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      ‘Cheer’ Is Back. Here’s Where the Jerry Harris Case Stands.

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      The Emmy-winning Netflix documentary series returns for a second season on Wednesday without its breakout star, who is awaiting trial in a case involving child sexual abuse imagery.Last month, Netflix announced a surprise second season of its Emmy-winning documentary series “Cheer,” which follows a national champion cheerleading team from Navarro College, a small-town Texas community college.While the new season shifts the focus to a fresh group of cheerleaders, one recent graduate remains in the news: Jerry Harris, the Navarro cheerleader whose “mat talk” and constant optimism in Season 1 made him a talk-show darling, has cast a shadow over the show. Twin teenage boys sued Harris in September 2020, accusing him of sexual abuse. He was also arrested that month on federal child pornography charges and remains in custody.The nine-episode season addresses the case from the start and includes an hourlong episode featuring on-camera interviews with Harris’s former cheerleading teammates from Navarro; the team’s coach, Monica Aldama; the brothers who are suing Harris; their mother; and the USA Today reporters who broke the news.Here’s what to know about the accusations against Harris, who is now 22, the status of his case and where Season 2 picks up.Jerry Harris in “Cheer.”NetflixWhat is Jerry Harris accused of?In September 2020, the twin brothers, who were then 14 years old, filed a lawsuit in Texas accusing Harris of sending them sexually explicit messages via text and social media, demanding they send him nude photos of themselves, and, while at a cheerleading competition in 2019, asking one of them for oral sex. Harris befriended the boys when they were 13 and he was 19, USA Today reported. Harris, of Naperville, Ill., was arrested by the F.B.I. in September 2020 and charged with production of child pornography.In a voluntary interview with the F.B.I. after his arrest, Harris acknowledged that he had exchanged sexually explicit photos on Snapchat with at least 10 to 15 people he knew were minors; had sex with a 15-year-old at a cheerleading competition in 2019; and paid a 17-year-old to send him nude photos.In the months that followed, federal agents interviewed other minors who said they had had relationships with Harris. In December 2020, they filed additional charges against him including four counts of sexual exploitation of children, one count of receiving and attempting to receive child pornography, one count of traveling with the attempt to engage in sexual conduct with a minor and one count of enticement, for a total of seven counts related to five minor boys. The indictment says these acts took place between August 2017 and August 2020 in Florida, Illinois and Texas. If convicted, Harris could face 15 to 30 years in federal prison.How has Harris responded to the accusations?In December 2020, he pleaded not guilty to the multiple felony charges. Harris’s lawyer, Todd Pugh, did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.Where does the new season of “Cheer” pick up?When we left the Navarro College team at the end of the first season, it was after they had won the 2019 junior college division of the National Cheerleaders Association and National Dance Alliance Collegiate National Championship in Daytona, Fla. Cue a “Today” show invite, an “Ellen DeGeneres Show” appearance and an “S.N.L.” parody.Season 2 began filming in January 2020 but came to a halt amid the pandemic shutdowns. The 2020 national championship was canceled because of Covid. Filming resumed in September 2020, tracking the team’s journey to the 2021 championship in April. (We won’t spoil it here, but if you want to know how they fared, well, we won’t stop you.)From left, Grant Lockaby, Lexi Brumback, La’Darius Marshall and Morgan Simianer in Season 2 of “Cheer.”NetflixThis season, the series follows the new cheer team as they get ready to compete against the rival Trinity Valley Community College. It also follows a few cast members from Season 1 (Gabi Butler, La’Darius Marshall, Lexi Brumback and Morgan Simianer all return).It addresses new challenges the team has faced since it claimed the 2019 title, including the departure of the head coach, Aldama, to compete on “Dancing With the Stars” in Los Angeles. She made it to Week 7 out of 11, but was 1,500 miles away from her squad when the allegations against Harris became public in September 2020.How does “Cheer” address the allegations?After Harris’s absence is mentioned in Episode 1, the show devotes almost the entire hour of Episode 5 to examining the case. It includes interviews with the twins, who discuss their decision to go public and the fallout from the accusations.The episode also includes interviews with Harris’s former teammates, who struggle to reconcile the bubbly, positive cheerleader they thought they knew with the crimes he is accused of committing. Aldama reveals that Harris wrote her a letter in which he said he hoped to become a motivational speaker one day.The one person we don’t hear from is Harris. In the press notes for the series, the “Cheer” director, Greg Whiteley, said he hadn’t talked to him, adding that Harris’s lawyers had prevented it. Netflix said Harris’s lawyers declined to comment for the series.Where is Harris now?Harris has been held without bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since his September 2020 arrest after a judge suggested he would pose a danger to the public if released. No trial date has yet been set. A case status hearing is scheduled for Wednesday. More

