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      in Television

      Review: ‘Fantasmas’ Journeys to the Center of Julio Torres’s Mind

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      In the comic fabulist’s dazzling new HBO series, sketch comedy meets sketch fantasy.The title of Julio Torres’s new HBO series, “Fantasmas,” is a way of giving a name to a thing you can’t see. In an early scene Torres, playing a version of himself, pitches Crayola executives on a crayon for “the color clear,” which he suggests naming after the Spanish word for “ghosts.” The executives hesitate; clear, they say, isn’t a color. “Then what do you call this?” he asks, gesturing at the air. “The space between us. The emotional space, I mean.”The scene is typical Torres, absurd, fantastical, a touch wistful. It also suggests a good way to describe his hard-to-pin down comic sensibility. As the delightful “Fantasmas” reiterates, he’s drawing with crayons that are in nobody else’s box.Over the past several years, Torres has established himself as a premier comic fabulist. In “Los Espookys,” the unjustly short-lived supernatural comedy Torres cocreated for HBO, he imagined a fictional Latin American country where magic-realist mysteries unfolded. In the 2019 special “My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres,” he imagined stories about a series of objects — cubes, toys, figurines — that rolled past him on a conveyor belt like whimsical sushi.The six-episode “Fantasmas,” which begins on Friday, lies somewhere between those two works structurally while borrowing elements of his earlier work as a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” It’s more digressive than a sitcom, more serial than a sketch comedy. Think of it as a sketch fantasy.“Fantasmas” places his character, Julio, in a stage-set version of New York City located a few parallel universes left of the one we know. In this one, the nightlife includes a club for gay hamsters; an “incorporeal services” company entices customers to “free yourself from the burden of having a body”; and the subway public address system announces that “the next F train will arrive in 178 minutes.” (OK, that one may roughly approximate actual New Yorkers’ experience.)Torres completists will note strong echoes of his recent film, “Problemista,” in which he played an El Salvadoran immigrant in New York scrambling to secure his work visa. The movie even began similarly, with his character pitching eccentric toy ideas to Hasbro, including a Barbie-like doll with her fingers crossed behind her back to create “tension.”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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      ‘House of the Dragon’ Cast Celebrates Its Season 2 Premiere

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      At the Season 2 premiere of HBO’s “Game of Thrones” prequel, the cast mingled over cocktails as early clips from the series suggested that “war is coming.”Where does the story pick up this season on HBO’s fantasy epic “House of the Dragon”?“So,” the actor Tom Glynn-Carney told a reporter on Monday night at the Season 2 premiere at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom, everything “hits the fan.”His character in the “Game of Thrones” prequel, the newly crowned King Aegon II Targaryen, holds a grip on the throne that is tenuous at best. His brother has just killed their nephew in what could best be described as death by dragon chomp. And his sister Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen is on the brink of going nuclear — as Targaryens tend to do — likely with more dragon chomping.Even as Mr. Glynn-Carney, Matt Smith and other “Dragon” actors laid out the violence in store for the new season — which returns June 16 — the show’s impending civil war stood in stark contrast to the evening’s cocktails and joviality, with not a single silvery wig in sight.“I think nothing is black and white with Daemon Targaryen,” Matt Smith said of his character.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesEmma D’Arcy, who plays Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, in Celine.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesGayle Rankin plays Alys Rivers in “House of the Dragon.”Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesMatthew Needham, who plays Larys Strong.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesSome actors have struggled to recognize each other without them, said Phia Saban, whose character, Queen Helaena Targaryen, plays a critical role in an early episode. (There were 114 wigs used this season, HBO’s chief executive Casey Bloys said at the premiere, and — back to the dragon chomping — 33 gallons of fake blood.)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

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      ‘Ren Faire’ Is ‘Succession’ With Turkey Legs

