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      in Television

      The Menendez Brothers’ Case Under Review: What to Know.

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      Prosecutors are revisiting the brothers’ convictions in the killings of their parents. It could lead to their release from prison.Over 35 years ago, Lyle and Erik Menendez — then 21 and 18 years old — walked into the den of their Beverly Hills mansion and fired more than a dozen shotgun rounds at their parents.Now, after serving decades behind bars as part of a life sentence without the possibility of parole, the Menendez brothers may be getting a chance at freedom.In early October, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, announced that his office was reviewing the case after lawyers representing the Menendez brothers asked prosecutors to recommend a resentencing, a move that could lead to their release.The reconsideration of their life sentences comes at a time when the Menendez brothers have been thrust back into the media spotlight thanks to the revelation of new evidence, an army of social media defenders and a recent television series and documentary examining their crime and trials.Here’s what to know about the Menendez brothers’ case:What were they convicted of?In 1996, the Menendez brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing their parents, Jose, a music executive, and Mary Louise, a former beauty queen who went by the name Kitty.It was their second trial. Two years prior, a mistrial was declared after two separate juries (one for each brother) deadlocked over a verdict.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 Movies

      In ‘Smile 2’ and ‘Trap,’ Pop Stardom Looks Pretty Terrifying

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      At a time when the business of being Taylor Swift or Beyoncé is booming, these films examine toxic fandom and what can seem like mass hysteria.This article contains spoilers.Last year around this time, audiences were heading to movie theaters to experience the joy of being in the presence of a pop star.“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” had just been released, prompting Swifties and the Swift-curious to descend on multiplexes, friendship bracelets adorning their wrists. Weeks later, the Beyhive would don silver cowboy hats for the release of “Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé.” Attending one of these concert films meant having a great time and reveling in the glory of the women onstage who seemed to be doing the same.Now being a pop star at the movies looks a lot more terrifying.Horror centered on pop stars is all the rage these days. In M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” released in August, the concert by the fictional Lady Raven (Saleka) is an elaborate setup to nab a serial killer (Josh Hartnett). This weekend, “Smile 2,” directed by Parker Finn, follows Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a troubled Grammy winner with a history of addiction who comes to be possessed by a demon that drives her mad with violent hallucinations. To her fans and her team, it looks like she’s on another, possibly drug-induced spiral, but really a monster is goading her into killing herself.Both these movies are a product of a time when the business of being a pop star is bigger than ever. Events like the Eras and Renaissance tours became zeitgeist-defining moments as well as fodder that filmmakers could mine for inspiration. Shyamalan was even direct about it in an Empire interview. His premise for “Trap”? “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”Saleka as a pop star whose concert is a setup to nab a serial killer in “Trap.” Warner Bros. PicturesBut both “Trap” and “Smile 2” prove that beyond the fun of the setup, the life of a pop star is actually thematically ripe for horror. It’s a high-pressure job in which you never know whether you’re meeting a fan or a predator.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 Theater

      The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now

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      Toward the end of “A Real Pain,” a movie written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg coming to theaters on Nov. 1, two first cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin approach the house in a Polish town where their recently deceased grandmother had lived before the Holocaust.Eisenberg’s character, David, the more reserved of the pair, proposes the two leave stones on the doorstep, riffing on the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.“She’s not buried here,” says Culkin’s cousin, Benji.“Yeah, I know, but it’s the last place she was in Poland,” says David. “It’s the last place any of us were.”The improvised remembrance, the interruption of self-awareness, the confused sense of duty — all are characteristic of how American descendants of the Holocaust’s victims two generations removed today commemorate an event that, nearly 80 years after it ended, can feel like something that still governs their lives, not to mention the lives of Jews and everyone else.This cohort is known as the third generation of Holocaust survivors, and “A Real Pain” is representative of their output. Which is to say: It is often not about the Holocaust at all. The cousins go together on an organized tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in Poland, but much of it — excepting a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp — is lighthearted. David and Benji grieve mainly not for the Holocaust but for their grandmother, who survived it. They struggle with their own problems, including the dissipation of their relationship. They question why they are even there.Jesse Eisenberg on the set of his new movie, “A Real Pain,” about the grandsons of a Holocaust survivor visiting Poland.Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight PicturesWe 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

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Fantastical’ Is a Catfishing Horror Story About Toxic Fandom