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      ‘Expedition Content’ Review: Anthropological Maneuvers in the Dark

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      An engrossing documentary looks back at a 1961 expedition to New Guinea and the creation of the landmark ethnographic film that resulted.“But what to do with your eyes?” — this ridiculous question popped into my head early while watching “Expedition Content,” though watching doesn’t entirely describe what I was doing. I was listening, a lot. That’s because for most of its 78 minutes, this startling and fascinating experimental documentary shows you only a black screen. Every so often, a shock of slate-y, steely blue fills the frame, followed by text. Late in the work, there is a cut to a brief scene that was shot from inside a cave. There, silhouetted figures carrying torches move about, faintly illuminated by light from the mouth of the cave.The genesis of this project is 37 hours of audio, recorded in what was then called Netherlands New Guinea (the western half of New Guinea). The tapes were made by Michael C. Rockefeller for “Dead Birds” (1964), a milestone in ethnographic cinema directed by Robert Gardner, which focuses on the Dani (also known as the Hubula), tribal people living in the Baliem Valley. The Dani were apparently unknown to westerners until 1938, when an American researcher and adventurer spotted them from a plane. Two decades later, Gardner heard about “an obscure New Guinea tribe” that engaged in elaborate ritual warfare.By that point, Gardner, a filmmaker and anthropologist (he died in 2014), had established the Film Study Center at Harvard College. He had made several shorts of his own and worked on John Marshall’s “The Hunters,” a documentary feature about hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert. Fortified with that experience, Gardner set about finding a new film to make. Part of what drew him to the New Guinea tribe, he later wrote, was the thought that he could “carefully document a small part of the still accessible and fully functioning Indigenous life.” The internet did not yet exist; the world was much larger, its people far less known.Gardner was aware of the region’s geopolitical turmoil and the fight for control over the western half of the island of New Guinea. Indonesia had declared its independence from the Netherlands in 1945, and in the years since had been trying to wrest western New Guinea from the Dutch. (Papua New Guinea comprises the island’s east half.) The dispute involved assorted international Cold War parties, including the United States, which in 1958 provided covert military aid to Indonesian anti-Communist rebels. By the time that Gardner’s team arrived in New Guinea, in 1961, Indonesia’s President Sukarno had threatened military and economic intervention in west New Guinea, including the expropriation of Dutch capital.“Expedition Content” engages with that history but provides comparatively little concrete information. Instead, its creators, Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati — the credits note that it was “composed by” them — let the audio speak for itself, as it were, an optimistic approach that assumes viewers have both a firm grasp on Indonesian history (not so much, in my case) and an appreciation of cinematic experimentation (way more). Those assumptions are immediately tested when, soon after the title flashes onscreen, the movie cuts to all black and the sounds of unidentified men speaking in English.“Everything is blue, there’s no filter,” says one man. He adds that the “key note” of the film’s photography is to achieve naturalism, asking if “Bob” agrees. “Not exactly,” says a man I assumed was Gardner, who answers in the same deep voice that narrates “Dead Birds.”Six minutes later, Karel and Kusumaryati sketch in some background with text, including the year, the names and professions of the expedition’s participants and the works that resulted from this venture. The composers also list some facts about the Rockefeller family, starting with a 1935 agreement between Standard Oil — which was founded by Michael’s great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller — and Royal Dutch Shell to explore oil in New Guinea. Among the other details listed is Michael’s disappearance and presumed death in New Guinea in late 1961. This brief family bio ends with a reference to Michael’s father, Nelson A. Rockefeller, “who ordered the police assault on the Attica prison uprising.”The Attica detail feels like a provocation, partly because it leaves you wondering what exactly Attica has to do with a 1961 expedition across the globe or why the histories of the other participants aren’t included. Be patient! As it turns out, these snippets of text are bread crumbs that help lead you — gradually, elliptically — down the movie’s darkly lit path. That journey is surprisingly engaging, though I admittedly needed to chill out, get into the movie’s groove and just drift along on the soundscape as I looked around the screening room, closed my eyes (briefly) and so on. The audio includes Michael Rockefeller’s time stamps, descriptions (“sounds of nature”) and bumbling with the equipment, as well as the beautiful music made by animals whirring, chirping and buzzing and the Dani people’s singing and chanting.The Dani also talk, murmur and yell, but not everything they say is translated, which is another provocation. The expedition participants speak in English and almost everything they say is understandable, at least if you speak the language. Whether this means that you, as an