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    ‘Catfish,’ the TV Show That Predicted America’s Disorienting Digital Future

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    MTVThis is Danny. He fell in love with a woman he’d met online. When he saw her photo, he called it love at first sight.He and Rosa talked on the phone daily for months and exchanged reams of texts in Spanglish. They bonded over being Puerto Rican.“You’re so funny, Daddy,” she once texted him. “You’re so sexy, my love,” Danny replied. Though they’d never met, he was making big plans: marriage and family.When the red flags started to pile up, Danny contacted “Catfish,” on MTV, for help. The truth was far from what he’d hoped. Rosa was secretly Jose.The TV Show That Predicted America’s Lonely, Disorienting Digital FutureSince its first episode aired in 2012, “Catfish: The TV Show” has held up a mirror to our online lives, reflecting how we present ourselves and make sense of love, lust, trust, companionship and loneliness in an increasingly digital world. Each episode unfolds like a detective show, with the host Nev Schulman summoned to untangle truth from lies, to take relationships that exist only on computers and phones and drag them into our three-dimensional reality.Listen to this article with reporter commentaryThe saga of Danny and Jose, which aired in 2017, is emblematic of the deception, dashed hopes and complicated situations regularly featured on the show.Danny contacted “Catfish” for help, believing Rosa had moved from Connecticut to Orlando, where he lived, but still would not meet him. Rosa had warned Danny that she had anger issues, in part because she had been molested as a child. When meeting with Schulman and his co-host Max Joseph, Danny said he wanted to help her by bringing more faith into her life. “I think I could make her a better person,” he said. “We plan to have a family.”In their research, Schulman and Joseph quickly discovered the so-called mask, meaning the unwitting person whose photos had been sent to Danny: a woman named Natalie. But Rosa’s real identity was harder to pin down. “This is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Danny said when shown the evidence. “I never had anybody send me fake pictures.”Schulman called Rosa to inform her that Danny was now aware she’d lied about the photos. Though combative, she agreed to meet in Connecticut. It became clear that she had never moved.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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      ‘Stress Positions’ Review: It’s Giving Pandemonium

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      The writer-director Theda Hammel’s biting, delirious quarantine comedy skewers white gay men in a world where fact, fiction and authentic experiences collide.For “Stress Positions,” the writer-director Theda Hammel shows her hand when a character says, in a world-weary voice-over, that the madness we’re about to witness “happened so long ago.”The movie is set in summer 2020.Karla (portrayed by Hammel) is a sardonic transgender massage therapist in New York, and the first of the film’s two narrators. Her opinion of white gay male privilege, especially that of her best friend Terry, who went from intern to husband of his boss, can be stinging.“Stress Positions” finds Terry (John Early) in lockdown in the brownstone of his soon-to-be ex-husband, Leo (John Roberts). Upstairs, Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), a tenant, puffs cigarettes and vaguely hews to Terry’s Covid safety protocols. Terry’s nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan fashion model, is ensconced at the garden level. The 19-year-old Bahlul is the son of Terry’s estranged sister who converted to Islam. He has a broken leg, soft brown eyes and a small notebook. Is it a memoir? A novel? As he writes, he ruminates on his mother in a voice-over. We find out that Karla’s girlfriend, Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), wrote a minor-hit novel with material filched from Karla’s life. Here, fact, fiction and authentic experience are all themes to be mined.Beyond skewering white gay male culture, the movie is also a dig at the pieties of the recently politicized. Terry, Karla and Vanessa don’t know where Morocco is, or Yemen or Kabul, for that matter. And Ronald, a food delivery guy (Faheem Ali), plays a telling role in exposing the hierarchy of lives that matter.If some of the points seem muddy, the filmmaking is expressive and deliberate. With shimmer, shadow and verve, “Stress Positions” — which recently closed the New Directors/New Films festival — captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.Stress PositionsNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      Queer Women Behaving Badly: These Movies Scrap the Coming-Out Story

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      “Love Lies Bleeding,” “Bottoms” and “Drive-Away Dolls” are leading a wave of stories about lesbians living their lives, committing crimes along the way.To a queer woman going to the movies, it may seem as if there has been something in the ether for the past year. First, in August, there was “Bottoms.” Then “Drive-Away Dolls” arrived in February. “Love Lies Bleeding” joined the fray in March. This cluster of relatively mainstream films about queer women, deliciously frothy and fun to watch, feels unprecedented.It isn’t, of course — film always has a precedent. But the latest titles are different. These movies lean into camp: heightened realities, suspended disbelief, larger-than-life plots. What’s more, queer women had a significant hand in crafting each release, and none of the movies involve coming-out stories. Their protagonists are already out, living their lives, committing crimes along the way.“I don’t think that these three films, even taken individually, could have quite existed in the pretty mainstream public sphere even a few years ago,” said Clara Bradbury-Rance, a film scholar and the author of “Lesbian Cinema After Queer Theory.” “At what point,” she added, “do you reach a sense that lesbians are represented enough to represent them in their badness and toxicity and irritation?”“Bottoms” follows two lesbian high school seniors, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri), who start a fight club (sorry, self-defense club) as a ruse to hook up with cheerleaders. “Drive-Away Dolls” is a crime caper about unsuspecting friends, Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), who find a mysterious package in the trunk of their car during a road trip. And in “Love Lies Bleeding,” Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an ambitious bodybuilder, comes to town and falls for Lou (Kristen Stewart), a gym manager with a shadowy past.With their offbeat B-movie feel, these stories are “managing to mess with this dichotomy between the good representation and the bad representation,” Bradbury-Rance said, allowing us to think, “there are ways of finding pleasure in ambivalence and ambiguity and tension.”These films are part of a recent larger wave of lesbian stories that includes “Tár,” “Nyad,” “The Color Purple” and “Silver Haze,” and they stand in stark contrast to another recent cluster: the period dramas of the late 2010s. Think: “Carol,” “The Favourite,” “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Ammonite.” Andrea Torres, one of the programmers behind the recent Sapph-o-Rama series at Film Forum in Manhattan, referred to this as the “lesbian saints era.” It even had its own “Saturday Night Live” sketch: “Lesbian period drama,” went the tagline. “You get one a year — make the most of it.”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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      Theda Hammel’s Road to a Directorial Debut With ‘Stress Positions’