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      “Fanatical,” an eye-popping film directed by Erin Lee Carr, details the bizarre 16-year ordeal that the duo and their fans endured.The turn-of-the-century internet was organized not around content selected for us by algorithms, but around shared interests that we sought out. Whether you loved a band or were devoutly religious or had questions about your sexuality, someone had made an AOL chatroom or a message board or a LiveJournal community where you could meet people like you. It was often invigorating and life-affirming, especially if you felt lonely in the real world. It seems like the exact opposite of today’s personality- and ad-driven internet.The new, eye-popping documentary “Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara” (Hulu), directed by Erin Lee Carr, is about that era and what became of it. But the lens through which it tells the story involves a truly bizarre series of events related to Tegan Quin, who with her twin sister, Sara Quin, formed an eponymous indie pop band that became huge right as the social internet was taking off. At the start of the film, Tegan says she’s never talked publicly about the situation before, which began 16 years ago. In fact, she admits to Carr, she already kind of regrets talking about it now.The duo started to become famous after their 2004 album, “So Jealous,” when the sisters realized their growing audiences skewed young, mostly female and mostly queer. Their concerts were safe spaces, and their fans often found one another through sites devoted to the band. Both women, but Tegan in particular, were active on the internet, and made a point of connecting with fans both online and at shows. They fostered a community.But “Fanatical” is not a profile of the band or its fans. It’s a horror story.In 2008, a fan named Julie contacted a Facebook profile that appeared to be Tegan’s. A yearslong messaging relationship ensued, one that turned close and even intimate. But then, in 2011, Tegan did something that felt off to Julie. So she contacted the band’s manager.From there emerged the kind of mystery that’s actually a nightmare, a story Carr tells through interviews with fans, the band’s former management, a few experts and both sisters. The user Julie had been talking to for years wasn’t Tegan at all — it was someone impersonating Tegan, a user they all started calling “Fake Tegan,” or “Fegan.” For Julie, this relationship had been deeply meaningful, especially since Tegan and Sara’s music was a way to process her fear when, as a college student, she began to question her own sexual orientation. When “Fegan” turned aggressive, even verbally abusive, she was wounded — and realizing that years of her life had been spent unburdening her secrets and her soul to someone who wasn’t Tegan was horrifying. As the band and their management discovered, these intimate messaging relationships went far, far beyond Julie — and so did the fallout.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

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Union’ Review: Amazon Workers Unionize

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      As this documentary by Brett Story and Stephen Maing chronicles, the efforts to unionize a warehouse in New York were successful — but also a grind.When employees at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, the result was seen as a major victory for organized labor. A year earlier, the documentarians Brett Story (“The Hottest August”) and Stephen Maing (“Crime + Punishment”) got on the ground with the workers and the organizers; in their engrossing new film, “Union,” they show how the vote’s outcome was hardly assured.The filmmakers introduce Christian Smalls — a founder of the Amazon Labor Union, the group striving to represent the workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center — as he grills food at a tent outside the warehouse. Even then, in 2021, Smalls is already, as a woman meeting him puts it, “low-key famous,” having been fired in 2020 after planning and attending a walkout over pandemic safety conditions.“Union” is partly about the grind of organizing: of chatting with workers over burgers, of attending video meetings, of resolving petty disputes. Smalls’s leadership does not always command the group’s full confidence. Natalie Monarrez, an early ally, grows disillusioned as “Union” proceeds. “I can’t leave one boys’ club at Amazon and work for another boys’ club in the union,” she tells Madeline Wesley, an organizer and recent college graduate who becomes another compelling voice in the story.Like Barbara Kopple’s organized labor documentary “American Dream,” “Union” is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well, as Smalls and company face daunting math and an anti-union campaign from inside, where the sometimes-tense footage, the filmmakers have said, was shot by the workers themselves.UnionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Nocturnes’ Review: They Come at Night

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      In the forests of northeast India, an ecologist tracking moths creates a tiny oasis of light in the darkness.Early in the enlightened nature documentary “Nocturnes,” a simple cut captures the mix of micro and macro that its directors, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, explore.Mansi Mungee, a quantitative ecologist, is counting moths in the forests of northeast India by hanging a lamp-lit sheet of fabric for the insects to land on. One such setup becomes a tiny oasis of light in the woods, and then, suddenly, we see the moon. Through this visual play with scale, moths and humans are placed in perspective as fellow creatures on the same level in the cosmos.“Nocturnes” is about Mungee’s hard work as a scientist, scouting and watching, and it’s also about the land itself. This lush and gorgeous stretch of Arunachal Pradesh, its misty landscapes drizzled with rain, has its own life apart from the scientific observers who come to the area. Mungee is measuring the sizes of hawk moths at different elevations and the effects of changing temperatures, but the filmmakers allow our gaze to dwell on the arabesques of wings on the hanging sheets, or, by day, the ethereal tree cover.This isn’t nature as an orderly picture book. Mungee and her team at one point must smash fallen rocks to clear a road, and they patiently endure cold and damp weather. In the award-winning film’s sound design, the din of animals — rustling and fluttering, plus calls of all sorts — becomes a raucous narration of its own.The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.NocturnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Christopher Reeve and 6 Takeaways From the Documentary ‘Super/Man’