English speaker, are aligned or even implicated in the expedition is a question the movie presents without answering. Certainly, for those who don’t speak Dani it is frustrating not to know what they’re saying, which is presumably to the movie’s point and the questions it raises about anthropology. By narrating “Dead Birds,” for instance, Gardner didn’t simply speak for the Dani: He translated them for his viewers and the greater world.The problem of translation — who speaks for whom and why — echoes through “Expedition Content,” which builds to a shattering climax during a long, boozy revel in which the expedition men joke and laugh. They’re celebrating, cutting loose. And then they start talking about jazz, and their talk grows progressively squirm-inducing, upsetting, ugly. Whether the conversation serves as an indictment of Gardner’s project and, by extension, the white ethnographic gaze, is left open. I found it heartbreaking, and instructive. I still love “Dead Birds” but when I reread Gardner on its making, I also lingered over his observation that anthropology could reveal “the meaning of one’s own life as well as, or even better than, the meaning of the lives of ‘others.’”Expedition ContentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Gadfly’ Review: A Candid Candidacy

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      This documentary goes behind the scenes of Mike Gravel’s oddball run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.A victory lap for a campaign that never sought to win, the documentary “American Gadfly” goes a long way toward explaining Mike Gravel’s perplexing run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.Gravel, the former two-term Alaska senator who pursued the 2008 nomination in earnest, and who died last year at 91, merely tried to qualify for the 2020 cycle’s debates. His run, which lasted for four months in 2019, was mainly the brainchild of two teenagers, David Oks and Henry Williams, who saw Gravel as a storied figure who wouldn’t prevail but could raise hell and push the political discussion leftward. Gravel sat on the sidelines and handed over his Twitter account.“My real end goal has always been to have Bernie Sanders pick up our platform plank,” Williams says at a staff meeting in the movie. Later in the film, in June 2019, Williams says he hopes half the candidates, “possibly including us,” will soon drop out, so that voters can vet contenders with a chance. Casting Tim Ryan, Bill de Blasio and John Delaney as villains — while somewhat incongruously praising Marianne Williamson, who aided Gravel’s fund-raising efforts — the movie suggests that Gravel had more substance than better-publicized long shots.The director, Skye Wallin, presents the correctness of Oks and Williams’s cause as a given. If you can get past that ingenuousness, “American Gadfly” is enjoyable as a chronicle of teenage idealism and its frustrations. (In Iowa, Oks bemoans the inefficiency of meeting and greeting voters.) Gravel, in his appearances, comes across as avuncular, eager to share ideas but even more eager to encourage young acolytes.American GadflyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Three Minutes: A Lengthening’ Looks at Jewish Life Before Nazi Invasion

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      A documentary based on a home movie shot by an American in 1938 provides a look at the vibrancy of a Jewish community in Europe just before the Holocaust.AMSTERDAM — Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.Fewer than 100 would survive it.Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.“It’s a short piece of footage, but it’s amazing how much it yields,” Stigter said in an interview in Amsterdam recently. “Every time I see it, I see something I haven’t really seen before. I must have seen it thousands and thousands of times, but still, I can always see a detail that has escaped my attention before.”Almost as unusual as the footage is the journey it took before gaining wider exposure. All but forgotten within his family, the videotape was transferred to DVD and sent to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in 2009.“We knew it was unique,” said Leslie Swift, chief of the film, oral history and recorded sound branch of the museum. “I immediately communicated with him and said, ‘If you have the original film, that’s what we want.’”The Holocaust museum was able to restore and digitize the film, and it posted the footage on its website. At the time, Kurtz didn’t know where it had been shot, nor did he know the names of any of the people in the town square. His grandfather had emigrated from Poland to the United States as a child and had died before he was born.Thus began a four-year process of detective work, which led Kurtz to write an acclaimed book, “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014.Glenn Kurtz, who found the original footage shot by his grandfather in his parents’ closet in Florida, later wrote a book about the significance of the film.Stigter relied on the book in completing the film, which is co-produced by her husband, Steve McQueen, the British artist and Academy Award-winning director of “12 Years a Slave,” and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. It has garnered attention in documentary circles and has been screened at Giornate degli Autori, an independent film festival held in parallel with the Venice film fest; the Toronto International Film Festival; Telluride Film Festival; the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam; and DOC NYC. It was recently selected for this month’s Sundance Film Festival.Nasielsk, which had been home to Jews for centuries, was overtaken on Sept. 4, 1939, three days after the German invasion of Poland. Three months later, on Dec. 3, the entire Jewish population was rounded up and expelled. People were forced into cattle cars, and traveled for days without food and water, to the towns of Lukow and Miedzyrzec, in the Lublin region of Nazi-occupied Poland. From there, they were mostly deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.