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    ‘The Machine’ Review: A Hard-Partying Comedian Pays for His Sins

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    In a movie extrapolated from one of his stand-up bits, Bert Kreischer is dragged to Russia to face a gory but still comedic reckoning.The star of this picture, Bert Kreischer, is one of those popular stand-up comedians who’s not zeitgeist-adjacent enough to generate much in the way of think pieces or buzz. But in the late 1990s, as a student at Florida State University, he was the subject of a Rolling Stone magazine profile that named him “the top partyer at the Number One Party School in the country.”The late 1990s were a while ago, and today Kreischer is a hefty 50-year-old who looks mildly partied out. That’s part of his shtick — he performs stand-up while shirtless. In “The Machine,” he plays a fictionalized version of himself, initially in a penitent mode — a family man who’s royally ticked off his clan. At his daughter’s 16th birthday party, Bert and his carpet salesman dad, Albert, are accosted, at gunpoint, by the mobster Irina (Iva Babic) and taken to Russia, where Bert is to make amends for his part in a drunken train robbery decades before.This gore-steeped shaggy dog story is extrapolated from an actual Kreischer bit. As they dodge a score of Slavic psycho killers who are after an heirloom Bert stole, father and son hash out their issues (of course).You may wonder, if Kreischer is such a popular stand-up comedian, why he hasn’t done more television and movie acting. Well. Here he hits his marks and stays in his persona lane, but he’s not a performer who can carry a movie. Mark Hamill, as his dad, comes closer to crusty-old-man territory than one might have predicted. He’s practically Wilford Brimley.The director Peter Atencio has gotten reasonable results in the absurdist meta-comedy realm (“Keanu,” for instance), but he can’t cook with these ingredients. Even when the relentlessly salty humor gets fully crass (a dog is thrown out a high window), the product is bland.The MachineRated R for language, gore and extreme partying. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Batman: The Animated Series’ Predicted the Bat-Future

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Batman: The Animated Series’ Predicted the Bat-FutureThis Saturday morning cartoon, now streaming on HBO Max, redefined the caped crusader years before he became one of the world’s most popular and endlessly recycled characters.“Batman: The Animated Series,” which premiered in September 1992, was a departure from earlier TV incarnations of the superhero.Credit…DC ComicsFeb. 21, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETBefore Robert Pattinson and Ben Affleck and Christian Bale, there was Kevin Conroy and the Gotham City of “Batman: The Animated Series.” The Warner Bros. series, which ran from 1992-1995 on Fox Kids, arrived on HBO Max in January. A Saturday morning cartoon that was also a super-stylized foray into the noir genre, it brought the Dark Knight version of the caped crusader to television, redefining a formerly earnest, occasionally silly TV hero and foreshadowing the ever darker iterations to come.“Batman” was both timeless and incredibly specific, creating a sense of a fully filled-in world. Its wonderfully perplexing, anachronistic landscape combined Art Deco accents with sleek supermodern architecture. Cars that looked cribbed from the 1930s and ’40s shared a world with gadgetry that tiptoed into the realm of steampunk.Batman has been swinging around since 1939, when he first appeared in Detective Comics, but he shot to popularity in the 1960s with Adam West’s relentlessly campy “Batman.” (I personally adore that time capsule of a series). During the 1970s and ’80s, Batman appeared in animated shows like Hanna-Barbera’s “Super Friends,” “The New Scooby-Doo Movies” and the short-lived “The New Adventures of Batman,” from 1977. These Batmen, who were often voiced by West, were direct descendants of the 1960s series.The viewing public got its first look at a moody Batman when Tim Burton stamped the bat with his signature gothic style in “Batman” in 1989. But the haunted, violent version of the character that dominates pop culture now sprang largely from the comics writer Frank Miller, whose groundbreaking work in the 1980s, including the series “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” is an obvious influence on “Batman: The Animated Series.”Unlike his TV predecessors, the hero in “Batman: The Animated Series,” which debuted in September 1992, fought real crime and took himself seriously. The show featured mobsters with guns and knives and tackled difficult themes involving murder, revenge, poverty, greed, exploitation and more. Some episodes, like the stunner “Perchance to Dream,” in which Batman is trapped in a dream version of his life where he isn’t the dark hero, dive into the dark psyche of the character.(It could have skewed darker: One episode script, about the gun that killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, never made it to the drawing board because the network found it too bleak, according to the writer and producer Alan Burnett.)For years, Adam West’s campy Batman was the defining portrayal of the character (pictured with Burt Ward).Credit…20th Century Fox Film CorporationNot quite the typical Saturday morning cartoon fare. But it was that, too: Despite its adult themes, “Batman: The Animated Series” didn’t make the mistake many DC properties have made in overdoing the brooding antihero bit. Rather, the series held onto its sense of humor in the banter between Batman and his loyal butler, Alfred; in Batman’s many flirtations; and his deadpan interactions with his antagonists.As in most “Batman” iterations, the villains were what shined most. Mark Hamill’s rollicking laugh in his performance as the Joker became one of the character’s most definitive qualities. The series revamped some villains from the comics, like Mr. Freeze, who was given a sympathetic back story. (A few years later, Arnold Schwarzenegger offered a saccharine take on the character in the widely maligned “Batman and Robin,” from 1997.) It also introduced a villain that has become fundamental to the Batman mythology, Harley Quinn, who somersaulted her way into the canon and, decades later, into her own irreverent television series and film.Kevin Conroy’s voice work showed a range not every actor in the role has been able to replicate, distinguishing Conroy, for many, as the one and only true Batman. (He went on to voice the character in nearly every subsequent DC animated spinoff, including the beloved 1993 film “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” and the stylish cyberpunk sequel series, “Batman Beyond,” both on HBO Max.) Stately without being stiff, playful without being juvenile, Conroy’s performance captured the gravitas of the character without ever losing track of the fact that he’s a billionaire playboy who runs around in bat-tights at night.“Batman: The Animated Series” was canny about how it mined the hero’s lore. It adapted characters and plots from the comics, drew tonal inspiration from the Burton films and then went on to influence Batman properties that followed.Batman is an onscreen staple at this point: Pattinson’s “The Batman” arrives next year, but Affleck’s Justice League Batman and Bale’s Batman are hardly distant cultural memories (not to mention Will Arnett’s sidesplitting Lego Batman).But years before Disney and Warner Bros. executives even dreamed of streaming platforms and cinematic universes, “Batman: The Animated Series” pointed the way forward for what was to become one of world’s most ubiquitous franchises. While some bats will fly off into the caverns of pop culture past, forgotten and disregarded, this one will remain one of the best and most influential incarnations of everyone’s favorite emo bat hero.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      Times's Five Minutes Series on Classical Music a Hit

