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      ‘War Game’ Review: It Can’t Happen Here (Right?)

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      This nail-biter of a documentary imagines it is Jan. 6, 2025, and armed supporters of the losing candidate are hatching a coup and maybe a civil war. What will the nation’s leaders do?“War Game,” a nail-biter of a documentary, asks a question a lot of us don’t want to even consider: What if there’s another Jan. 6, only bigger, better organized and more ideologically cohesive? To try and answer that question, on Jan. 6, 2023, two filmmakers turned their cameras on a nonpartisan group of politicians and intelligence and military advisers who were role-playing in a fake crisis like the assault on the Capitol. Like actors in a grim sequel — Steve Bullock, the ex-governor of Montana, plays the incumbent president — they were taking part in an unnervingly familiar scenario, racing to prevent a coup and maybe civil war.This war game was created by Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for veterans that was founded in 2009. As in other war games, exercises that simulate and prepare for wars (the U.S. Defense Department uses them), this one features sets of players. On one side is Bullock’s President John Hotham and his team white-knuckling through the unscripted scenario in the (fake) Situation Room; on the other is a fictional group of extremists, the Order of Columbus, who are loyal to the losing candidate, Gov. Robert Strickland (Chris Coffey, an actor). Among the rebels is a cool cat (Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran), who, from another location, approves moves and disinformation while elsewhere the game’s designers and consultants observe the proceedings.This particular game had one overarching rule: The president and his team have six hours to quell the revolt and ensure the “peaceful transfer of power,” parameters that, as the clock runs out, give it mounting urgency. The movie’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, working with Vet Voice, built sets and, using moody lighting, sleek camerawork and brisk editing, gave the game dramatic shape and momentum, paring down its six hours into a fast-moving 94-minute intrigue. The players did their part, too, of course: Bullock is definitely leading man material, even if, as the crisis deepens, he’s upstaged by Heidi Heitkamp, a former U.S. senator from North Dakota who plays his tough-talking senior adviser.Vet Voice’s appealing C.E.O., Janessa Goldbeck, a former combat engineer officer in the Marine Corps, takes on dual roles here as the game’s onscreen no-nonsense producer and the voice of the offscreen governor of Arizona. When she’s not hovering with the other game producers and consultants — these include the retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the conservative standard-bearer Bill Kristol — Goldbeck fills in some details. This war game, she explains, was inspired by a sobering 2021 Washington Post opinion piece by Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba and Steven M. Anderson, all retired U.S. Army generals.“We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time,” the three wrote, urging the Defense Department to “war-game the next potential postelection insurrection.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy

