limitations and comforts of a community where everyone knows each other’s painful secrets. The gray tones and the procedural plot resemble those of a grim European cop show, but the performances and dialogue exhibit a lot of vitality.Also arriving:Apr. 1“Made for Love”Apr. 13“Our Towns”Apr. 15“Infinity Train” Season 4Apr. 16“Mortal Kombat”Supposed Sasquatch footprints, as seen in “Sasquatch.”HuluNew to Hulu‘WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn’Starts streaming: Apr. 2Like many stories about cutting-edge business ideas, the saga of the real-estate-sharing company WeWork ultimately comes down to the disconnect between its bosses’ public ideals and the ugly practical realities of making money. Directed by Jed Rothstein, “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn” features a wealth of insider interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, all describing a start-up that began by touting a clever solution to the modern urban problem of overpriced office space but then tried to evolve into an entire unwieldy lifestyle brand. Rothstein’s film focuses mainly on the charismatic co-founder Adam Neumann, and how Neumann and his fellow execs were spending like billionaires while misrepresenting — even to their faithful employees — what was really happening.‘Sasquatch’Starts streaming: Apr. 20The journalist David Holthouse has spent much of his career investigating odd American subcultures, spending time with people whose lives have revolved around drugs, violence or the arcane. In the three-part docu-series “Sasquatch,” Holthouse heads into Northern California’s so-called Emerald Triangle — one of the most storied cannabis-growing regions of the world — to look into a legend he heard decades ago, about a trio of farmers who were dismembered by the infamous cryptid known as Bigfoot. The director Joshua Rofé follows Holthouse into the wild as he interviews locals who are enthusiastic about both marijuana and the paranormal. The stories they unearth are partly about eerie phenomena and partly about the very real dangers of a community teeming with crime.Also arriving:Apr. 3“Hysterical”Apr. 8“Glaad Media Awards”Apr. 9“The Standard”Apr. 12“Spontaneous”Apr. 15“Younger” Season 7Apr. 16“Fly Like a Girl”“Songbird”Apr. 21“Cruel Summer”Apr. 22“Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World”Apr. 25“Wild Mountain Thyme”Apr. 28“The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 4From left, Deborah Ayorinde, Melody Hurd, Shahadi Wright and Ashley Thomas in “Them.”Amazon StudiosNew to Amazon‘Them’Starts streaming: Apr. 9The first season of the new horror anthology series “Them” has the subtitle “Covenant,” referring to the rules for residents of a middle-class suburban subdivision in the early 1950s. Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas play a married couple with two young daughters, who move from North Carolina to an all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles looking for their piece of the American dream. They meet open hostility from their new neighbors (including the local housewives’ cruel ringleader, played by Alison Pill), while also being haunted by strange supernatural forces. Created by Little Marvin and produced by Lena Waithe, “Them” uses the discomfiting facts of racial discrimination to unsettle the audience, even before the nonhuman monsters arrive.Also arriving:Apr. 2“Moment of Truth”Apr. 16“Frank of Ireland”Apr. 30“Without Remorse”Justin Theroux and Melissa George in “The Mosquito Coast.”Apple TV+.New to Apple TV+‘The Mosquito Coast’Starts streaming: Apr. 30Justin Theroux is both a producer and the star of the mini-series “The Mosquito Coast,” an adaptation of an acclaimed 1981 novel by his uncle Paul Theroux. The show’s co-writers Neil Cross and Tom Bissell, with the director Rupert Wyatt, have updated the story to the 21st century, but its still about the idealistic and eccentric inventor Allie Fox, who hates modern technology as much as he detests American materialism. Chasing his dreams — and dodging the federal authorities — Allie packs his family onto a rickety boat and floats them down to Latin America, where he plans to live off the land. The TV version deviates sometimes significantly from the book, but its heart is the same: a rich portrait of a brilliant madman, and of the people he’s dragged into his delusions.Also arriving:Apr. 2“Doug Unplugs” More

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      ‘WeWork’ Review: The Sharing Economy or a Shared Delusion?

