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      ‘Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman’ Review: Artisanal Admiration

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman’ Review: Artisanal AdmirationThis documentary offers a dry, rote introduction to a designer who became a key figure in the Arts and Crafts movement.The designer Gustav Stickley, center, is the subject of the documentary “Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman.”Credit…First Run FeaturesMarch 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe documentary “Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman” offers an introduction to a designer (1858-1942) who became a crucial figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. But the movie itself, directed by Herb Stratford, is so dull and unimaginative in its presentation — talking heads, an overused score that might as well have been downloaded from a free database — that it makes for an unfortunate match of subject matter and form.This hourlong film is pitched at a level of detail that is admirable in theory but ill-suited to dabblers — or to the medium. The Stickley biographer David Cathers, one of many people charged with delivering dry exegesis (he also shares a writing credit on the film), speaks in a calm, unvaried tone as he discusses how “Stickley moved his family from Walnut Avenue in Syracuse to Columbus Avenue in Syracuse” or recounts Stickley’s eccentric late-career quest to develop a perfect furniture finish “that manufacturers could apply efficiently and at low cost.” He might as well be reading from his book.[embedded content]
      It is marginally livelier to hear from the Stickley relative Richard Wiles, who relates being told that a dresser whose drawers he used to smash shut ended up in a museum. The documentary does its baseline job of showcasing what made Stickley an innovator. You leave with a desire to visit The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms, his New Jersey estate, as well as the Craftsman Building in New York. And by the end, a viewer could probably identify Stickley furniture with at least 50-50 accuracy.Gustav Stickley: American CraftsmanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Walrus and the Whistleblower’ Review: The Fight to Free a Friend

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Walrus and the Whistleblower’ Review: The Fight to Free a FriendAn animal trainer turned activist strives to end sea mammal captivity in this documentary that could use a sharper frame on its subject.Phil Demers, one of the subjects of “The Walrus and the Whistleblower.”Credit…Tom CometMarch 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe Walrus and the WhistleblowerDirected by Nathalie BibeauDocumentaryNot Rated1h 28mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In Marineland, the sprawling aquatic park in Niagara Falls, Ontario, lives a walrus named Smooshi. Concerns for the sea mammal’s well-being form the core of the documentary “The Walrus and the Whistleblower,” which follows the former trainer Phil Demers’s fight to free Smooshi from her captivity.Demers believes that, while he was working at Marineland, Smooshi imprinted on him, or deemed him her guardian. The director Nathalie Bibeau pairs Demers’s account with home video footage of the pair playing during off-hours at the park. At the time, a local news story about their bond spread nationally, even appearing on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” But in 2012, after witnessing the animals suffer chemical burns, Demers quit his job and vowed to expose the park’s abuse.[embedded content]As Bibeau examines the movement born out of Demers’s allegations, she hews closely to her subject. The film tracks a hefty lawsuit Marineland files against Demers, and a bill he supports that would ban the captivity of whales and dolphins in Canada. The legal and legislative battles supply narrative through-lines, but their progression — or rather, their stagnation — proves dull padding for the story.More intriguing is Demers’s yearning for the walrus he is barred from seeing, a fixation that scans as alternately authentic and performed. Frustratingly, the documentary declines to probe Demers’s evolving relationship to his activism and newfound fame — particularly once he assumes a grandiose Twitter persona and scores repeat appearances on Joe Rogan’s podcast.“I’m Smoochi’s mom,” Demers declares at one point. “What’s more natural than reuniting a baby with its mother?” With sharper framing, this line might suggest irony, given the unusual nature of this cross-species relationship. Offered at face value, all that registers is bombast.The Walrus and the WhistleblowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Discovery+.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Stray’ Review: Nothing but a Hound Dog