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      An engrossing documentary debuting Sunday on HBO, it chronicles a Renaissance festival impresario’s effort to find a worthy heir.George Coulam, known as King George to his acolytes, in a scene from “Ren Faire.”HBO“Ren Faire,” an engrossing and inventive three-part documentary that debuts on HBO Sunday at 9 p.m., centers on George Coulam, founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival. King George, as everyone calls him, claims he wants to retire; he believes he’ll live for another nine years, and he has a vision for how he wants to spend this remaining time.“I wanna do art and chase ladies,” he says. If only he could find a worthy heir.Coulam comes across as part Logan Roy, part Joe Exotic — cruel, charismatic, driven and able to inspire fealty even as he dispenses bitter nastiness. (He has an assistant maintain his profiles on sugar-daddy websites and asks all dates, within moments of meeting them, if they have breast implants.)People on the show compare him to Willy Wonka and King Lear, and he says he followed Walt Disney’s playbook for land acquisition and political strategy. One employee weeps with glee upon meeting him, and others curtsy when he walks into their office. He’s not a king! you want to shout. He’s just some guy! But I guess someone wants to shout that about every king.George’s ambitious underlings strive for his intermittent approval and prostrate themselves, enduring petty humiliations only to crawl back and beg for more. The most debased and tragic is Jeff, who, with his wife, has worked at the fair for decades. He gets frustrated with her comparative lack of loyalty to the king, even as George pushes them both aside. “Just say that you serve George,” he insists, past the point of banter.Later, as Jeff schemes and stresses, she asks him earnestly, “Is it folly?”“Of course it’s folly!” he bellows, his voice shaking. Usually these kinds of lines are heard only in particularly farcical episodes of “Frasier,” but here they are both laughable and heartbreaking.There’s something ridiculous about renaissance fairs, and so there’s something ridiculous about “Ren Faire,” which blends hallucinatory nightmare sequences and fiery cinematic moments into its nonfiction. Those clever additions echo the agreed-upon dumb fantasy of renaissance fairs: Nay, my lord, this meager pub be all out of Red Bull.Directed by Lance Oppenheim and produced by Benny and Josh Safdie among others, “Ren Faire” depicts and embodies a Möbius strip of truth and grandiosity. The fair really is Jeff’s life’s work, as he says multiple times; it really is George’s gilded isolation chamber; it really is a business and a dream. Things can be silly and true and meaningful at the same time. Huzzah. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      ‘Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A.’ Review: Looking for a Little Respect

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      An HBO series tells the triumphant, tragic story of the record label Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes and the Staple Singers called home.Multipart music documentaries come at us these days with the insistence and abundance of the old K-tel collections, scrambling to satisfy the cravings of every variety of pop nostalgist. Recent months have added “James Brown: Say It Loud” (A&E), “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” (MGM+), “Kings From Queens: The Run DMC Story” (Peacock) and “Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story” (Hulu), among others, to the rotation.That’s four Rock & Roll Hall of Fame acts right there. But if you are looking for something even bigger — the arc of America across the 1960s and ’70s, set to a rough and infectious soundtrack — I know a place: “Stax: Soulsville, U.S.A.,” premiering Monday on HBO.The stormy, relatively short history of Stax Records (it went from founding to bankruptcy in 18 years) is rich material, shaped by a serendipitous blend of personality, geography and studio acoustics and propelled by the regional dynamics of race, class and music in Memphis, away from the record-industry centers of New York and Los Angeles.The director Jamila Wignot, who has profiled Alvin Ailey for “American Masters” and directed episodes of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Finding Your Roots,” brings more organizational sense than imaginative flair to the four-episode series. “Soulsville, U.S.A.” gives a conventional talking-heads treatment to a story that calls out for more. But that story, tracking from innocence to cynicism and triumph to calamity, is so involving that Wignot’s straightforward approach isn’t fatal.And the interviewees doing the talking are a notably varied and engaging group. They include the white farm boy Jim Stewart, earnest, folksy and disastrously naïve, who founded the label with his sister Estelle Axton; the charismatic Black businessman Al Bell, who came on as promotions director and saved the company when it seemed doomed, only to preside over its eventual demise; and Booker T. Jones, leader of the house band Booker T. and the M.G.’s, who looms over the early episodes like a cool, cryptic, scholarly guru of soul.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

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Sympathizer’ Opens a Counteroffensive on Vietnam War Movies