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      This documentary on the workspace start-up is a fast-paced, entertaining saga of relentless self-selling and a curious corporate culture.Getting freelancers to split a workspace and convincing them that they’re part of an exclusive club is a neat trick, but it’s only the first flicker of gaslighting visible in “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn,” a documentary that suggests that WeWork — the tech start-up, or is it a real-estate start-up? — owed its growth less to the sharing economy than to shared delusion.On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should. Instead, the movie relays a fast-paced, entertaining saga of WeWork’s relentless self-selling and what it portrays as a cultlike corporate atmosphere. (One interviewee, August Urbish, who worked at WeWork and lived in WeLive — a similar venture for short-term, semi-communal apartment rentals — says his “entire life was being propped up by the We community.”)Rothstein’s documentary never captures the appeal of the obnoxious guru at its center, Adam Neumann, a co-founder of WeWork who stepped down as chief executive in 2019. A title card says he declined to participate, but from what’s onscreen, he speaks (and maybe thinks) exclusively in motivational sound bites. Person after person testifies to his charisma, but it’s hard to understand how he persuaded people to join the company, rather than hit him in the head with a designer chair.The film is sharper when its subjects describe the financial maneuvering that enabled WeWork’s rise, which, as explained here, involved redefining measures of profitability into meaninglessness. The movie overextends itself, too, by implying, in its final beat, that, folly or not, WeWork’s vision of human interaction holds promise for a post-lockdown world.WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion UnicornNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Malni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore’ Review: Embracing Our Ghosts

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      This ethereal experimental documentary by Sky Hopinka is an essential portrait of contemporary Indigenous life.An essential portrait of contemporary Indigenous life that resists the touristic gaze, “Małni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore,” the debut feature from the Ho-Chunk artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, isn’t too concerned with whether we fully understand the traditions and rituals it entrancingly commits to screen. It refreshingly centers the Native perspective, and beckons audiences onto its wavelength by tapping into something more intuitive, the stuff of dreams.“You don’t have to say much,” says one of the film’s two subjects, Sweetwater Sahme, as she leads the filmmaker on a hike through the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, gesturing at the quivering foliage. “It’s a feeling, an energy. And there’s so much to look at.”The documentary, anchored in the Chinookan origin-of-death myth (a dialogue between a wolf and a coyote about the afterlife), separately follows two young parents — pregnant Sahme and Jordan Mercier, both friends of Hopinka’s — as they grapple with questions of legacy and identity.Subtitles switch between English and Chinook jargon, yet the oral component (including Hopinka’s narration) occasionally fades into the backdrop with sound design that amplifies the crackling of a fire, the bubbling and thrashing of the ocean and waterfalls.The natural world, with its never-ending tides and its cycles of life and death, provides a framework for the preservation of Indigenous culture, resilient despite its new forms and manifestations. An extended interlude sees a Native song and dance performed inside a school gymnasium. In voice-over, Sahme considers the link between her unborn child and her grandmother while a long canoe makes its way down a river lined with cranes and factories.An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.Malni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the ShoreNot rated. In English and Chinook jargon, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. On Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look, So You Can, Too

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      Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series.Of Ernest Hemingway, Ken Burns, left, said, “This is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated.” Lynn Novick said the moment for the series was apt: “We are living in times when we are re-evaluating all these icons from our past.”Kelly Burgess for The New York Times, Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesCould there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?Though his influence on generations of writers is inescapable, he has come to be seen as an avatar of toxic masculinity, the chest-thumping papa of American letters, sacrificing all to the work, headstrong and volatile, serially discarding one wife for another.And yet this contradiction is what made him interesting to the documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who have worked together on in-depth series such as “The Vietnam War” and “Baseball.”That Hemingway is a writer who has contributed so much to the form but who is also full of complexities — or, to borrow another electric word from our current moment, that he is “problematic” — only seems to have made him more of a draw.Burns’s and Novick’s new three-part series on Hemingway, which begins airing Monday on PBS, approaches the man and the writer without trying to tidy any of it up. The alcoholism; the womanizing; the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism and racism; the many, many shot lions and elephants — it’s all there. But there is also reverence for his literary gifts, a desire to remind us of them and even introduce new dimensions, such as Hemingway’s apparent interest in gender fluidity.Ernest Hemingway, pictured here in 1945, is the subject of a new documentary series on PBS.Art Shay / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of PhotographyIn a video interview from their homes last month, Burns and Novick seemed to revel in the challenge of reviving Hemingway and allowing his “mysteries,” as Burns put it, to coexist alongside the enduring myth of the man. They also discussed his relationships with women, what parts of him they see in themselves and the Hemingway book they always come back to. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why Hemingway now?KEN BURNS Well, you know, we don’t have a “now.” We were talking about Hemingway as early as the early ’80s. I found a scrap of paper from after we decided to do the Civil War that said, “Do Hemingway, Baseball,” and then it showed up on lists through the end of the aughts and into the teens. We didn’t know it was going to take six years to do. We don’t anticipate the timing of it. We just know that every project we work on will resonate in the present, because human nature doesn’t change.But you had to be aware that perhaps Hemingway wasn’t the sort of historical figure with whom a 2021 public would be eager to spend time.LYNN NOVICK We’re aware of the fact that he’s a controversial figure. And that there are people who are so put off by his public persona that they haven’t read his work or don’t want to read his work. But we are living in times when we are re-evaluating all these icons from our past. And there’s no better way to do that than looking at Ernest Hemingway. Some of it is very ugly, and very difficult. And if you’re a woman or a person of color, or you’re Jewish, or you’re Native American, there are going to be things in Hemingway that are going to be really, really tough. But he is so important as a literary figure and in terms of his influence that to ignore him seems to just avoid the problem.What remains most refreshing about his work was this ability he had to trust the reader so completely.BURNS It’s a beautiful thing. And the thing I go back to often is that this is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated. Joyce and Faulkner, they’re really super complicated. And he dared to impersonate simplicity. What he understood is that you could use these seemingly simple sentences, and they would be as pregnant as any long Joycean paragraph or Faulknerian sentence that goes on and on. So much was below the surface. And it requires you to go searching for meaning. It isn’t just how to order a French meal or fire a machine gun, it’s also about life and death and these fundamental human questions. And he’s saying, I’m not going to walk you through this. It’s mesmerizing to me, when it works. There’s nothing better.Behind-the-scenes filming of Hemingway’s manuscripts and typewriters at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.Jonah VelascoThe most surprising thing for me was the thread of gender fluidity that runs through the series and seems to upend everything we’ve come to think about Hemingway — the fact that he was willing to experiment with his sexuality and take on what he thought of as a female role.NOVICK I think the world first got a hint of this when the family published “Garden of Eden” posthumously in the 1980s. But I don’t think we fully appreciated what this said about him. Even when that was published. Now we have the framework to talk about it that we didn’t have as a culture then. There’s a reason he never published “Garden of Eden.” It’s a dangerous topic for him to go into. Even in an unpublished manuscript, even in his private life, given who he is. And then there were the huge problems he had with his son who was also interested in the same things. It caused an irreconcilable conflict between them, which is so sad.BURNS It’s pretty interesting that he is pursuing this all the way through and, and not blindly, that is to say, I think there’s a consciousness to it. It’s in him asking all his wives to cut their hair short, in his sympathy for female characters in stories like “Up in Michigan” and “Hills Like White Elephants.” I don’t think it’s like, Oh, I can’t let this out of the bag. I think he’s moving toward it. And he’s exploring it all the time.The wives also punctuate the entire series, becoming