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Stray’ Review: Nothing but a Hound DogElizabeth Lo’s thoughtful documentary uses the stray dogs of Istanbul to comment on the human condition.One of the wandering subjects of Elizabeth Lo’s documentary, “Stray.”Credit…Magnolia PicturesMarch 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETZeytin has a strong head, hazel eyes and a quizzical expression. Long-legged and confident, she trots beside busy highways, unbothered by crowds or the director Elizabeth Lo’s trailing camera. Why should she be? She’s a star.As simple as its title and as complex as the city it briefly illuminates, “Stray,” Lo’s sharp-eyed documentary about the street dogs of Istanbul, unspools without narration or anything like a plot. Instead, the restless rhythms of the mutts’ uncertain existence lend a poetic randomness to a movie that’s more contemplative than cute. On-screen quotations from Greek philosophy punctuate its brief 72 minutes, and snatches of overheard conversations swirl and fade as Zeytin and her canine pals — part of this world, yet aloof from it — pass by.[embedded content]Once exterminated en masse and now protected by law from euthanization, the strays interact with a citizenry whose tolerance for their fighting and garbage-raiding is sometimes surprising. The residents’ treatment of human outcasts, though, is rather less welcoming, as we see when tagging along with a pitiful group of Syrian refugees, glue-sniffing youngsters who find with the dogs a comfort they’re otherwise denied.Organically and entirely without judgment, “Stray,” filmed from 2017-19, builds a subtle, cross-species commentary that’s more than a little melancholy. While never directly political, Lo’s camera is there when the animals encounter a women’s march for equality and, later, when the refugees connect with boatmen who share their own migrant past. The filmmaker’s eyes may rarely leave the dogs, but what she’s really looking at is us.StrayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      A ‘Rent’ Reunion Measures 25 Years of Love and Loss

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA ‘Rent’ Reunion Measures 25 Years of Love and LossA fund-raiser, a tribute, a documentary — and a reminder that Jonathan Larson’s musical remains especially inspiring in hard times.Members of the original cast sing “No Day but Today” during New York Theater Workshop’s “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love.”Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopMarch 3, 2021Is “Rent,” Jonathan Larson’s 25-year-old groundbreaking musical, somber or celebratory? When I was in high school, in the early throes of my “Rent” obsession, I made my aunt see the show. “That’s so depressing!” she wailed afterward. “No it isn’t!” I insisted. She looked at me like I was crazy.I often think of that exchange, now 14 years later. For me, the adjective “depressing” never fit this musical, which was about so much more than its tragedies: a generation fighting AIDS, poverty, gentrification and the everyday drama and griefs of those 525,600 minutes that make a year.On Tuesday night the New York Theater Workshop hosted “25 Years of Rent: Measured in Love,” a virtual fund-raiser commemorating the show, which premiered there in 1996 before going on to Broadway, Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and international renown.It is well known that Larson died just before the musical’s first preview performance. So even though this was a tender, even intimate celebration, the “Rent” event, hosted by the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” contestant Olivia Lux, also embraced loss.Olivia Lux hosted the show, which was at once a documentary, a telethon and a tribute to the “Rent” composer Jonathan Larson.Credit…—-, via New York Theater Workshop“25 Years of Rent,” directed by Andy Señor, worked as a tribute to Larson, a contemporary telethon packed with stage celebs and, most touching, a documentary about the making of the beloved show. The theater summoned him back to life through archival images and footage — a broad-grinned waiter making milkshakes at the Moondance Diner; singing “Will I” on a cassette tape — as well as via recollections from friends, family, performers and the show’s director, Michael Greif.The names involved were impressive enough to light up a marquee: the original cast members Taye Diggs, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega, as well as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annaleigh Ashford, Neil Patrick Harris, Ben Platt, Anaïs Mitchell, Telly Leung and so many more.Some teared up recalling Larson’s exuberance and talents, and described the burden of carrying on with a show whose success he would never see. Of course, this is part of the tragedy of “Rent.”The saying goes that for every death in the world there’s a birth. And as “Rent” was born and grew, so did the careers of the cast members, many of whom were unknowns at the time. Anthony Rapp described working at Starbucks and auditioning with an R.E.M. song, while Idina Menzel, before jumping over the moon or defying gravity, had made a living as a bar mitzvah singer.Fredi Walker-Browne, who played Joanne in the original production, described hearing the lyric to her song “Take Me or Leave Me” for the first time.Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopThe night was also about how Larson’s work helped open people up to themselves. Fredi Walker-Browne, the original Joanne, spoke about first hearing “Take Me or Leave Me,” which Larson wrote for her and Menzel, and feeling that he laced her personality into the lyrics: “I look before I leap/I like margins and discipline/I make lists in my sleep.”Others, like Lux, hailed the show for portraying queerness and drag at a time when many productions didn’t.Winners of Jonathan Larson Grants, awarded to promising early-career musical theater artists, spoke to his legacy. And theater notables who weren’t in “Rent” at its beginnings took on pieces of the score in their own styles. Christopher Jackson’s hymnlike “One Song Glory,” Eva Noblezada’s coquettish “Out Tonight” and Billy Porter’s explosively baroque “I’ll Cover You” were standouts.Among the performers inspired by “Rent” was Billy Porter, who sang “I’ll Cover You.”Credit…via New York Theater WorkshopIf Larson’s death is one side of some karmic exchange, another side is the audiences who used — and continue to use — “Rent” to excavate some hidden part of themselves, and to inspire their own art.So much of this last year has been marked by things unmade: the people unmade by a pandemic, the innocent Black lives unmade by brutality, the planet unmade by a changing climate. My own tiny bubble of a life has gotten smaller, without the chance to see some of my closest friends and where the outside world seems newly and inexplicably dangerous.And yet in recalling the making (and remaking) of “Rent,” the event helped quiet the grief that creeps up on me every day. In the chat box next to the stream, which reached over 6,000 viewers, “Rent” fans confessed to crying; a final group rendition of “Seasons of Love” seemed to push many beyond comforting.It took me a few viewings before I could watch “Rent” without bursting into head-aching, snot-falling ugly crying, but eventually the show became my joy, my comfort. As much as Roger and Mark, a songwriter and filmmaker, hoped to make something of themselves through their art, so did I make myself — in whatever facile way — through “Rent,” using it to shape myself as an artist and an outcast and a New Yorker.At the end of “Rent,” Angel has died but the rest of the bohemians live, and Mark has finally finished his movie. You can read the signature lyric “No day but today” as fatalistic, as the characters’ existential cry, as Larson’s prescience about his sudden death.But I’ve always read “No day but today” — which gets woven into “Seasons of Love” in the show’s finale, and was this event’s final heart-rending hurrah — as a promise: Today I wake up to a new version of myself. I will be magnificent. I account for the losses of yesterday, but today? Today is alive. There’s no tragedy in that.25 Years of Rent: Measured in LoveThrough March 6; nytw.orgAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Britney Spears’s Father Says He Hopes She Won’t Need a Conservatorship

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Britney Spears’s Legal BattleControl of Spears’s Estate‘We’re Sorry, Britney’Justin Timberlake ApologizesWatch ‘Framing Britney Spears’ in the U.S.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBritney Spears’s Father Says He Hopes She Won’t Need a ConservatorshipThe father’s lawyer shared his opinions on the conservatorship on CNN and NBC News recently, almost a month after a documentary examining the arrangement was released.Jamie Spears, left, Britney Spears’s father, has been one of her conservators for more than a decade. He’s telling his side of the story, through a lawyer, on television.Credit…Associated PressMarch 3, 2021Updated 2:48 p.m. ETAs the legal battle and public fallout over Britney Spears’s finances and personal life continue, a lawyer for her father, Jamie Spears, has told CNN that Jamie “would love nothing more than to see Britney not need a conservatorship.”The comments came not long after “Framing Britney Spears,” a TV documentary by The New York Times, released last month, revisited the details of the conservatorship that has shaped this pop singer’s life. Since it aired, Jamie Spears’s lawyer has sought to tell her client’s side of the story on national television programs, including “Good Morning America” last week and NBC News this week.The #FreeBritney campaign, which was also explored in the documentary, has for years campaigned to portray the conservatorship arrangement as an unjust means to control Spears’s life and finances.On Tuesday night, Vivian Lee Thoreen, Jamie Spears’s lawyer, defended the singer’s conservatorship to NBC News.“Britney being safe and not being taken advantage of is his No. 1 priority,” Thoreen said about Jamie Spears as Britney Spears’s co-conservator.Spears has been in a conservatorship, or guardianship, since 2008, after a series of public meltdowns captured by paparazzi. The complicated arrangement designates a representative to manage someone’s personal affairs and their estate if they are unable to care for themselves or if they are vulnerable to outside manipulation.Thoreen told CNN that Jamie Spears “would love nothing more than to see Britney not need a conservatorship.”