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      The new film chronicles the life of the paralyzed star, covering his friendship with Robin Williams and gut-wrenching details about his care and family.The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who died in 2004 at 52, chronicling his early days; his pivotal friendship with his Juilliard roommate, Robin Williams; and his transformation, in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, into a leading disability and research advocate. Friends like Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry offer their observations; disability rights activists do, too. It’s a thought-provoking tear-jerker.It also doubles as a family movie, showing Reeve in his role as a father to his three children — Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens from an early relationship that he fled at the height of his fame, and Will Reeve, his son with his wife, Dana Reeve. With unwavering support, she largely gave up her career as a singer and actress to care for her husband. She died of cancer in 2006, just 18 months after him, leaving behind their son, then 13.The compounded tragedy is leavened by the hope that Reeve embodied, especially with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which has invested $140 million in the search for a cure for spinal cord paralysis. The film — which arrived in theaters 20 years after Christopher Reeve’s death, almost to the day — chronicles their determination, and doesn’t flinch from the darkest moments, including money worries and the relentlessness of day-to-day caregiving.Reeve, left, and his wife, Dana, with the comedian and actor Robin Williams after Reeve’s appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1996.Vince Bucci/AFP, via Getty ImagesThe unvarnished approach — and the timing, with Reeve’s children having reached solid footing as adults — led the siblings to agree to the project after years of turning down other offers, said Will Reeve, 32, a correspondent for ABC News and a look-alike to his father. They hoped their home movies and archival material “would provide a deeper meaning and greater texture to his story,” he said, “and remind folks of the fullness of life that one can have, despite whatever catastrophic injury they may suffer, whatever disability they may have.”In a video interview from London, where they’re based, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discussed their rationale for not putting Reeve “on a pedestal,” as Ettedgui described it. “It was really important to show how someone who you might think of as being somehow perfect — the ideal hero — how they experience the same insecurities, the same family issues that the rest of us might,” he said.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 Movies

      Lego’s First Documentary, ‘Piece by Piece,’ Tells Pharrell Williams’ Story

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      The toymaker has found success in fictional films. But with “Piece by Piece,” about the life of Mr. Williams, it has gotten into a new genre.In Lego, anything is possible — within limits. Just ask the documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville.Mr. Neville, an Oscar winner, spent the past five years turning the life story of Pharrell Williams into an animated documentary created entirely from Legos. And those Danish-designed building blocks allowed him to create things that would typically fall outside the genre’s constraints.He illustrated Mr. Williams’s experience of synesthesia, which allows him to see color when he hears sounds, through translucent Lego pieces. They gave Mr. Neville the tools to turn the signature beats of the multi-hyphenate — rapper, producer and fashion designer are among Mr. Williams’s titles — into colorful bricks that he could take out of storage and transform into a hit song. And it ushered in some fantastical scenes that show Mr. Williams lost in outer space or trapped inside a whirlpool.“One thing I realized right away was that it wasn’t just about translating a documentary into animation,” said Mr. Neville, who on Friday will debut “Piece by Piece,” a $16 million musical documentary via Focus Features. “It was about using what animation could do that documentary couldn’t do, which is take you into the fantasy world. I found it so liberating, all the things you can communicate visually that you don’t have to say.”The film is also a stretch for Lego, which defied odds back in 2014 when it released “The Lego Movie” to both commercial and critical acclaim. (That movie grossed $471 million worldwide, and its signature song, “Everything Is Awesome,” landed an Oscar nomination.) The toy company made three more films in partnership with Warner Bros. before moving to Universal Pictures in 2020. That arrangement, while four years old, has yet to produce a movie. “Piece by Piece” is not part of that deal, though it was made by a subsidiary of Universal.Mr. Williams’s experience of synesthesia, which allows him to see color when he hears music, is illustrated in the film through translucent Lego pieces.NBC Universal“We really always want to be doing something that is inspiring people, that’s fitting with the brand and what we stand for, but that is also unexpected,” Jill Wilfert, a senior vice president of global entertainment at the Lego Group, said in an interview. “We were looking to come back onto the big screen, and this felt like a nice way to do something that was definitely going to defy people’s expectations.”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