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeExplore: A Cubist CollageFollow: Cooking AdviceVisit: Famous Old HomesLearn: About the VaccineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHooking Readers on Classical Music, Five Minutes at a TimeDrawing on the passion of experts, a Culture desk series has doubled its audience for the genre.CreditCredit…Angie WangFeb. 3, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETMark Hamill was spellbound by a Mozart composition, but he couldn’t remember its name. The haunting choral masterpiece played near the end of the Broadway production of “Amadeus” more than 40 years ago, in which he performed the title role.So when Mr. Hamill, the actor who portrayed Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars,” was approached in June 2020 by Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times’s classical music editor, to suggest an irresistible Mozart piece, he responded with one request: Can you track it down?With some help from the team at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Mr. Woolfe identified the mystery earworm: a section of Mozart’s Requiem. Mr. Hamill played the composer hundreds of times on Broadway and in the first national tour of “Amadeus” in the early 1980s. But, he told Mr. Woolfe, “I never got tired of the sound.”Mr. Woolfe chatted with Mr. Hamill for the Mozart installment of The Times’s classical music appreciation series, “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love _____.” Once a month online, about 15 musicians, pop-culture figures and Times writers and editors each select the piece they would play for a friend tied to a theme, be it an instrument, composer, genre or voice type. This month’s theme, published today, is string quartets.The series aims to make classical music as accessible to readers as a Top 40 track, Mr. Woolfe said. You don’t need to know the difference between a cadenza and a concerto. “It’s about pure pleasure and exploration,” he said.Now two and a half years and a dozen segments into the project, Mr. Woolfe said he had been surprised at readers’ appetite for the series, regardless of the theme. “It’s like, ‘OK, ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Mozart’ is super appealing,’” he said. “But ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Baroque Music’? Or ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Composers’? But those both did terrifically as well.”The name for the series came to him in the shower in 2018 as he was pondering ways he could make The Times’s classical music coverage accessible to a broader audience. “I was thinking about being at a concert or listening to a recording, and being like, ‘OMG, that note she hit!’” Mr. Woolfe said. “Then I had the idea of asking different people to pick their favorite little five-minute nuggets and presenting them like a playlist.”The first installment, in which he asked artists like Julia Bullock, the young, velvety-voiced soprano, and Nicholas Britell, the composer of the Oscar-nominated score for “Moonlight,” to choose the five minutes they would play to make their friends fall in love with classical music, became a runaway hit with readers, racking up more than 400,000 page views in its first week alone.That reception inspired him to expand the series — first to individual instruments like the piano, then to genres like opera and composers like Mozart and Beethoven. And the pandemic motivated him to ramp up the pace: Since last April, new segments have published on the first Wednesday of every month.“It has doubled our audience for classical music,” Mr. Woolfe said. “It’s gratifying that whatever we do, people are willing to explore and be into it.” But he added that he had been happy to hear that classical aficionados have enjoyed the series, too.David Allen, a freelance critic for The Times and a frequent contributor to “5 Minutes,” said he targeted both novices and experts with his selections. “I sometimes have thought deeply about finding pieces that are off the beaten track,” he said, like a little-heard piece from Bach’s organ music or a movement from a Mozart serenade.Mr. Woolfe also credited the appeal to the series’s vibrant, eye-catching animations, like pulsating cello strings or a silhouette of Mozart caught in a colorful confetti storm. “They enhance the playfulness and accessibility of the series,” he said.Angie Wang, the freelance illustrator who creates them, said she watched videos of the musicians and noted their characteristic movements, paying particularly close attention to wrist and elbow articulation. “I wanted to render them with delicacy,” she said. “The animations are a kind of visualization for the music.”One of Mr. Woolfe’s favorite aspects of working on the series has been getting to know artists outside the performance context in which he typically encounters them (“Renée Fleming is a really good writer,” he said), as well as talking to notable names outside the classical music world about a subject they are rarely, if ever, asked to discuss.“I get to see how people think in addition to how they perform,” he said. “It’s another facet of the personalities of artists.”Although the series was not conceived as an antidote to the polarization that has gripped politics and public health in the past year, Mr. Woolfe is glad it has worked out that way. “I’m so happy it’s been counterprogramming for people during the pandemic,” he said. “And I hope they’ll keep listening.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More