“Whether or not there is an end to the conservatorship really depends on Britney,” Thoreen added. “If she wants to end her conservatorship, she can file a petition to end it.”Thoreen, who once represented Jamie Spears before the documentary, has rejoined his legal team. She did not return calls seeking comment on Tuesday.In the documentary, though, she told The Times: “Of the cases I’ve been involved in, I have not seen a conservatee who has successfully terminated a conservatorship.”Jamie Spears has been one of his daughter’s conservators for more than a decade, controlling crucial aspects of her life such as her finances and her mental health care. In 2019, citing health problems, he walked back his role, and a professional conservator filled in temporarily.Britney Spears’s court-appointed lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, made clear for the first time in a court filing in August that the singer “strongly opposed” having her father as the conservator. Spears had rarely commented on her conservatorship. Ingham, who declined to comment on Tuesday, said at that hearing that Britney Spears believed that the conservatorship “must be changed substantially in order to reflect the major changes in her current lifestyle and her stated wishes.”Then, at a hearing in November, Ingham said that Britney Spears would not perform again as long as her father was in charge of her career. “My client has informed me that she is afraid of her father,” he told the judge.The judge, Brenda Penny, fulfilled a request by Britney Spears that Bessemer Trust, a corporate fiduciary, be added as a co-conservator. But Judge Penny did not remove Jamie Spears as a conservator of Spears’s estate. Britney Spears and her father were back in court on Feb. 11, but the judge did not order any substantive changes.In the week after the release of The Times’s documentary, some media outlets responded with apologies for their past coverage of Spears’s mental health, mothering skills and sexuality. Spears’s former boyfriend Justin Timberlake also apologized to her after the documentary re-examined their breakup.Joe Coscarelli and Julia Jacobs contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Children’s Film Festival Pushes Boundaries, Mixing Somber and Sweet

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyChildren’s Film Festival Pushes Boundaries, Mixing Somber and SweetFrom a feature just for teenagers to short movies for toddlers, this groundbreaking New York event will stream for the first time nationwide.The documentary “Curtain Up!” followed the production of “Frozen KIDS” at Public School 124 in Chinatown. This year, the festival has 14 features, seven programs of short films and more than a dozen livestreamed events.Credit… Hui Tong and Kelly NgMarch 3, 2021, 2:28 p.m. ETThe New York International Children’s Film Festival faced unusual challenges in developing a cinematic celebration during a pandemic. Now the festival, which will present its first all-streaming version from Friday through March 14, is offering its audience some unusual challenges, too.In addition to unblinking views of young people grappling with fractured families, bullying and puberty, the festival is showing what may be its most serious and mature feature yet: “Beans,” a fictionalized autobiography by the Canadian filmmaker Tracey Deer. The action unfolds during what is now known as the Oka crisis, a conflict in 1990 between the Mohawk people and the Canadian authorities over land rights.The central character, a 12-year-old Mohawk girl nicknamed Beans, played by Kiawentiio Tarbell, begins a personal rebellion that parallels her community’s uprising. Recommended for viewers 14 and older, the film includes obscene language, violence and a harrowing scene in which an older boy tries to pressure Beans into performing oral sex. It’s hardly what you expect at a children’s festival, but the organizers, who this year are delivering 14 features, seven programs of short films and more than a dozen livestreamed events — all available for the first time to families across the country — found the movie too accomplished and relevant to put aside.Kiawentiio Tarbell in “Beans,” a fictionalized autobiography by the Canadian filmmaker Tracey Deer. It is recommended for viewers 14 and over.Credit…EMA Films“It was a way to have great Indigenous storytelling, great female-led filmmaking and an extraordinary young lead actress — it was like, how can we not do this?” said Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director. “It’s our responsibility to be mindful and not afraid.”Villaseñor said she felt particularly obligated after a year dominated by a public-health crisis and a racial reckoning. The initial inclination was “let’s just make it as lighthearted as possible,” she said of the festival. “But I don’t think that fully does justice to kids. Kids need time to process grief and think about loss in ways that are developmentally appropriate.”One of the most affecting evocations of a child’s experience with death is among the festival’s short films, which compete to receive prizes from an adult jury that includes the filmmakers Sofia Coppola and Peter Ramsey. Martina Lee’s “Black Boy Joy,” part of the new shorts program Celebrating Black Stories, focuses on a bereaved fictional family — a grandfather, a father and a 10-year-old autistic son — whose struggles are an affirmation of love as much as an exploration of mourning.Evan Alex in “Black Boy Joy,” part of the new shorts program Celebrating Black Stories.Credit…HBO MaxThe 24-year-old festival, however, also offers comedy, fantasy and another new shorts program, about young people who are reinterpreting their gender identity, as well as titles for audiences as young as 3. Its opening livestreamed event, on Friday evening, is a behind-the-scenes look at the new Netflix animated television series “City of Ghosts,” in which a diverse club of enterprising elementary school students investigate Los Angeles’s supernatural side. The ghosts, all friendly, are not Casper types so much as spirits that illuminate immigrant history.