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      HBO’s series is not just a good story. It’s a sharp piece of film criticism.HBO has long defined itself in contrast to mainstream television — “It’s not TV,” as the slogan goes — but in many ways its history is one of revising and responding to the movies. “The Sopranos” updated the mafia movie (and its characters quoted, and were influenced by, films like “The Godfather”). “Game of Thrones” dirtied up the high-fantasy genre; “Deadwood” the Western; “Watchmen” the superhero story.But the network has never given us its longform version of, or rebuttal to, one Hollywood staple: the Vietnam War movie (unless one counts the alternative history aspects of “Watchmen”). Until now, with “The Sympathizer,” Park Chan-wook’s kinetic and darkly hilarious adaptation (with the co-showrunner Don McKellar) of the novel by the Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen.The seven-episode series is many things. It’s an exploration of dual identity: The protagonist, known only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande), is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent planted as an aide to the General (Toan Le), a leader of the South Vietnamese secret police. It’s a spy thriller, a satire of colonialism and its many faces — many of them Robert Downey Jr.’s — and an exploration of the complications of love and memory.But it’s also an intense dialogue and argument with the movies. It is simultaneously its own Vietnam War movie, bold, inventive and sometimes bloody, as well as a pointed, detailed work of movie criticism.In “The Sympathizer,” which began airing in April, the movies are a continuation of war by other means. Its fixation on film begins early. Retelling his story in a postwar re-education camp — the framing device for the series — the Captain recalls watching the vicious interrogation of a communist agent on the stage of a movie theater, where the marquee sign for “Emmanuelle” is coming down, and the one for Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” is hoisted into place. Even in Hollywood’s dream vision, beauty gives way to an American pointing an oversized gun.“Hollywood” is a metonym for America in “The Sympathizer”; it is the country’s front door, its export and its weapon. The Captain’s C.I.A. contact, Claude (Downey), lectures his “protégé” (who he is unaware is a communist) about American pop culture, expounding to him about the Isley Brothers and the Herbie Hancock score for “Death Wish.” Later, Claude tells him about the C.I.A.’s interest in keeping tabs on film directors: “As long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism but with no actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless.”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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Kelli O’Hara’s Ties to Opera, From ‘The Gilded Age’ to the Met Stage

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      O’Hara is an unusual kind of triple threat: a star of Broadway and television who is appearing at the Metropolitan Opera in a revival of “The Hours.”On the HBO costume drama “The Gilded Age,” Kelli O’Hara plays a New York grande dame forced to choose sides in an opera war: remain at the old guard’s Academy of Music, or defect to the Metropolitan Opera being built by the nouveau riche they had excluded.When her character, Aurora Fane, joins a throng of socialites surveying the nearly completed Met, the camera lingers on her face, upraised in awe.O’Hara herself is far more familiar with the Met, at least in its current incarnation. In addition to being a Tony-winning star of Broadway musicals and an Emmy nominee, she has been singing at the Met for nearly a decade, and is back now for a revival of “The Hours,” starring opposite Renée Fleming and Joyce DiDonato, opera legends both.Still, the Met’s grand auditorium, which holds 4,000 people, inspires the same wonder in O’Hara as it does in Aurora. Although Aurora never had to fill it. And O’Hara does.“Once I give over to it and believe in myself, I remember that this is the way my voice wants to sing,” she said.This was on a recent morning during a break from rehearsals. O’Hara, 48, had traded her costume corset for a black jumpsuit. One hand held a paper cup of coffee. (A socialite would never.) Later she would return to the basement space where she is rehearsing “The Hours,” Kevin Puts’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s time-skipping novel, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” which opens May 5.On “The Gilded Age,” O’Hara, left, plays Aurora Fane, a wealthy socialite who is forced to choose sides in the opera war that created the Met. She is shown with Louisa Jacobson.Barbara Nitke/HBOOne of the Met’s archivists, John Tomasicchio, stopped in to show O’Hara a few items from the Met’s founding that would have been familiar to Aurora: a piece of its original stage, an etched glass lightbulb, brocade from a box seat. Tomasicchio displayed a newspaper illustration of the audience thronging the stage.“It was like a rock concert,” O’Hara marveled. “The passion people had.”Opera was not quite O’Hara’s first passion. She went to college intending to study musical theater, but was told that her voice wasn’t built for the pop and rock styles then in vogue. As she was graduating, she participated in the Met’s National Council Auditions and made it to the finals at the regional level. But she missed the camaraderie she had experienced in musical theater, so she packed her bags and headed for Broadway.Broadway welcomed her. She starred in acclaimed productions of classic musicals including “South Pacific” and “The King and I,” for which she won a Tony. Just this week she received her eighth Tony nomination for “Days of Wine and Roses.”While she did not regret leaving opera, she sometimes wondered how she might have fared on the Met’s stage. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.At the very end of 2014, she had her chance, in a new production of the operetta “The Merry Widow” directed by Susan Stroman, with whom she had previously worked on Broadway. She followed that debut with a production of Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” in 2018. To make this leap in midcareer was frightening, but O’Hara, who runs marathons and has gone sky-diving, doesn’t mind a certain amount of fright.“I had to put my backbone straight and have conversations with myself,” she said. “’You can do this. You’re fine. Just keep your nose to the ground and do your work.’”Even as she scaled the heights of Broadway, O’Hara recalled her opera training. “There was always this thing in the back of my head that said: But my voice wants to sing that way,” she said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat work paid off. When she sang in “Così,” her “lovely soprano voice and quite good Italian diction” were praised by Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times.While opera singers occasionally make the move to Broadway (Fleming and Paolo Szot are recent examples), careers rarely flow the other way. And a performer who can do all this and television, too? That’s rarer still.“The Hours,” O’Hara’s first contemporary opera, which premiered in 2022, is a further challenge. O’Hara co-stars as Laura Brown, a woman constrained by the suburban rhythms of post-World War II California. In some ways, Laura is a companion to Kirsten, the role O’Hara was nominated for in Adam Guettel’s “Days of Wine and Roses.” Kirsten is another woman confined by the expectations of midcentury American life. Both find freedom where they can.“I’m coming off of over two years now of playing sad women, held women, even Aurora, held back, constricted,” O’Hara said.For O’Hara, opera is not exactly freeing. It’s too demanding for that, too needful of perfection. But she believes that she’ll keep pursuing it — for the difficulty, for the terror, for the range of roles. (On TV, she said, she now plays grandmothers. Opera is rather more forgiving.)O’Hara knows that she could fail. Her voice could crack. She might flub a note. But Aurora is brave enough to join the new-money mavens at the Met’s opening. And O’Hara in her way is brave, too. Brave enough to send her bright, unamplified soprano out into thousands of ears each night.“I’m confident enough to want to try,” she said. More