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      Theda Hammel is under no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.“I don’t think it’s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,” she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. “But I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.”Later this month, her debut film, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that showed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many people would rather forget.And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?No, just a function of circumstance.“I don’t know any straight people,” Ms. Hammel, 36, said. “I don’t know any.”The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by the comedian John Early, tries to keep his potentially virus-carrying friends at bay as they clamor to meet his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan model he started caring for just as the world shut down.Masks dangle from chins, but the word “Covid” is uttered only once. That’s because Ms. Hammel is less interested in life during the pandemic than the way a certain set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her movie is privilege: the way it coddles, insulates, divides.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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      ‘It’s Only Life After All’ Review: Indigo Girls Documentary

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      The director Alexandria Bombach benefited from the musician Amy Ray’s archivist instincts in this warm, compelling new documentary.Indigo Girls have been going strong for over 40 years now, and maybe the key to their resilience is that they never were cool. Often, they got it worse: Even at their commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were routinely mocked for being too earnest, too poetic, too folky, too lesbian. Back then, being labeled a female, gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and commercial curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All,” a smart, compelling new documentary.The director, Alexandria Bombach, greatly benefited from Ray’s archivist instincts: The musician has held on to decades’ worth of artifacts and opened up her vault — 1981 rehearsals, recorded on cassette when Ray and Saliers were in their teens, are startlingly crisp documents of a budding chemistry, for example.From this clay Bombach has sculpted an affecting portrait of two women who have stuck to their beliefs and, just as important, their loyalty to each other. Existing fans will be mesmerized, but non-fans like me should also get a kick out of “It’s Only Life After All.” The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media — their dramatic, and very funny, reading of a withering 1989 review in The New York Times is a highlight — along with their personal struggles and steadfast political engagement for causes, including the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth.Now that the band is experiencing a cultural moment — its hit “Closer to Fine” was prominently featured in “Barbie,” and an indie jukebox musical movie set to their songs, “Glitter & Doom,” came out last month — it is delightful to see them have the last laugh.It’s Only Life After AllNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Making Films About Outsiders, Increasingly in the Mainstream

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      Goran Stolevski, who is from North Macedonia and grew up partly in Australia, has made three features in three years, all teeming with unruly emotion.Periods of personal crisis have often yielded writing sprees for Goran Stolevski, a Macedonian filmmaker who has made three critically acclaimed features in three years.Although his recent spate of theatrical releases — all by Focus Features — could make it seem as if success has been quick to come by for the filmmaker, it has been proceeded by long seasons of debilitating professional uncertainty.Right after turning 30, Stolevski wrote four feature screenplays in a nine-month period he spent living in Bristol, England. Writing gave shape to his days as an unemployed artist who couldn’t get any of his projects off the ground. Two of those screenplays became his recent features “You Won’t Be Alone” and “Housekeeping for Beginners.”Then, after his 2017 short film “Would You Look at Her” won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Stolevski was out of work for another two years, and wrote four more screenplays.Stolevski, now 38, had written at least 10 scripts before making his 2022 feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone.” An evocative tale about a shape-shifting witch in a 19th-century Macedonian village, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. His sophomore effort, the 1990s-set Australian gay romance “Of an Age,” opened in U.S. cinemas in early 2023.“I wouldn’t make every film I’ve written, but there are some I’m obsessed with; they need to exist outside of my head,” he said in a video call in January from this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival where his third feature, “Housekeeping for Beginners,” screened.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 Shares187 Views