“My hope is that people who are looking for something more calming and intellectually stimulating will enjoy this show,” said Elizabeth Ito, the series’s creator, who will take part in Friday’s event. She said she was aiming for a tone like that of “old ‘Mister Rogers’” episodes.The festival will include a special screening of Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada’s “Raya and the Last Dragon,” a Disney movie.Credit…DisneyThe films, which will mostly be available to stream on demand throughout the festival, also include the cheerful New York City-centered documentary “Curtain Up!” Its directors, Hui Tong and Kelly Ng, visited Public School 124 in Chinatown to chronicle its production of “Frozen KIDS,” a half-hour adaptation of the Disney musical “Frozen,” for the 2019 Junior Theater Festival. The filmmakers and two of the students will take part in a discussion on March 13. Disney fans can also look forward to a special screening of Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada’s animated “Raya and the Last Dragon,” accompanied by a Q. and A., on March 12.Even the festival’s more somber films have moments of joy and triumph. Kenza (Tiara Richards), the 11-year-old protagonist of Eché Janga’s “Buladó,” a feature from the Netherlands and Curaçao, may be adrift without a mother, but she is also a car mechanic, a dead aim with a slingshot and unafraid to embrace the spiritual traditions of her enslaved ancestors. She draws on an inner strength that the heroine of “Beans” discovers as well.“Just because we’re young, it doesn’t mean that we’re powerless,” said Deer, who will discuss “Beans” online with festivalgoers on March 13. “I hope that message gets to them. And that they matter, they have a voice, and the importance of standing up for what they believe in.”“Nahuel and the Magic Book,” a feature from Brazil and Chile that will be screened in a special event.Credit…Punkrobot Animation StudioFilms like these reveal a continuing theme of children connecting to their cultural roots. Sometimes that bond is mystical, as in Germán Acuña’s animated “Nahuel and the Magic Book,” a feature from Brazil and Chile, which will be screened in a special event on Saturday. At other times it involves unearthing forgotten history, as when a teenage Canadian hockey player in Sandi Rankaduwa’s short documentary “Ice Breakers” learns about the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes.Knowing how much young moviegoers have missed being in theaters, the festival’s organizers have tried to make the experience feel authentic. Cinephiles will still vote for their favorite titles, but with digital ballots, and while the festival participants won’t meet filmmakers face to face, they will have increased opportunities for live discussions online. (Those events will be recorded for later viewing on the festival’s Facebook page.)“Every year we talk about the opportunity to explore the world, to explore ideas, to explore identity through the festival,” said Nina Guralnick, its executive director. Right now, she added, “that feels particularly poignant.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalThrough March 14; 212-349-0330, nyicff.org.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and What Popular Culture Wants to Believe

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWoody Allen, Mia Farrow and What Popular Culture Wants to BelieveThe new HBO documentary revisits a 1990s scandal. What viewers take away from it may depend on the stories they trust about women and why.The family in happier days, with Woody Allen, third from left, and Mia Farrow, far right.Credit…HBOMarch 2, 2021Updated 4:45 p.m. ETThere are two stories. In one, a father molests his 7-year-old daughter. In the other, a mother coaches that daughter to falsely accuse the father. These stories, one proposed by Mia Farrow and her advocates, one by Woody Allen and his, clearly contradict each other. No sane person can accept both. Crucially, only one lets you feel mostly OK about watching “Annie Hall” again.I was a teenager in 1992 when this particular scandal broke, so I experienced them through the cracked prism of gender narratives absorbed from the movies and shows and stealthily read supermarket tabloids of the day: That a woman should be pretty but not too pretty, sexy but not too sexy, smart but not too smart, empowered but mostly in a way that means wearing boob-forward dresses and high heels — but for you! because you want to! — and doesn’t trespass on any actual power. A fun fact about high heels: They make it harder to run away. There were limitless ways, the culture informed me, that a woman could get it wrong — “it” being her body, her career, her accusations of abuse.I can still remember an article, probably from The National Enquirer, that pitted celebrity women against one another according to their knees. The only star with acceptable ones? The “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart. Her knees are truly lovely, the article read.I thought about these narratives while watching — twice, in a “Clockwork Orange,” eyes-clamped-open kind of way — “Allen v. Farrow.” A four-part documentary by Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy, now on HBO, it centers on one of the more involuted scandals of the early ’90s, the breakdown of the relationship