“When you see it, you want to scream to these people run away, go, go, go,” Stigter said. “We know what happens and they obviously don’t know what starts to happen, just a year later. That puts a tremendous pressure on those images. It is inescapable.”Stigter stumbled across the footage on Facebook in 2014 and found it instantly mesmerizing, especially because much of it was shot in color. “My first idea was just to prolong the experience of seeing these people,” she said. “For me, it was very clear, especially with the children, that they wanted to be seen. They really look at you; they try to stay in the camera’s frame.”A historian, author and film critic for a Dutch national newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, Stigter worked on this film, her directorial debut, for five years. She started it after the International Film Festival Rotterdam invited her to produce a short video essay for its Critic’s Choice program. Instead of choosing a feature film, she decided to explore this found footage. After making a 25-minute “filmic essay,” shown at the Rotterdam festival in 2015, she received support to expand it into a feature film.“Three Minutes: A Lengthening” never steps out of the footage. Viewers never see the town of Nasielsk as it is today, or the faces of the interviewees as talking heads. Stigter tracks out, zooms in, stops, rewinds; she homes in on the cobblestones of a square, on the types of caps worn by the boys, and on the buttons of jackets and shirts, which were made in a nearby factory owned by Jews. She creates still portraits of each of the 150 faces — no matter how vague or blurry — and puts names to some of them.An image from the home movie showing Moszek Tuchendler, 13, on the left, who survived the Holocaust and became Maurice Chandler. He was able to identify many other people in the footage of the town where he grew up.United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumMaurice Chandler, a Nasielsk survivor who is in his 90s, is one of the smiling teenage boys in the footage. He was identified after a granddaughter in Detroit recognized him in a digitized clip on the Holocaust museum’s website.Chandler, who was born Moszek Tuchendler, lost his entire family in the Holocaust; he said the footage helped him recall a lost childhood. He joked that he could finally prove to his children and grandchildren “that I’m not from Mars.” He was also able to help identify seven other people in the film.Kurtz, an author and journalist, had discovered a tremendous amount through his own research, but Stigter helped solve some additional mysteries. He couldn’t decipher the name on a grocery store sign, because it was too blurry to read. Stigter found a Polish researcher who figured out the name, one possible clue to the identity of the woman standing in the doorway.Leslie Swift said that the David Kurtz footage is one of the “more often requested films” from the Holocaust Museum’s moving picture archives, but most often it is used by documentary filmmakers as stock footage, or background imagery, to indicate prewar Jewish life in Poland “in a generic way,” she said.What Kurtz’s book, and Stigter’s documentary do, by contrast, is to explore the material itself to answer the question “What am I seeing?” over and over again, she said. By identifying people and details of the life of this community, they manage to restore humanity and individuality.“We had to work as archaeologists to extract as much information out of this movie as possible,” Stigter said. “What’s interesting is that, at a certain moment you say, ‘we can’t go any further; this is where it stops.’ But then you discover something else.” More

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      For Pop Music, 2021 Was the Year of the Deep Dive

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      Documentaries brought us closer to musicians this year, and it wasn’t always pretty.The pandemic, it seems, sent certain enterprising music lovers into editing rooms. For those still leery of gathering for a live concert, the 2021 consolation prize was not a slew of ephemeral livestreams, but an outpouring of smart, intent music documentaries that weren’t afraid to stretch past two hours long. With screen time begging to be filled, it was the year of the deep dive.Those documentaries included a binge-watch of the Beatles at work in Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back”; a visual barrage to conjure musical disruption in Todd Haynes’s “Velvet Underground”; far-reaching commentary atop ecstatic performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Questlove’s “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)”; and a surprisingly candid chronicle of Billie Eilish’s whirlwind career — at 16, 17 and 18 years old — in R.J. Cutler’s “The World’s a Little Blurry.” The documentaries were about reclaiming and rethinking memory, about unexpected echoes across decades, about transparency and the mysteries of artistic production.They were also a reminder of how scarce hi-fi sound and images were back in the analog era, and how ubiquitous they are now. Half a century ago, the costs of film and tape were not negligible, while