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      in Television

      The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV

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      A few years ago, “Atlanta” and “PEN15” were teaching TV new tricks.In “Atlanta,” Donald Glover sketched a funhouse-mirror image of Black experience in America (and outside it), telling stories set in and around the hip-hop business with an unsettling, comic-surreal language. In “PEN15,” Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created a minutely observed, universal-yet-specific picture of adolescent awkwardness.In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film, it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work. The stars have chemistry and charisma; the series avails itself of an impressive cast of guest stars and delectable Italian shooting locations. It’s breezy and goes down easy. I watched several episodes on a recent long-haul flight and they helped the hours pass.But I would never have wasted an episode of “Atlanta” or “PEN15” on in-flight entertainment. The work was too good, the nuances too fine, to lose a line of dialogue to engine noise.I do not mean to single out Glover and Erskine here. They are not alone — far from it. Keri Russell, a ruthless and complicated Russian spy in “The Americans,” is now in “The Diplomat,” a forgettably fun dramedy. Natasha Lyonne, of the provocative “Orange Is the New Black” and the psychotropic “Russian Doll,” now plays a retro-revamped Columbo figure in “Poker Face.” Idris Elba, once the macroeconomics-student gangster Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” more recently starred in “Hijack,” a by-the-numbers airplane thriller.I’ve watched all of these shows. They’re not bad. They’re simply … mid. Which is what makes them, frustratingly, as emblematic of the current moment in TV as their stars’ previous shows were of the ambitions of the past.What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.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

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Jinx Part Two’ Review: Filmmaking a Murderer

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      A new installment of HBO’s landmark true-crime documentary continues the strange, sad story of Robert Durst, in which the show is a major player.Nine years after we first heard Robert Durst mutter “Killed them all, of course,” “The Jinx” is back, with a new, six-episode Part Two that premiered Sunday on HBO. And why not?Maybe it feels unseemly, or like old news, with Durst having died in prison in 2022 after the original series helped convict him of murder. But a lot happened in the meantime. You can imagine that the filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, who directed both parts, felt a responsibility to a story he has now lived with for 20 years. And since “The Jinx” has effectively erased the line between itself and the case it chronicles, you could hope that he felt a responsibility to examine his own role in the prosecution and conviction of Durst, the wealthy and eccentric New York real estate heir.That examination does not come in the four episodes HBO provided for review, but Jarecki acknowledges the show’s continuing influence in a wry, “Can you believe that happened?” fashion.It is noted, once again, that in 2013 “Jinx” producers shared with prosecutors evidence regarding the disappearance and two deaths in which Durst was implicated, kick-starting the investigation that led to his conviction and life sentence in 2021 for the murder of his friend Susan Berman. The impact of the original broadcast on the popular imagination is conveyed when a young law clerk recalls exclaiming “Killed them all of course!” at the mention of Durst’s name, quoting his accidentally recorded words from the original series’s chilling final moments.This theme reaches an early peak in a scene filmed at a screening of that final episode in March 2015 in Jarecki’s apartment, on the same day the fleeing Durst — who had been watching the show along with the rest of us — was found and arrested in New Orleans. Relatives of Durst’s first wife, Kathleen McCormack, who had disappeared 33 years earlier, listen to his apparent confession with remarkable composure, probably acutely aware of the cameras a few feet away waiting to catch their reactions.From left, Jim, Sharon and Liz McCormack, relatives of Durst’s first wife, Kathleen McCormack, who disappeared in 1982.HBOWe 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