between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow and the accusations and counteraccusations and custody trial and appeals that followed. The couple met in 1979. They had a child together in 1987, Ronan Farrow (who changed his name from Satchel). In 1991, Allen formally adopted Mia Farrow’s two youngest children, Dylan, the daughter who has accused him of abuse, and Moses.Moses Farrow, Soon-Yi Previn, Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen in a scene from the documentary.Credit…HBOIn January 1992, Farrow discovered explicit Polaroids that Allen had taken of another of her daughters, her eldest, Soon-Yi Previn, then 21. That August, Dylan Farrow has said, she was abused when Allen was alone with her for perhaps 20 minutes during his visit to Mia Farrow’s home in Connecticut. Concerned by reports from babysitters and by statements that Dylan allegedly made, Farrow took the child to a pediatrician. The pediatrician reported the suspected abuse to law enforcement. Allen sued for custody. A criminal investigation began. The news media chronicled it all with the kind of fervid enthusiasm you mostly see in circus parades. (Allen has consistently denied the accusations.)Dick and Ziering’s previous work includes “The Invisible War,” an exposé of sexual assault in the military, and “The Hunting Ground,” which addressed assault on college campuses. Their last film, “On the Record,” explored allegations against the music producer Russell Simmons. (He has denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex.) So no, “Allen v. Farrow” isn’t exactly evenhanded. Then again, in cases of abuse allegations, is even-handedness exactly what we want?Allen and Soon-Yi Previn declined to participate in the series, recently arguing, via a spokesperson, that the filmmakers hadn’t given them enough notice. Not that Allen has made his own case particularly well. In a 1992 news conference he appears whiny, aggrieved. Later, in a “60 Minutes” interview, he says that he couldn’t possibly have abused his child in that moment, because it would have been “illogical.” Is this how most men approach predation? With careful pro-and-con lists? (Also, here’s the title of Allen’s 2015 movie about a murderous professor who sleeps with his young student? “Irrational Man.”)The documentary shows evidence supporting Allen, chiefly a report from the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital, which concluded that Dylan was either fantasizing or had been coached by her mother. On the other side is the testimony, in court and for the camera, of babysitters, family friends and Dylan herself. The judge in the custody trial ultimately labeled Allen’s behavior “grossly inappropriate.”Dylan, left, and Ronan Farrow with Woody Allen, who has called the documentary “shoddy.”Credit…HBOBut at the arrhythmic heart of the matter were these two stories. Until very recently, the public preferred the one that allowed Allen to keep making movies, movies in which comparatively powerless young women willingly enter into relationships with older, more powerful men.This past summer and fall, as my marriage was very quietly imploding, I spent what little free time I had jogging around the park near my Brooklyn apartment, trying, I guess, to figure out my own story, 3.3 miles at a time. While I ran, I listened to “You’re Wrong About,” an irreverent, stiletto-sharp podcast that often discusses maligned women of the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s — Anna Nicole Smith, Tonya Harding, Janet Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, half a dozen more.These stories run a big-haired gamut in terms of individual culpability, but in every case, popular culture found a way to blame the woman, often to excuse a more blameworthy man. Take, for example, Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate, a scandal that never touched Justin Timberlake. Or Monica Lewinsky, portrayed as a slut, as though that somehow negated the outrageous power imbalance in Bill Clinton’s relationship with her. This recalls another lesson I learned from ’80s and ’90s media: The only good victim is a perfect victim. That otherwise it was probably her fault.This particular narrative re-emerges in the recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears.” That film shows news media at the turn of the century panting to tell a story about a star acting inappropriately, a party girl wilding out when she should have been at home. “Britney: Out of Control,” read an Us Weekly cover. Whose control? Conveniently, the tabloid framing lays Spears’s spiral at her own bare feet. It avoids impugning the people with actual power, the magazine editors and the record company executives who shaped and policed and profited from her image..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Understand the Allegations Against Woody AllenNearly 30 years ago, Woody Allen was accused of sexually abusing Dylan Farrow, his adoptive daughter. A new docuseries re-examines the case.This timeline reviews the major events in the complicated history of the director, his children and the Farrow family.The documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering spoke about delving into this thorny family tale. Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter in 2014, posted by the New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, recounting her story in detail.Our book critic reviewed Mr. Allen’s recent memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.”A.O. Scott, co-chief film critic, grappled with the accusations and his complicated feelings on the filmmaker in 2018. I asked Sarah Marshall, a journalist and a host of “You’re Wrong About,” why popular culture likes to portray women as complicit and deserving of contempt. “It justifies subjugating them,” she said. “If women are randomly taken down for possessing what we see as an alarming degree of power, even if it isn’t, then maybe they’ll be more fearful about how they wield it.”Mia Farrow — with her children Daisy, Fletcher, Soon-Yi and Lark Previn — cooperated extensively with the documentary makers.Credit…HBOHas popular culture finally moved on? In a recent telephone interview, Anne Helen Petersen, a celebrity gossip expert and the author of “Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman,” discussed sympathetic attitudes toward Allen, Michael Jackson and R. Kelly in the ’90s and 2000s. “I don’t think we were equipped to deal with stories of abuse at that moment,” she said. Now she sees “a larger shift in our apparatus of language to understand and condemn when it comes to abuse,” she said.We can perhaps trace that shift if we survey the celebrity scandals of the past year — involving Marilyn Manson, Shia LaBeouf and others. Then again, when it comes to gossip and censure, the scales for men and women remain differently weighted. Armie Hammer had to allegedly ask to literally eat women in order to provoke outrage. (He’s denied the accusations.) All Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion had to do was rap about female arousal. A few weeks after they released “WAP,” Megan Thee Stallion accused the rapper Tory Lanez of shooting her in July, a charge Lanez has denied. Some social media users then suggested that the shooting was somehow her fault.The “Allen v. Farrow” series, in part because it sides so unequivocally and uncritically with Mia Farrow, will convince some but not all. Still, no matter what did or didn’t happen in that Connecticut crawl space in 1992, and even though we know, or we should know, that child sexual abuse is frighteningly common and that false reports of abuse are rare, there was one story that our culture believed. Here’s how a now adult Dylan Farrow put it in a CBS interview from 2018: “What I don’t understand is how is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I’m saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?”How? Because that story reinforces norms of power and control. Because it supports an idea of women as conniving and untrustworthy. Because making women wrong — for their knees, for their autonomy — is what our culture loves to do. And if a woman like Mia Farrow — pretty, successful, comparatively wealthy — could be exposed as a villain, it becomes that much easier to delegitimize the rest of us, particularly women of color, who are more likely to experience sexual violence and less likely to report it.If you believe Allen, his story is a happy one, at least until #MeToo came along and complicated it. He marries Previn. He makes movie after movie. He even wins another Oscar. If you believe Dylan Farrow, you recognize she grew up knowing that her abuser went unpunished, that his career flourished. That’s a terrible ending. What attitudes would our culture have to sacrifice to imagine a better one?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Biggie Smalls, the Human Behind the Legend

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBiggie Smalls, the Human Behind the LegendThe new Netflix documentary “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” captures the rapper before fame, and history, got a hold of him.“Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” is mainly a prehistory of the Notorious B.I.G.Credit…NetflixMarch 1, 2021, 6:56 p.m. ETThere are only a few known photographs of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur standing side by side, but just one that’s truly canonical. It’s from 1993. Biggie is on the left in a checkered headband, posed tough, toothpick jutting out of his mouth. Pac is on the right, in a THUG LIFE beanie and a black leather vest over a skull-and-bones T-shirt, extending both middle fingers. They look a little standoffish to each other, two people taking a photo they’re not quite interested in sharing with the other.Photos are incomplete snapshots, of course. And Biggie and Tupac were friends before they became rivals. That’s clear from footage of that same day — from their friend era — which appears late in the new Netflix documentary “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell.” They’re sitting at a table together, and Tupac is rapping for Biggie, an optimal audience. Both of them are lighthearted, two young rising stars finding a little respite with each other. As for the photo, a pose is just that.Memory — history — is what’s left standing when all the rough edges are sandpapered down. And in the case of the Notorious B.I.G. — who was one of the most commercially successful and creatively impactful rappers of the 1990s, and whose 1997 murder was a wound to the genre that remains unsolved — history has perhaps been unreasonably flattening. Almost two and a half decades later, the Biggie Smalls narrative (music