posterity was a minor consideration. Experiencing the moment seemed far more important than preserving any record of it. It would be decades before “pics or it didn’t happen.”The Velvet Underground, in its early days, was simultaneously a soundtrack and a canvas for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia club-sized happening that projected images on the band members as they played. Although the Velvets’ social set included plenty of artists and filmmakers, apparently no one got the obvious idea of capturing a full-length performance by the Velvets in their prime. What a remarkable missed opportunity.Haynes’s documentary creatively musters circumstantial evidence instead. There are memories from eyewitnesses (and only eyewitnesses, a relief). And Haynes fills the lack of concert footage with an overload of contemporaneous images, sometimes blinking wildly in a tiled screen that suggests Windows 10 running amok. News, commercials and bits of avant-garde films flicker alongside Warhol’s silent contemplations of band members staring back at the camera. The faces and fragments are there, in a workaround that translates the far-off blur of the 1960s into a 21st-century digital grid.Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” fills the lack of concert footage with an overload of contemporaneous images.Apple TV+Luckily there was more foresight in 1969, when Hal Tulchin had five video cameras rolling at the Harlem Cultural Festival, which later became known as “Black Woodstock.” New York City (and a sponsor, Maxwell House) presented a series of six weekly free concerts at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) with a lineup that looks almost miraculous now, including Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone and Mongo Santamaria, just for starters. Tulchin’s crew shot more than 40 hours of footage, capturing the eager faces and righteous fashions of the audience along with performers who were knocking themselves out for an almost entirely Black crowd. Yet nearly all of Tulchin’s material went unseen until Questlove finally assembled “Summer of Soul” from it.The music in “Summer of Soul” moves from peak to peak, with unstoppable rhythms, rawly compelling voices, snappy dance steps and urgent messages. But “Summer of Soul” doesn’t just revel in the performances. Commentary from festivalgoers, performers and observers (including the definitive critic Greg Tate) supply context for a festival that had the Black Panthers as security, and that the city likely supported, in part, to channel energy away from potential street protests after the turbulence of 1968.Questlove’s subtitle and his song choices — B.B. King singing about slavery, Ray Baretto proudly claiming a multiracial America, Nina Simone declaiming “Backlash Blues,” Rev. Jesse Jackson preaching about Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, even the Fifth Dimension finding anguish and redemption in “Let the Sunshine In” — make clear that the performers weren’t offering escapism or complacency. After five decades in the archives, “Summer of Soul” is still timely in 2021; it’s anything but quaint. Here’s hoping that far more of the festival footage emerges; bring on the expanded version or the mini-series. A soundtrack album is due in January.The music in “Summer of Soul,” which includes the 5th Dimension, moves from peak to peak, but the film doesn’t just revel in the performances. Searchlight PicturesCameras were filming constantly during the recording sessions for “Let It Be,” when the Beatles set themselves a peculiar, quixotic challenge in January of 1969: to make an album fast, on their own (though they eventually got the invaluable help of Billy Preston on keyboards), on camera and with a live show to follow. It was one more way that the Beatles were a harbinger of things to come, as if they had envisioned our digital era, when bands habitually record video while they work and upload work-in-progress updates for their fans. In the 1960s, recording studios were generally regarded as private work spaces, from which listeners would eventually receive only the (vinyl) finished project. The “Let It Be” sessions represented a new transparency.Its results, in 1970, were the “Let It Be” album, reworked by Phil Spector, and the dour, disjointed 80-minute documentary “Let It Be” by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg — both of them a letdown after the album “Abbey Road,” which was released in 1969 but recorded after the “Let It Be” sessions. The Beatles had announced their breakup with solo albums.The three-part, eight-hour “Get Back” may well have been closer to what the Beatles hoped to put on film in 1969. It’s a bit overlong; I will never need to see another close-up of toast at breakfast. But in all those hours of filming, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras took in the iterative, intuitive process of the band constructing Beatles songs: building and whittling down arrangements, playing Mad Libs with syllables of lyrics, recharging itself with oldies and in jokes, having instruments in hand when inspiration struck. Jackson’s definitive sequence — the song “Get Back” emerging as Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are jamming one morning — merges laddish camaraderie with deep artistic instinct.Cameras were filming constantly during the recording sessions for “Let It Be” in January 1969.Apple Corps“Get Back” newly reveals the situations that the Beatles were juggling even as they pushed themselves toward their self-imposed (and then self-extended) deadline. They moved from the acoustically inhospitable Twickenham film studios