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      A recent documentary has industry bigwigs telling a galling story about the file-sharing era: Everything worked out for the best.How do you disassemble a decades-long, multibillion-dollar industry in just a few short years? This was the question at the heart of this summer’s two-part Paramount+ documentary, “How Music Got Free,” which examines the greed and myopia of the music business in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when an assortment of otherwise feckless teenagers and tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to trade songs over the internet. Depending on your perspective, it is either a delightful yarn about the money-changers in the temple getting their due or a long, sad narrative about corporations and consumers banding together to deprive artists of a fair wage.Far from demonizing the innovators of online music piracy, “How Music Got Free” regards them as digital Robin Hood figures, visionaries whose passion for technology and music leveled the economic playing field. One montage contrasts the Croesus-like wealth of artists like Master P with the hardscrabble lives of residents of Shelby, N.C., as if seeking to justify piracy in one persuasive sweep of social-realist juxtaposition. Shelby is the home of Bennie Lydell Glover, a computer wizard and CD-manufacturing-plant employee who smuggled countless embargoed records onto the internet — a pipeline of prerelease material large enough to affect the sales of artists as big as Kanye West and 50 Cent. The documentary is also quick to point out the orgiastic profits reaped by record labels during the ’80s and ’90s, when CDs could be manufactured for around $2 and sold for $20, a practice that proved doubly lucrative as the new format induced consumers to buy their record collections all over again. The old expression goes: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. When the damage was done — from 2006 to 2016, CD sales dropped 84 percent — an entire generation had internalized the notion that they should never expect to pay anything for the music they cherished. The carnage could scarcely be calculated.“How Music Got Free” offers a sympathetic look back at the early days of this paradigm shift, but it’s worth remembering how music moguls and corporations actually responded to piracy at the time. Their reaction might best be described as a Keystone Kops-style combination of outrage, threats and litigation that mirrored the general stages of grief. Their indignant protests had a plaintive message: “You’re stealing from your favorite artists!” The unspoken second half of that was: “That’s our job!”This is worth remembering specifically because “How Music Got Free” was produced by Eminem, among others, and features a parade of industry bigwigs including Jimmy Iovine, 50 Cent, Timbaland and Marshall Mathers himself. Today the documentary treats the rise of online file-sharing services as first an astonishment, then a nuisance, then an existential threat and then, amazingly, a panacea. The original pirates are judged to be “pioneers” who lit the only clear path forward for the music industry. That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut. A highly weird coda praises the contemporary streaming economy as a populist breakthrough, wherein, per the documentary’s narration, “we are one step closer to an artist being able to chart their own course.” Also: “Fans can experience music in their own ways.” Also, per one Panglossian talking head: “If you like music, you have more opportunities.” Also: “The artists themselves are just having more direct relationships with the consumers,” which — what does this even mean?History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.All turned out well, and music was solved forever.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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      Looking for the Best in Black Cinema? Try Brown Sugar.

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      The streaming service highlights some of the finest movies starring, and often directed by, Black artists.As the name-brand streaming services struggle to show profits and broker cable-esque bundling packages to cut costs, the most successful streamers are proving to be niche services, which curate specialized libraries for a specific target audience. We’ve spotlighted several such streamers in this space, most of them focusing on clearly defined genres or sensibilities; this month, we look at a service with an eye on one particular culture.Brown Sugar, which started in 2016, promises on its site “hit movies and TV shows along with the largest collection of classic Black cinema, uncut and commercial-free.” Its library features programming about the Black experience, predominately by Black creators, and aimed primarily at Black audiences (while recognizing that those audiences are seeking all sorts of entertainment). There is a robust selection of Black cinema from the 1970s, the vaunted blaxploitation era, including titles from Ossie Davis, Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Roundtree, as well as cult titles like “The Harder They Come” and “Putney Swope,” and ’80s favorites like “Hollywood Shuffle” and “Beat Street.”That era initially dominated the service’s library, but it has since broadened its offerings to include more contemporary romantic comedies, action thrillers, heartwarming dramas, and historical and true crime documentaries. It’s also cultivated a partnership with Bounce TV that gives viewers access to such long-running and popular shows as the soap opera “Saints & Sinners,” the rags-to-riches sitcom “Family Time” and the barbershop-set comedy “In the Cut.”Subscription is a bargain, running only $3.99 per month (after a one-week free trial) or $42 for a year. Brown Sugar is available on desktop and a variety of streaming devices, including Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Image quality varies wildly — some films and shows are Blu-ray quality, but occasional older and less-cared-for titles may well have been mastered from VHS. But it’s worth the risk for the hidden gems the service offers.Here are a few highlights from the current library:Pryor plays an outlaw and Williams a federal agent in Sidney J. Furie’s film.Paramount Pictures‘Hit!’: “Lady Sings the Blues” was one of the first and most successful (critically and commercially) films of ’70s Black cinema; this 1973 effort reunited that film’s director, Sidney J. Furie, with two of its co-stars, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, this time for an action extravaganza that more resembled “The French Connection” than “Lady.” Williams plays a federal agent who goes after an international drug cartel after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose; Pryor is one of the team of outlaws and outcasts he puts together to get the job done when his superiors veto the mission. The result is fast-paced and funny (thanks primarily to the always-reliable Pryor), and filled with thrilling action beats.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 ‘Swan Song,’ a Ballet Company Faces Racism and Sexism