aside) often feels reduced to a few image touchstones, or even just facial expressions, to say nothing of the generations-later conflation of the Biggie and Tupac story lines into one, especially given that their musical careers told very different tales about hip-hop at that time.The story that “Biggie” wants to tell is about how Christopher Wallace became Biggie Smalls, not how Biggie Smalls changed the world.Credit…NetflixThis fuzzying of the truth is a problem addressed head-on by “Biggie,” which is, in the main, a prehistory of the Notorious B.I.G. Maybe half of the film is about his music career, and of that, not much at all is devoted to his commercial prime. This makes the film anti-mythological, but also far more robust.The first footage you see in “Biggie” is of the rapper, then in his early 20s, shaving and joking about trying to hold tight to looking like his 18-year-old self. A little bit later, he’s goofily singing Jodeci’s “Freek’n You,” a slithery classic of ’90s R&B. For so long, Biggie has been enshrined as a legend, a deity — it unclenches your chest a bit to see him depicted as human.The story that “Biggie” — directed by Emmett Malloy, and reliant upon ample ’90s videotape shot by Biggie’s childhood friend Damion (D-Roc) Butler — wants to tell is about how Christopher Wallace became Biggie Smalls, not how Biggie Smalls changed the world. It delves into the relationship between his parents: Voletta Wallace, who has become a public face of mourning and grief, and the father he barely knew. It recounts childhood time spent in Jamaica, where his mother was born and where much of his family still resides, leaving largely unspoken the way that Jamaican toasting and melody slipped into his rapping.The film explores Biggie’s relationship with Donald Harrison, a saxophonist who lived on the rapper’s Brooklyn block and exposed him to art beyond the limits of their neighborhood.Credit…NetflixIt spends time with Donald Harrison, a saxophonist who played with Art Blakey, McCoy Tyner and Lena Horne, and lived on Biggie’s Brooklyn block, and who had a mentor relationship with a teenage Biggie — playing him jazz albums, taking him to the Museum of Modern Art, encouraging him to think beyond his neighborhood and to treat his rapping as an artistic practice.Harrison’s mentoring, though, is only one part of Biggie’s childhood education. The drug bazaar on Fulton Street, just around the corner from the stoop his mother rarely let him stray from, beckoned him and his friends. Eventually, he was selling crack, and the operation he and his crew ran took in a few thousand dollars a week, according to an old interview excerpted in the film. One time, he left crack out to dry in his bedroom, and his mother, thinking it was old mashed potatoes, threw it out.Before he was offered a pathway into the music business by Sean Combs, then Puff Daddy, selling drugs was Biggie’s most likely route. And for a while, the two careers commingled. Even Easy Mo Bee, who produced six songs on “Ready to Die,” describes driving onto Fulton to see if Biggie was on the block, offering to take him for rides as a strategy for disentangling him from his street business. But in 1992, Biggie’s childhood friend and running buddy Roland (Olie) Young was killed by his uncle, Carl (I-God) Bazemore, in a street dispute, and afterward, Biggie turned hard toward music.By that time, Biggie had already appeared in the Source magazine’s Unsigned Hype column. He’d also participated in a Brooklyn corner freestyle battle (that was fortuitously videotaped) that helped connect him with the D.J. 50 Grand, who he would record his demo with.Biggie with 50 Grand, the D.J. who worked with the rapper on his demo.Credit…NetflixBut even though his career was a spectacular comet ride, most of the parts of the film about that robust success focus more on how he treated his friends, and brought them along for the journey (under the Junior M.A.F.I.A. moniker). At one point, Biggie and a cameraman bust in on Lil’ Cease in a hotel room, undressed, and Biggie immediately turns into a big brother, turning to the camera lens and asking for privacy for his friend. Occasionally there is commentary from Combs, who is almost literally shining, a visual representation of the luxurious life that hip-hop would provide an entree to, which Biggie rapped about as fantasy but wouldn’t live to see.Most of the meaningful footage here is happenstance — a brutal trip on a tour bus without air conditioning or casual chatter in a room at Le Montrose, the Los Angeles hotel, during his final time in California. (The helicopter footage of Biggie’s funeral procession is also deeply moving, framing his death, and life, as a part of the city’s very architecture.)In the March 1997 San Francisco radio chat that’s presented as his final interview, Biggie is already sensing the way in which history will be selective in how it retells a deeply complicated narrative. Asked about his troubles with Tupac — who by then had died, but who had become a vicious antagonist before — Biggie doesn’t sound or look even slightly resentful. Instead, he’s measured, hoping to unravel a tricky knot before it becomes fixed. “Take a chance to know the person before you judge a person — that goes with anybody, not just me,” he tells the interviewer. “Try to get the facts first.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More