a big part of the structure as he moves from Hadley Richardson to Pauline Pfeiffer to Martha Gellhorn to Mary Welsh. It’s clear that he always needs a woman in his life as both an anchor and a foil.BURNS You got to have her and you got to leave her or you got to be bad to her. Edna O’Brien [an Irish writer who appears in “Hemingway”] says in the opening: I love that he fell in love. But she also knows that he has to escape all of that, too, in order to provide himself new material.NOVICK You do feel that somehow there’s some kind of arrested development or something where he’s just sort of stuck in this place of needing to have this great romance. And then when ordinary life or tensions or problems come up, he’s out of there. To me, the most fascinating is the relationship with Martha Gellhorn because she can hold her own with him. It’s so exciting when they get together, even though he’s cheating on Pauline. But there’s something really interesting about their professional connections. And then he can’t deal with it.Lynn Novick, left, with Edna O’Brien, a writer who appears in “Hemingway.”Meghan HorvathIf Hemingway is one of our great archetypes of the artist, is there anything you recognized of yourself in him?BURNS Only one thing. I think that we have, and have always had, a really strong work ethic and a discipline. And not being satisfied until it’s really done. And we’re not afraid to take a scene that is already working and dismantle it because we learn new information. Our scripts are just filled with that same sort of crossing out and emendations that Hemingway did.NOVICK Hemingway has you in the palm of his hand from the very first word. And you know, I feel personally I should be so lucky to ever be able to do that. So we are storytellers, and the obsession and reworking that Ken is talking about is in the service of trying to tell a good story. And that’s an example that he left for us when he’s at his best, with all his flaws.So have you emerged from this process with a favorite Hemingway work?NOVICK It’s the same work that was my favorite when we started, which is surprising because I read or reread almost everything. I started with “A Farewell to Arms,” and I ended with it. I love the short stories, but I really love diving into a great novel. And that, that is one of the all-time great novels for me. It’s pure poetry from the very first words. It’s not the classic Hemingway minimalist take. It’s a big epic story, and it gives you everything you need to know. And even though I know how it’s going to end, obviously, I love to reread it because I see different things every time I go through it. It’s beautiful. It’s devastating. It’s epic. And it’s timeless for me.BURNS What she said. I champion the short stories, and I can list the 10 that really float my boat, like “Snows of Kilimanjaro” and the two parts of “Big Two-Hearted River.” But if it’s a favorite novel, then it has to be “A Farewell to Arms.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

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      ‘The Place That Makes Us’ Review: Rebuilding, Brick by Brick

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      This documentary offers a brief look at a handful of people trying to revitalize Youngstown, Ohio.Cities devastated by industrial closures should never be written off for dead. “The Place That Makes Us” looks at a handful of people trying to revitalize Youngstown, Ohio, where the shuttering of steel mills led to an exodus of residents, a rash of vacant homes and an ebb of civic engagement.The movie, directed by Karla Murthy, substantially, perhaps even too narrowly focuses on the work of the Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit that rehabilitates empty houses, with the goal of turning ghost blocks into desirable neighborhoods. The subjects profiled include Ian Beniston, the group’s executive director, and Tiffany Sokol, its housing director, who removes plywood from a door and takes us through the process of surveying an abandoned home’s potential. By the end, we’ve seen it sold, to a new owner we’ve gotten to know.Elsewhere, Julius T. Oliver, a city councilman, concentrates on investing in Youngstown’s youth by pushing to reopen a once-thriving basketball arena. With the filmmakers, he visits the former sites of the two houses he grew up in. (After speaking of violence around the first location, he says that the problems eventually traveled to the second.) Early on, he talks about how, as a businessman, he found that a simple perception that a neighborhood “looks scary” can deter potential customers.The families’ stories help turn “The Place That Makes Us” into more than a policy proposal in motion. Ian’s father, a former steelworker, says, “If I had to do it over again, I would not have been in Youngstown.” Ian and his sister, Abby, who have chosen to stay, have a more optimistic outlook.The Place That Make UsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. Watch on PBS platforms. More

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      A French Monument Remains Every Bit as Grand on Film