to a hastily assembled basement studio at Apple. They seriously mulled over some preposterous locations — an amphitheater in Tripoli? a children’s hospital? — for the impending live show. There was so much tension that George Harrison walked out of the band, only to reconcile and rejoin after a few days. Meanwhile, they faced predatory coverage from British tabloids. It’s a wonder they could concentrate on making music at all.Yet as established stars, the Beatles could work largely within their own protective bubble in 1969. Fast-forward 50 years for “The World’s a Little Blurry,” and Billie Eilish faces some of the same pressures as the Beatles did: songwriting, deadlines, playing live, the press. But she’s also dealing with them as a teenage girl, in an era when there are cameras everywhere — even under her massage table — and the internet multiplies every bit of visibility and every attack vector. “I literally can’t have a bad moment,” she realizes.In “The World’s a Little Blurry,” Eilish performs to huge crowds singing along with every word, sweeps the top awards at the 2019 Grammys and gets a hug from her childhood pop idol, Justin Bieber. But as in her songs — tuneful, whispery and often nightmarish — there’s as much trauma as there is triumph. Eilish also copes with tearing a ligament onstage, her recurring Tourette’s syndrome, a video-screen breakdown when she headlines the Coachella festival, an apathetic boyfriend, inane interviewers, endless meet-and-greets and constant self-questioning about accessibility versus integrity. It’s almost too much information. Still, a few years or a few decades from now, who knows what an expanded version might add? More

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      Five Joan Didion Movies You Can Stream Right Now

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      The writer, working with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, saw Hollywood as a way to make cash to support her art. It did and didn’t work out.“This place makes everyone a gambler,” Joan Didion sniped of Hollywood, nine years after she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne left Manhattan to make their fortunes as a screenwriting team.When the newlywed magazine writers rolled the dice on a career change in 1964, neither had even read a script, let alone written one. Luckily, one tipsy night in Beverly Hills, they spotted a TV actor hurling one at his girlfriend. They stole it, diagramed how its story was pieced together, and resolved that unlike that drunken louse — and unlike the drunks they admired, such as Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had been jaded about the dream factory — they would never let Los Angeles make them lose their cool.How hard could Hollywood be? Didion had a steady gig as a film critic for Vogue, where she championed teeny-bopper beach flicks (“All plot is incidental; the point is the surf”) and panned “The Sound of Music” for being a musical, a genre she found insulting. (“Think you can get me with some fat Technicolor chrysanthemums, just think again.”) Meanwhile, Dunne’s clinical interest in the movie industry would soon result in his landmark nonfiction book, “The Studio,” which covered, among other things, how a 20th Century Fox publicist flogged the 1967 “Doctor Dolittle” in an awards race where it earned nine Oscar nominations despite middling reviews.Yet, Didion and Dunne’s get-rich scheme wasn’t as easy to pull off as they had hoped. In 25 years, the couple saw their names credited on the big screen just six times. Didion vowed to protect her heart from Hollywood. She never wagered more optimism than she could afford to lose. But screenwriting was supposed to afford her the freedom to write serious art, not waste her time on endless unpaid draft revisions.Worse still were the movies they didn’t write. Over repetitive lunches of white wine and broiled fish, producers pitched the pair a disco-era remake of “Rebel Without a Cause,” a reworking of Fitzgerald’s tragedy “Tender Is the Night” with a happy ending, a U.F.O. flick for the ’80s blockbuster titans Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and this three-word brainstorm: “World War II.”“What do you want to do with it?” Dunne asked.“You’re the writers,” the producer replied.The irony is that the more the couple mocked Hollywood in essays, the higher their script fees rose. Slamming the businessmen in suits could have made Didion and Dunne personae non grata at the Polo Lounge. Instead, cynicism made them look savvy. Here were two smart people who knew exactly what they’d signed up for. They got it, or as Dunne joked, “I have never been quite clear what Going Hollywood meant exactly, except that as a unique selling proposition, it’s a lot sexier than Going University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”It’s hard to argue that Didion and Dunne’s films are palpably them any more than one can touch an actor onscreen as he coils his tongue around Didion’s diction. (Or at least, the traces of her sharp precision that remain after being massaged into studio submission.) Yet, in honoring Didion’s creative life, it’s worth making time for the work that fills out our image of her as not only an uncompromising prose stylist, but also an ambitious artist who knew exactly when to compromise in service of her greater goals.Here is a look at five films by or about Didion that are available to stream.1972‘Play It as It Lays’Available on YouTubeBefore Didion and Dunne learned to play the Hollywood game, the fledgling screenwriters made the rookie mistake of optioning books that they found interesting — not John