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      The film follows a National Ballet of Canada production of “Swan Lake” as dancers and others deal with long-simmering issues of racism and sexism.Ballet makes a great documentary subject, with its rarefied, glamorous world that’s hidden from most viewers. What you see on the stage is just a tiny bit of the whole story. All that beauty and grace is the product of something so arduous that some fiction filmmakers have depicted it as physical and psychological torture (think of “Suspiria” or “Black Swan” or “The Red Shoes”). Even when it’s not that extreme, every ballet is the product of extraordinary commitment and work, and that means there are all kinds of stories to tell.Those tales provide excellent fodder for nonfiction filmmakers; any ballet documentary is equally about the dance and the dancers. “Swan Song” (in theaters or on Apple TV+ and directed by Chelsea McMullan) takes that to heart. It’s a film with a lot on its mind, one in which you can sense the filmmakers discovering the story as they go along.“Swan Song” centers on the National Ballet of Canada’s new production of “Swan Lake,” which was mounted in 2022. “Swan Lake,” set to a Tchaikovsky score, is one of the most widely performed ballets in the world, and also one of the most challenging for the central ballerina, who traditionally takes on two roles: the gentle Odette and the seductive Odile.During her career as an internationally renowned dancer, Karen Kain performed the role many times. After retirement, she joined the senior management of the National Ballet, becoming its artistic director in 2005. When “Swan Song” begins, she is preparing to stage and direct a new production of “Swan Lake” with the company. The work is slated to premiere in 2020, coinciding with Kain’s retirement. It’s her gift to the company and a cap to a 50-year career in ballet.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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      ‘Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net’ Review: How the Magic Happens

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      This documentary chronicles the reboot and reopening in Las Vegas of the acrobatic show “O,” which shutdown during the pandemic.Conventional wisdom once held, snootily, that circus folk were quirky, superstitious, given to idiosyncratic behavior. Whether that was ever really true or not, the members of the rather unconventional Cirque du Soleil, as portrayed in the new documentary “Cirque du Soleil: Without a Net,” happen to be rather remarkably levelheaded.In scenes of conception, rehearsal and more, nobody raises a voice, storms off, indulges in Machiavellian scheming or displays anything vaguely resembling diva or divo behavior. One acrobat expresses a hope to bring a new trick to a revived show. When she can’t make it work, she reverts to her rehearsed routine and resolves to come up with something some other time. No drama.The movie is not boring or dry, though, as “Without a Net,” directed by Dawn Porter, chronicles a critical period in the organization’s history: the remounting of a show after the pandemic shutdowns. (It had dozens of shows playing around the world before the pandemic. The virus shut them down within 48 hours in March 2020, and 95 percent of the company’s staff was laid off.) Over a year later, the company began remounting “O,” its popular Las Vegas show. The title is a pun: This spectacle features acrobats performing without a net above an ingeniously engineered pool of water — as in “eau,” the French word for water.Porter’s inquisitive camera gives the viewer enticing detail on how everything comes together — for instance, unbeknown to the audience, the pool is constantly monitored by rescue divers in scuba gear who also serve as prop people — while holding in suitable awe the actual magic all this work eventually yields.Cirque du Soleil: Without a NetRated PG-13 for some strong language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Sympathy for the Diva: Why We Love ‘Difficult’ Stars