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      The Palais Garnier, which inspired the first “Phantom” in 1910, is silent at the moment, but it continues to hold the imagination.PARIS — Wearing heels and an off-the-shoulder evening dress, Emily Cooper arrives at the Paris Opera for a big performance. She hurries up the grand marble staircase, pauses to gape at the painted ceilings, and runs into a suave young Frenchman she knows.“Did you know they were performing ‘Swan Lake’ tonight? Is this a joke?” he asks her. “‘Swan Lake’ is for tourists.” After a terse exchange, Emily scurries off to take her seat in a velvet-lined opera box.The scene is from “Emily in Paris,” the popular Netflix series — one of dozens of productions for which the original Paris Opera building, the Palais Garnier, has provided a backdrop. In the nearly century and a half since its inauguration, the Garnier has been featured in everything from documentaries (Frederick Wiseman’s “La Danse,” on the Paris Opera Ballet), to live-action/animation movies (“Smurfs 2”) to motion pictures: Sofia Coppola’s 2006 “Marie Antoinette” and the 2018 biopic of Rudolf Nureyev, “The White Crow,” directed by Ralph Fiennes.The pandemic may have shut down house performances in the last year, but on-location shoots have continued, in accordance with strict Covid-19 protocols. Two movies have recently been filmed inside the Palais Garnier: “Couleurs de l’Incendie” starring the French actress Fanny Ardant, and “Le Ténor,” with the tenor Roberto Alagna.Jean-Yves Kaced, the opera’s commercial director, said the coronavirus pandemic had made it easier for the house to accommodate film and television crews. Under normal circumstances, the Garnier has a full slate of opera and ballet performances that cannot be interrupted by outside projects. In normal times, the building also welcomes visitors for daytime tours.“The absence of audiences at the moment is a sad reality, but it does allow us to be a bit more flexible in hosting outside productions,” Mr. Kaced said.With or without a pandemic, filming at the opera requires a hefty budget. A daylong shoot at the opera (for eight hours) costs roughly 30,000 euros (about $35,000), according to Paris Opera management. “All things rare are expensive,” said Mr. Kaced, adding, “Look at it this way: You don’t have to pay for set designs, and it’s less polluting!”Mr. Kaced said he had appeared in one production himself — “La Danse,” in a “supporting role,” a meeting-room discussion about selling sponsorship packages to American patrons.François Ivernel, whose company, Montebello Productions, produced “The White Crow,” confirmed that filming at the Palais Garnier was “not cheap,” and that the fee was not something to be negotiated, as is the case at other French cultural landmarks like the Louvre. “You take it or leave it,” he said.“The White Crow,” a biopic of Rudolf Nureyev starring Oleg Ivenko, featured three scenes shot at the Palais Garnier.Jessica Forde/Sony Pictures ClassicsMr. Ivernel listed three scenes in the movie that were shot at the Palais Garnier: the arrival of the Russian troupe, filmed in the grand foyer; a conversation between Nureyev and a French dancer, shot on the Garnier rooftop, with panoramic views of Paris; and shots of the performance hall, filmed from the stage. Filming of “The White Crow” coincided with the opera’s glamorous annual fund-raising gala, to which Mr. Ivernel was invited.The shoot was, on the whole, a “wonderful experience,” Mr. Ivernel said. Before filming, the team was allowed to spend three half-days backstage with the Paris Opera Ballet where, interestingly, Nureyev would become ballet director in 1983. They met dancers, watched rehearsals and visited the costume-making ateliers, where tutus hang from the ceiling. It was “all very useful for the director,” Mr. Ivernel said, “because it gave him a much better sense of what it was like to be a principal dancer,.”There was just one minor misstep, recalled Marie Hoffmann, who is in charge of rental of public spaces at the opera. While the crew was busy filming inside the opera house, Mr. Fiennes, who plays a ballet master, settled into a recently restored fauteuil, a period armchair usually kept behind a protective barrier. “We asked him, in the politest way possible, to give up the seat,” Ms. Hoffmann recalled.Filming inside the opera is a complex process. Before the pandemic, shoots had to happen at nighttime, when there were no more performances or visitors, and they were all-night affairs, running from 11 p.m. until 9 a.m., when the premises were cleaned for morning tourists.Because the building is a listed national monument, every corner of it is guarded and protected. As at Versailles and other French heritage sites, equipment cannot be placed directly on the floor: There must be a layer of protection such as a strip of carpeting. There are weight restrictions on camera equipment as well, and crews are followed everywhere by security.Have there ever been any accidents? “No, touch wood,” Ms. Hoffmann said.There has, however, been the odd anachronism.In the 2006 movie “Marie Antoinette” starring Kirsten Dunst, a masquerade