Q. Public. With James Mills’ heroin-addled paperback “The Panic in Needle Park,” Didion explained, “It just immediately said movie to me.” The film, with its mediocre box office receipts, served as a launching pad for the star Al Pacino’s career, but didn’t do much for hers. (It’s not available to stream.) At least the paycheck let Didion complete her own hazy, dispassionate novel, “Play It as It Lays,” about an actress untethering herself from a cold and callous Los Angeles by taking drugs, having sex and speeding down the highway in a convertible that functions as a motorized fugue. When the novel was a minor hit, Didion and Dunne turned it into their second film, with Tuesday Weld as the lead and “The Swimmer” director Frank Perry at the helm. Critics liked the film; Didion (and audiences), less so. “Everything was different,” she said, “even though I wrote the screenplay.”1976‘A Star Is Born’Stream it on HBO MaxIt was time to make some real dough. So for their third film, the pair pitched a rock ’n’ roll refresh of “A Star Is Born” featuring Carly Simon and James Taylor. The truth was Didion and Dunne had never seen the previous versions. They just wanted to go with musicians on the road, where their research included talking to groupies about injecting adrenaline and following Led Zeppelin to Cleveland, where they amused themselves by calling a for-a-good-time number scrawled on the dressing-room wall. When Barbra Streisand announced her interest in the project, the couple was finally forced to watch the 1937 original at the recording star’s house while their daughter, Quintana Roo, played with Streisand and Jon Peters’s pet lion cub. Neither writer was passionate enough about the project to stick with it once Streisand seized the reins. Their draft was reworked by 14 subsequent screenwriters before the star was satisfied she had an awards contender. Streisand took home a Golden Globe for the film, making her the third actress in a row to win a prize for a role that Didion originated on the page. (Weld won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for “Play It as It Lays,” while Kitty Winn claimed best actress at Cannes for “Panic.”)1981‘True Confessions’Rent it on major platforms.For 15 years, Didion and Dunne took turns trying to squeeze money out of studios. One would do the first draft of a script; the other would edit and revise. Now it was Dunne’s turn to adapt one of his novels, his best-selling crime noir, “True Confessions,” inspired by the Black Dahlia murder. Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro play siblings: Duvall is a detective; De Niro, a Roman Catholic monsignor whose future in the church depends on how his brother handles the case. While reviewers mostly enjoyed the thriller, some found the plot vague and confusing. The mixed response echoed the feedback on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” before it was later deemed a classic, which might have made Didion smile. After all, not only did she buy her wedding dress at Ransohoff’s, the same shop where Jimmy Stewart made over Kim Novak, she and Dunne even got married at Mission San Juan Bautista under the bell tower where Novak leapt to her death.1996‘Up Close and Personal’Rent it on major platforms.There was only one reason Didion and Dunne signed on to adapt a biography of the NBC News anchor Jessica Savitch, who died in a car accident in 1983 shortly after broadcasting a segment in which she appeared intoxicated: They needed the Writers Guild health insurance. The trade-off might not have been worth it given the stress of writing 27 drafts until Disney, the financier of the film, was satisfied that all traces of Savitch’s drug use, divorces, abortions and suicide attempts had been scrubbed out of what was now a wholly fictional Michelle Pfeiffer workplace romance about a successful journalist who survives through the end credits. “Up Close and Personal” took eight years to complete, and the best thing about it is the brutal memoir Dunne wrote about the ordeal, titled “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen.” Savitch never got her biopic, but a documentary about her struggle to be taken seriously in a mostly male workplace — a struggle Didion understood as studio executives’ assistants would frequently refuse to patch through phone calls from their boss without Dunne on the line — did inspire Will Ferrell to make his own film about chauvinism in local news, “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.”2017‘Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold’Stream it on Netflix.Even though Didion and Dunne escaped Hollywood to move back to New York, the movie business remained the family business. Her brother-in-law Dominick, a film and TV producer, raised a family of actors, including the“Poltergeist” star Dominique Dunne and the actor-director Griffin Dunne, who in 2017 convinced his famous aunt to let him film an interview with her for a documentary about her life. Their familiarity allows them both to speak candidly. Dunne thanks Didion for not laughing when his testicles fell out of his swimsuit as a boy; Didion confesses to him that stumbling across a 5-year-old girl on LSD, an encounter that led to one of the darkest scenes in her book “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” gave her a thrill. Didion admits: “You live for moments like that, if you’re doing a piece. Good or bad.” The moment isn’t comforting, but it’s honest — a truly Didion-esque revelation finally immortalized on film. More

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      ‘Dead Man’s Switch: A Crypto Mystery’ Review: A Staggering Scam?