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      A new Faye Dunaway documentary wants to turn us from gossips into cheerleaders.Before Faye Dunaway makes her big entrance, you hear her snap from off camera: “We need to shoot. I’m here now. Come on!” When we meet her inside her apartment, she’s using a piece of paper to fan herself with a petulance that’s reminiscent of Queen Charlotte from “Bridgerton.” This is the feisty opening to the HBO documentary “Faye,” and it doesn’t do much to dispel decades of rumors painting Dunaway as a temperamental diva. Difficult, erratic, vain, narcissistic: These descriptors have etched themselves into the reputations of many famous women, and they have also been countered in all sorts of media. Much like Barbra Streisand’s memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” or the 2018 Grace Jones documentary, “Bloodlight and Bami,” one clear purpose of “Faye” is rebuttal: to let Dunaway reconstruct the narrative.Like many in my generation, I first saw Dunaway in “Mommie Dearest,” the 1981 film — either a disaster or a masterpiece, depending on whom you ask and their tolerance for camp — in which she played another supposed she-devil: Joan Crawford, whom the movie depicts as an abusive mother and a fame-hungry prima donna. Unlike Roger Ebert, who called it “one of the most depressing films in a long time,” I was transfixed by “Mommie Dearest.” I couldn’t get enough of Dunaway’s shellacked eyebrows, the murderous rose-garden scene, the “no more wire hangers” theatrics. There’s an entire age cohort whose sense of Dunaway is all scrambled up in this role. Instead of meeting her via classics like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Chinatown” and “Network,” we met her as Crawford, berating everyone in her path. As Dunaway says in a 1984 interview clip shown in the new documentary, “There’s an inevitable tendency of people who both work in the industry and the audience to associate, to think you’re like the parts you play.”If you’re not up on the reputation that Dunaway now has to dispute, a quick scroll through Reddit threads about her should get you up to speed. There are first-person accounts, too, many of which appear in HBO’s documentary. In one clip, Johnny Carson asks Bette Davis — rumored to be a bit of a harpy herself — to name the most difficult person she ever worked with; Davis, looking prim in a white bucket hat, shoots back, “One million dollars, Faye Dunaway,” to great laughter. In a clip that’s not shown in the documentary, Brenda Vaccaro, who worked alongside Dunaway in the 1984 movie “Supergirl,” says that Dunaway “would terrify people” — though she also calls her a “brilliant actress” and adds that “you can see the struggle.”“Faye” uses a mix of straight-to-camera interviews, family photos, archival footage and plenty of film clips to humanize little Dorothy Faye, a girl from Bascom, Fla., who quickly achieved Hollywood-icon status. It also dwells on that “struggle” part and enlists talking heads to spring to Dunaway’s defense. We learn about her alcohol dependency and her late-in-life diagnosis of bipolar disorder, both of which Dunaway finally sought treatment for after years of unexplained mood swings, depression and erratic behavior. Sharon Stone, Dunaway’s chum and mentee, talks about the intense pressure on actresses to be thin and says that Dunaway has only ever been kind and generous to her. She becomes fiercely protective when the subject of “Mommie Dearest” comes up: “Everybody wants to make fun of her for ‘Mommie Dearest,’ but you tell me how you play that part,” she says. “The joke is on the director, the joke is not on the artist.”At each stage, we the audience have our own parts to play: fans, bullies, executioners, cheerleaders, allies.Mickey Rourke — whose own reputation isn’t exactly untarnished — starred in “Barfly” with Dunaway. He was, he says, “in awe of her and kind of a little intimidated.” He attempts to soften Dunaway’s image, but that task becomes complicated when people like Howard Koch come along to share their experiences. Koch was first assistant director on the set of “Chinatown.” In his first phone call to Dunaway, he says, she guessed that he was a Sagittarius, then informed him that this astrological offense meant they would never get along. He then dishes about Dunaway’s demanding that Blistex be applied to her lips before every take. Jack Nicholson, we learn, had a loving nickname for her on the set: “Dread.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Two American Families’ Is a Knockout Documentary