ball scene was set inside the Palais Garnier, despite the fact that the building was built a century after the reign of Antoinette.Leigh Johnson/Columbia PicturesIn “Marie Antoinette,” the lavish masquerade ball scene is set inside the Palais Garnier. A masked Queen Marie Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst) twirls around a crowded dance floor — in the famous “Rotonde des Abonnés” (the circular hall under the stage), with its elaborate mosaics — and is later seen slithering down the opera’s curving marble staircase, flirting incognito with a handsome young count.There’s just one slight problem: The Palais Garnier was built a century after the reign of Marie Antoinette, who was executed in 1793. The anachronism is listed under “Goofs” in the Internet Movie Data Base: “The masquerade ball held in the Paris Opera is clearly seen to take place in the Palais Garnier in Paris, built between 1861 and 1875 during the reign of Napoleon III.”The Garnier also serves as the backdrop in the 1910 novel “The Phantom of the Opera,” by the French writer Gaston Leroux, who tells the melodramatic story of a disfigured musical prodigy who lives underneath the palace and kidnaps a glamorous young soprano.“Phantom” first captured the public’s visual imagination in 1925, in the film version of the novel starring Lon Chaney, and the story has been retold repeatedly, perhaps culminating in the 1980s stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.Oddly, none of the film adaptations of the novel are listed as having been shot on location in the Palais Garnier. Yet they have fueled a rumor that persists to this day: that there is a lake underneath the edifice.“When we take visitors around the basement area, they come expecting to see the lake,” Ms. Hoffmann said. “In fact, it’s a reservoir that’s the size of the main stage, and located right underneath it.”“We have no access to it,” she added. “It’s accessible only to Paris firefighters, who use it for diving training.” More

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      ‘Kid 90’ and the Days When Even Wild TV Teens Had Privacy

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      A documentary from Soleil Moon Frye, star of “Punky Brewster,” and a reunion of “The Real World” remind us that Gen X didn’t curate themselves for mass consumption.Sometimes I remember the clunky devices of my youth — the boxy Polaroid cameras, the bricklike car phones, the shrill answering machines, the pagers that could be made to spell an angular, all-caps “BOOBS.” This was the personal tech of the early-to-mid-1990s, in the years before AOL Instant Messenger provided an internet on-ramp, which means it was pretty much the last time an American teenager could behave with some expectation of privacy.Still, camcorders existed back then and Soleil Moon Frye, the child star of “Punky Brewster,” rarely turned hers off. In “Kid 90,” a documentary now streaming on Hulu, an adult, manicured Moon Frye — filmed in the kind of all-white room usually associated with near-death experiences — revisits her endless home movies, as well as related ephemera: diaries, voice mail messages and photographs. If you are a young Gen Xer or an old millennial, “Kid 90” may provide the uncanny and not entirely welcome experience of having your childhood returned to you — the syntax, the celebrities, the fashions that haven’t come back around (the backward baseball cap, the vest as a bustier). Revisiting your youth culture when your own youth has mostly fled is an exercise in estrangement and mild humiliation, like running into your therapist at Victoria’s Secret.In the 1980s sitcom “Punky Brewster,” Moon Frye starred as a girl being raised by a foster father.Gene Arias/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty ImagesBefore I clicked play, I asked an editor how many drinks I might need to make it through the documentary. “A 40 of Mickey’s malt liquor,” she wrote.The early ’90s also reappear on “The Real World Homecoming: New York,” a Paramount + show that reunites the cast members from the first season of MTV’s flagship unscripted series. Seven people, strangers no more, return to the New York loft (well, one is waylaid by a positive Covid-19 test) where their teen and 20-something lives were taped for a few months in 1992. It wasn’t the first reality show, but its wild popularity and subsequent franchise profoundly influenced what came after. “We didn’t know what it was going to be,” the journalist and activist Kevin Powell, one of the original roommates, says in the first episode of “Homecoming.” “We were just ourselves.”To watch the series and the documentary is to dilate, helplessly, on what has changed (or not) in the past 30 or so years. It’s to realize that Moon Frye, by cheerfully surveilling her own life, and those first Real Worlders, by agreeing to the constant presence of producers and cameras, were the harbingers of today’s culture, in which self-image is shaped in the expectation of a lens and personhood collates with brand identity.