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      A new documentary tries to unpack how $200 million went unaccounted for after the Canadian cryptocurrency entrepreneur Gerald W. Cotten died.The realms of bitcoin and cryptocurrency can be confounding labyrinths for those of us comfortable with paper money. “Dead Man’s Switch,” an at times absorbing documentary, demonstrates there’s nothing new under the sun in terms of stealing, whether the cash is material or virtual.Its director, Sheona McDonald, has sufficient confidence in the story and lays out many of the juicy bits as the opening credits roll. A brash, well-liked young bitcoin entrepreneur dies suddenly in India, she tells us early, after which the money that was sunk into his venture by scores of ambitious investors goes missing. When the film ends, we’re told that over $200 million is still unaccounted for.The entrepreneur was a fresh-faced Canadian named Gerald W. Cotten, and his trajectory — from Canada’s Pied Piper of cryptocurrency to a soon-to-be pariah keeping one step ahead of allegations of his misdeeds — is nearly whiplash inducing. McDonald enlists a small army of investigative journalists to piece together Cotten’s rise and fall. And, for poignancy’s sake, she features a couple of new-money in-crowd wannabes who wound up losing their life savings to Cotten’s company, Quadriga CX.There’s some comedic value here. The movie details how the transparency supposedly inherent in cryptocurrency actually enabled Cotten to run what appears to have been a brazen Ponzi scheme. So a seemingly better way of banking turns out, perhaps, to be a better mousetrap for those willing to take the bait.And yet. The orphanage he and his new wife traveled to India to open turns out to have been real! And despite the discovery, by some intrepid journalists, of the peculiar comings and goings of his corpse, his death, too, seems to have actually happened. At the movie’s close, onscreen text states that neither the F.B.I. nor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would comment for this movie because of ongoing investigations. So stay tuned for a sequel, maybe.Dead Man’s Switch: A Crypto MysteryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘The Velvet Queen’ Review: Searching for an Elusive Leopard

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      The documentary follows the photographer Vincent Munier and the writer Sylvain Tesson on a mission to catch a glimpse of a rare snow leopard in Tibet.The documentary “The Velvet Queen” asks viewers to experience solitude in a way that is difficult to achieve in a movie theater. (Another of this week’s releases, “Memoria,” comes closer to the combination of image, sound and pacing it takes to inspire that kind of contemplative state.)“The Velvet Queen” follows the wildlife photographer Vincent Munier and the writer Sylvain Tesson on a mission in a mountainous region of Tibet. They hope to catch a glimpse of a rare snow leopard. Their journey, with no guarantee of success, requires extreme patience and a disconnection from what Tesson, who narrates, calls the “puppet show of humanity.” At the end, he likens seeing the animal to the Promethean feat of stealing fire.The movie operates on two basic levels. One is philosophical, as the camera watches two men who are themselves looking through viewfinders experience the sensations of a place where humans rarely disrupt the natural order.Munier directed “The Velvet Queen” with the wildlife filmmaker Marie Amiguet, whom Tesson includes in a drawing he makes for children in the area, but whose presence generally goes unacknowledged. The end credits note that the film was shot with a small team and that great care was taken not to disturb the animals. Still, the men might not always be quite as alone as the film makes them look.On another level, “The Velvet Queen” is a wondrous nature documentary. While it’s hard to imagine the film will conclude without a snow leopard, there are other animal stars along the way: wild yaks, Tibetan foxes, bears and the Pallas’s cat, whose cuddliness, to paraphrase Tesson, belies the fact that it might leap at your throat if you tried to pet it.The Velvet QueenNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More