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      This latest installment in a long-term Frontline series is an intimate look at two American families, who work hard but struggle to make ends meet.The Frontline documentary “Two American Families: 1991-2024,” arriving on Tuesday, follows two Milwaukee families, one Black, one white, over the last 30-odd years. “Families” is intimate and dignified, unwavering but gentle. At a time when so much documentary television feels generic, disposable and even straightforwardly pointless, this is both a master work unto itself and a glaring reminder of what is largely absent in television narrative nonfiction.“Families” is the fifth installment in the tales of the Stanley and Neumann families, a long-term portrait series produced and directed by Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes, with interviews and narration by Bill Moyers. The specials began with “Minimum Wages: The New Economy” in 1992, after the breadwinners of each family were laid off from union manufacturing jobs. (This newest entry covers the full timeline and does not require previous familiarity.) Since then, neither family has ever truly recovered, despite ceaseless — ceaseless — hard work, as the parents, and eventually their children, all struggle to find their way into the middle class.Faith is a huge theme here, with each family turning to religious practice as a respite from suffering and as reservoir of hope. In one scene, the white family, the Neumanns, stand on the altar as their priest thanks God for providing the dad with an $8-per-hour nonunion job with no benefits. Even that job doesn’t last. Prayers and preaching weave through the decades, gratitude for the riches ostensibly to come.“Families” intercuts moments of everyday strain with Inaugural Addresses going back to Bill Clinton, in which each president promises jobs, jobs and more jobs, and each declares the American economy to be growing and glorious. And yet. “Despite all the hard work, these two American families had barely survived one of the most prosperous decades in our history,” Moyers narrates. And that’s barely at the halfway point in the story.The latest installment is available Tuesday on the PBS app and website and airs on PBS that night at 10 p.m. (Check local listings.)SIDE QUEST“Two American Families” reminds me a lot of the 1998 series “The Farmer’s Wife,” also a Frontline documentary. That’s available on the PBS Documentaries app, and it’s one of the most memorable and powerful documentaries I’ve ever seen. More

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      in Music

      10 Outstanding Brian Eno Productions

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      Inspired by an ever-changing new documentary about the musician and producer, listen to songs he helped construct by David Bowie, Talking Heads, U2 and more.Just four versions of Brian Eno.Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesDear listeners,This week, I saw Gary Hustwit’s lively documentary “Eno,” about the musician, artist and producer Brian Eno. I’d recommend it to you — but it’s highly unlikely that you will see the same version of the film that I did.Formally inspired by Eno’s longtime fascination with generative art, “Eno” is essentially created anew each time it’s screened. A computer program called Brain One (a playful anagram of “Brian Eno”) selects from 30 hours of interviews with Eno that Hustwit conducted and 500 hours of archival footage, fitting it into a structure that lasts about 90 minutes. According to the Brain One programmer Brendan Dawes, 52 quintillion possible versions of the movie exist. I did not even know, before seeing this film, that “52 quintillion” was a real number.Some of my favorite parts of the version of “Eno” that I saw concerned his work as a producer. He’s certainly been a prolific one, working with traditional rock bands (Coldplay, U2), avant-garde composers (Harold Budd) and a whole lot of legends in between (David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads). Eno is neither a classically trained musician nor a conventional technician, and his role in the studio can be hard to define — maddeningly so, to certain record-label executives over the years. Admitted Bowie, in a clip from the film I saw, “I don’t really know what he does.” He meant that as a compliment.The most interesting parts of “Eno,” for me, shed a little more light on that elusive “what.” As a producer, he is equal parts agitator and sage. When he and Bowie were hitting a wall during the making of Bowie’s 1977 landmark “‘Heroes,’” they each pulled cards from Eno’s deck of Oblique Strategies cards, which provide creative jumping-off points; the result was the hypnotic ambient composition “Moss Garden.” When Bono was struggling to complete a soon-to-be classic U2 track, Eno showed patience. When Talking Heads were looking for a new musical direction before making “Remain in Light,” Eno played them one of his all-time favorite musicians, Fela Kuti. The rest — in so many clips of Eno in the studio — is history.Inspired by “Eno,” today’s playlist is a collection of songs produced by the man himself. Eno the Producer is merely one side of this multifaceted artist, but I appreciated that the sense of multiplicity baked into the structure of “Eno” speaks to how difficult it is to define him with a single identity. There are probably nearly 52 quintillion possible Brian Eno playlists I could have made — Jon Pareles made another in 2020, selecting 15 of Eno’s best ambient compositions — but here is the one I chose. It flows well from start to finish, but if you’re feeling inspired by Hustwit’s generative approach, you’re certainly welcome to put it on shuffle.Line my eyes and call me pretty,LindsayWe 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