“The Real World Homecoming: New York” reunited the cast of the hit reality show, which premiered on MTV in 1992; from left, Norman Korpi, Kevin Powell, Julie Gentry and Heather B. Gardner, with Andre Comeau looking on.Danielle Levitt/MTVMoon Frye seems to have known every other child star in Los Angeles and its outlying counties: Sara Gilbert, Emmanuel Lewis, Brian Austin Green, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Joey Lawrence, Jenny Lewis (hilarious) and at least a dozen more. These were children valued less for who they were and more for the fandom and ads they could generate, the tickets they could sell. Today, that’s everyone with an Instagram account, potentially.“Kid 90” also reminds us that until pretty recently, the dumb things teenagers wore and the dumber things they did and said didn’t have an afterlife, because there were few ways to record them and even fewer ways to disseminate those recordings. A crucial aspect of adolescence is performance — trying on different outfits and identities — and seeing if they feel OK. (The comedy of adolescence is that it’s practice for adulthood. The tragedy is that adolescents practice on one another.)I was a teenager in the ’90s, and I’m unutterably grateful that my own mortifications — lines like, “I’m not a feminist, I’m really more like a humanist,” and a grunge-adjacent look that my high school bestie still calls the Lumberjack Sexpot — persist only on the bloopers reel in my head. Until young adults achieve some reasonable sense of self (and style), why get the internet involved?When Moon Frye moved to New York, she fell in with a group of skaters, some of whom were in the movie “Kids.”Soleil Moon Frye/HuluThe kids in “Kid 90” are filmed during their off hours: poolside, at house parties, high on mushrooms in a field somewhere. They sometimes perform for the camera — winking, pontificating, flashing a don’t-tell-mom pack of cigarettes — but they perform confident that almost no one will ever see it. “We never thought, ‘Oh, well, she’s going to use that in a way that’s going to come back and haunt us,’” Gosselaar says in the documentary.Back in 1992, those “Real World” participants knew that MTV would eventually air the footage, but not how that footage would be organized. They didn’t know that the producers would fabricate a will-they-or-won’t-they story line for Julie Gentry and Eric Nies, or that Kevin Powell would be edited to seem like a “politically angry Black man,” as he said in a recent interview. “We all thought it was a documentary about seven artists,” Rebecca Blasband says in “Homecoming.” If she and her loftmates didn’t act entirely naturally, they don’t seem to have spent the series trying to build a marketable brand.The producers and editors did the building for them, giving each a type (naïf, himbo, rock god, firebrand), which the cast members then spent years trying to live up to — or live down. “I had this notoriety, but I had no idea how to utilize it,” Gentry says in “Homecoming.”Moon Frye as a teenager; she is now appearing in a “Punky Brewster” reboot on Peacock.Soleil Moon Frye/HuluMoon Frye seems to have also struggled with her image and with how the industry treated her when her body began to diverge from Punky’s. In an agonizing section of the documentary, she talks about going through puberty, developing breasts and being seen, at 13 and 14 years old, only for bimbo-esque roles. Peers called her Punky Boobster.“It’s hard when you’ve got boobs and you can’t work in this business,” a teenage Moon Frye says. “I just want people to see me for the person I am inside.” Here’s a thought: What if the business is the problem and not children’s bodies?She wanted serious roles, so at 15, she had breast reduction surgery. But the serious roles never came. After years in the entertainment wilderness, she is now starring in a “Punky Brewster” reboot, now streaming on Peacock. “Kid 90” presents this comeback as a chirpy capstone, but it feels darker. The documentary honors a slew of friends who didn’t make it to their 40s (including Jonathan Brandis and Justin Pierce, a star of the movie “Kids”) and mentions the addictions suffered by those who did. Some of that pain must have originated in the space between what the industry (and the fans) told these actors they had to be and who they felt they were. Maybe Moon Frye is Punky once more because “the business” wouldn’t let her be anyone else.I was, unconvincingly, so many people as a teenager — a rebel, a sophisticate, a drama nerd, a go-getter, a witch. I could try on a persona for size and then return it, tags on. There was no social media then and no one wanted me on any reality series, so I never had to curate a self before I had one. But I did stupid things for love. What would I have done for likes? What would that have made me?Like Moon Frye and a lot of girls with big feelings and poetic inclinations, I kept diaries as a teenager. I’ve never gone back and read them. Why? I’m afraid that I might be embarrassed by my younger self or that she might be embarrassed by boring, wine-mom me. But I hope we’d get along. And then we could take a kiss-face selfie together, filter it, Facetune it, post it with some cute caption and watch the little hearts roll in. More