      in Television

      In “Mary and George,” Julianne Moore Is a Scheming Mom

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      In the historical drama “Mary and George,” new on Starz, Julianne Moore plays an ambitious mother whose son catches the eye of King James I of England.Standing in a shadowy archway on a bridge leading into Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire, England, sheep nibbling the grass below, Julianne Moore curtsied deeply, lowering her eyes before a splendidly gowned woman. “Your Majesty,” she began, before being drowned out by a loud “baa” from the sheep. Moore burst out laughing, as did her fellow actress, Trine Dyrholm, who was playing Queen Anne of England. “Talk to the sheep!” Moore commanded the director, Oliver Hermanus. “Tell them we’re doing a TV mini-series!”That mini-series is the visually sumptuous, seven-part “Mary and George,” strewn with sex scenes that look like Caravaggio paintings and riddled with all the good things: intrigue, scheming, cunning and villainy. The show, which premieres on Starz on April 5, was inspired by Benjamin Woolley’s 2018 nonfiction book, “The King’s Assassin,” and tells the mostly true tale of Mary Villiers (Moore), a minor 17th-century aristocrat with major ambitions, and her ridiculously handsome son, George (Nicholas Galitzine), who she uses as a path to power and riches at the court of King James I (Tony Curran).James likes ridiculously handsome young men. “The king,” says Mary’s new husband, Lord Compton, “is a dead-eyed, horny-handed horror who surrounds himself with many deceitful well-hung beauties.”From left: Laurie Davidson as the Earl of Somerset, Tony Curran as King James I and Trine Dyrholm as Queen Anne.StarzGeorge’s ascent isn’t easy: Mary must get the current favorite, the Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson), out of the way; forge and break alliances; and murder the odd opponent. George, naïve and insecure, must learn how to deploy his beauty and charm. But over the course of the series, George becomes a powerful political figure, with Mary a formidable, frequently antagonistic, presence alongside him.“These are people who use sex not just for intimacy and relationship building, but for power, as a transaction,” Moore said in a video interview. “The most compelling thing to me about Mary was that she was very aware of how limited her choices were. She had no autonomy, her only paths are through the men she is married to, or her sons.” George, she said, “is almost her proxy; he has access to a world she doesn’t have.”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

      Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show Review: Out and Open

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      Have you heard the one about the comedian who tried to live truthfully?Midway through “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” the comedian tries to convince Jamar Neighbors, his longtime friend and fellow standup, to deepen his act by using his unhappy past as material. Neighbors, who prefers an energetic, joke-focused performance (his act includes doing back flips onstage), is skeptical about what he calls “therapy comedy.” Why should he dwell on his foster mother, he asks, when “Jeff Bezos is going to space”?“Yeah, but also Jeff Bezos is going to space because it’s some [expletive] he can’t talk to his mama about,” Carmichael says. “It always comes back to that. You’re not just going to space.”In “Reality Show,” a captivating, introspective, sometimes uneasy docuseries beginning Friday on HBO, Carmichael does not go to space. But he does go boldly, bringing family, friends and lovers on an exploration of what it means to live honestly and how it feels to deal with the repercussions.In “Rothaniel,” his 2022 comedy special, Carmichael came out publicly as gay. But that intimate and revelatory show was about more than sexual identity. It was about secrets, not just Carmichael’s being gay (and its effect on his relationship with his conservative Christian mother, Cynthia), but also his family history of deceptions, including his father, Joe, having had a second family when Carmichael was young.“Rothaniel” (the title comes from Carmichael’s actual first name, which he also revealed) was in part about how even open secrets can be corrosive, about what living in a state of knowing-but-not-saying does to you.“Reality Show” is an effort to undo that, in front of an omnipresent camera crew. The Carmichael that we see here is making up for lost time. “I came out late in life,” he says. “I was like basically 30. So I’m like, in gay years, I’m 17.”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 Music

      Gossip Dance Back Into Action After a 12-Year Pause

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      The trio fronted by Beth Ditto wasn’t sure it would return after scattering in different directions. But music united them for a new LP, “Real Power.”It’s possible that there are better people to dig you out of an ice storm than the frontwoman of a dance-punk act, but few would do it as resourcefully or cheerfully as Beth Ditto. Since her band Gossip started 25 years ago, its scrappy, D.I.Y. roots have always run strong.Early this year, when Portland, Ore., Ditto’s adopted home of two decades, was overtaken by a deep freeze, my windshield was a sheet of ice, and there was no scraper in sight (do better, Portland rental car agencies). Over my protestations, Ditto fished out her old ID, hopped out of the slowly warming sedan in her black beret and Chuck Taylors, and shaved the ice off herself. She has never been fazed, she said, by the unexpected.Though Gossip has been a major label act since 2009, when it made the leap from the storied indie Kill Rock Stars to Columbia Records and the megaproducer Rick Rubin, the trio has carved out a very unconventional path.“We’re renegades,” said Ditto, who founded the group with her childhood friend Nathan Howdeshell on guitar and bass, chatting with her bandmates in the drummer Hannah Blilie’s minimalist, midcentury living room, cozy against the wintry mix outside. They had gathered to talk about “Real Power,” their first album together in 12 years. Due Friday, its arrival was not preordained, or even serendipitous — it was more instinctual, a product of punk energy, somehow sustained across time, space and adulthood.“We don’t plan,” said Howdeshell, who grew up with Ditto in small-town Arkansas. “Me and Beth just sit down and made up stuff.” They don’t talk about it, either. That might ruin it, make it feel contrived, Ditto said.“That’s the magic of our band, I think,” Blilie added. “It just kind of falls into place.”That is, until it didn’t.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