internal-truncator

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares83 Views

      in Television

      Jean Smart of ‘Hacks’ Is Having a Third Act for the Ages

      by

      Calling someone a “hack” is a particularly vicious insult. It implies that they have no talent or, worse, that they have wasted it. The slight is hurled early on in “Hacks,” the popular HBO series starring Jean Smart as Deborah Vance, a seasoned comedian who teams up with a younger one named Ava (Hannah Einbinder) to freshen up her act. When they meet, Ava takes stock of Deborah — her glitzy mansion, her residency at a casino in Las Vegas, a hustle selling branded merchandise on cable TV — and sees her as the definition of a hack, a sellout cashing in on her former fame. Deborah is unfazed. Amused, even. What does this kid know about her career, about years of hard work, about the unfairness, sexism and disregard? Deborah, meanwhile, sees Ava as a bit of a hack herself — an entitled and spoiled young internet persona who was canceled for posting a joke about a closeted senator. (“Sounds like a Tuesday for me,” Deborah retorts when Ava complains about it.) Deborah is a workaholic on the verge of bitter, someone who grew tired of being cut and so became a knife. She’s shameless, litigious, petty, vengeful, stubborn — qualities that become a comedic asset for the character and a narrative engine for the show. Just how far is Deborah Vance willing to go? Throughout the first two seasons, much of the drama — and delight — is in seeing Ava puncture Deborah’s carefully lacquered facade with her Gen Z earnestness and sharp wit. In one of the show’s funniest moments, Deborah bluntly asks Ava, “You a lesbian?” Ava leans back in her chair while considering the question. She responds with a treatise reflecting the identity politics of a generation raised with nonexistent boundaries and zero sexual shame, ending with a graphic description of how she orgasms. Deborah doesn’t miss a beat. “Jesus Christ!” she exclaims. “I was just wondering why you were dressed like Rachel Maddow’s mechanic!” Deborah and Ava are mirrors for each other, gifted and perspicacious performers at opposite ends of their careers, both trying to be their most audacious selves in an industry that will dispose of them the moment they cross an invisible line.Over the last three years, “Hacks” has earned its two Emmy nominations for outstanding comedy series by cultivating a polyphonic, fast-paced humor relentless as Deborah’s own quick mind. There are constant insult jokes about Ava’s appearance (“Your manicurist must use a paint roller!”); manic banter between Jimmy, Deborah’s beleaguered agent, and his delusional assistant (played brilliantly by the comedian Meg Stalter); antic bits like a seemingly poignant scene of Deborah’s daughter playing classical piano as a reflection of her gilded upbringing, before it devolves into absurdity when the music is revealed to be the theme song from “Jurassic Park.” And then there are the battles royale in which Ava and Deborah fire hilarious barbs back and forth until their frustration gives way to awe at each other’s cleverness and something like respect blooms. It’s weaponized therapy.Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart in the new season of ‘‘Hacks.’’MaxWe 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 Shares88 Views

      in Movies

      Anya Taylor-Joy Went Through the Wringer for ‘Furiosa’

      by

      There’s nothing normal about making a “Mad Max” movie, and Anya Taylor-Joy knew that when she signed on to star in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the newest film in George Miller’s long-running action series.“I wanted to be changed,” she said. “I wanted to be put in a situation in extremis where I would have no choice but to grow. And I got it.”Trials by fire don’t burn much hotter than the conflagration that consumed “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), the most recent film in the franchise, which was one of the most infamously difficult productions in Hollywood history. In the works for nearly two decades, the movie was shut down several times by studio executives, who feared they were producing a big-budget boondoggle. And the constant clashes between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, two of its stars, in the remote Namibian desert required outside intervention.Despite all of those headwinds, “Fury Road” was hailed upon its release as one of the greatest action films ever made; it would go on to win six Oscars and net a spot on many critics’ best-of-the-decade lists. Its success paved the way for the prequel “Furiosa,” in theaters May 24, which casts the 28-year-old Taylor-Joy as a younger version of Theron’s iconic warrior woman.Plucked from her idyllic home by bandits, Furiosa grows up shuttled between two captors, the gabby psychopath Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and the hulking warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Furiosa faces constant danger on both sides, and she strives to survive long enough to escape, keen to exact revenge on those who have taken everything from her.Though Theron still casts a long shadow, Taylor-Joy stakes her claim on the role with a formidable ferocity: Under the grease that Furiosa smears on her face like war paint, the actress’s distinctive wide-set eyes blaze bright with righteous anger. To make Furiosa her own, she allowed herself to be put through an emotional and physical wringer for six and a half months. How did she feel in late 2022, when she finally wrapped the arduous production?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 Shares104 Views

      in Music

      How a Novelist Became a Pop Star

      by

      “I hope you fall in love, I hope it breaks your heart” is the refrain (in English translation) of “Pasoori,” Ali Sethi’s 2022 global hit. Is this a curse or a blessing? The song, performed as a duet with the Pakistani singer Shae Gill, defies such simple classifications — it’s a pop banger sung in Urdu and Punjabi, punctuated with flamenco handclaps and driven by a reggaeton beat. Sethi, a Pakistani-born artist who lives in Manhattan’s East Village, composed it in the wake of a thwarted collaboration with an Indian organization that feared reprisal (because of a 2016 ban on hiring Pakistani creatives). Drawing on themes from ghazals — sly courtesan poems about desire and betrayal that have doubled as political critiques, a genre that dates to seventh-century Arabia — “Pasoori” is at once “a love song, a bit of a flower bomb thrown at nationalism, a queer anthem, a protest song, a power ballad [and] a song of togetherness,” Sethi says. It’s now been viewed some 850 million times on YouTube, including by countless Indian fans.Sethi, 39, is a master of microtonal singing, gliding between the notes of the Western tempered scale. He’s been lauded for sounding like a vestige of another age — his supple, keening tenor the result of years of apprenticeship to the Pakistani artists Ustad Saami and Farida Khanum. Growing up in Lahore, where he was recognized at school for his academic and artistic abilities but also, he says, “taunted by both students and teachers for being part of a queer cohort,” he found in traditional music a way to be good but also fabulous, rooted without being fixed.Back then, he didn’t see the arts as offering a viable career path. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early aughts, he was expected to study economics. He instead took courses on South Asian history and world fiction, and first read Jane Austen at the behest of his teacher Zadie Smith. In 2009, he published “The Wish Maker,” a semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel set in his home city. The narrator navigates the wounds and thrills of adolescence, as well as a factionalized, globalizing country, alongside his female cousin: They watch an “Indiana Jones” film (“about an American man of the same name who wore hats and enjoyed the company of blonde women”) and are puzzled by its Indian villain; they fuel their crushes with love songs by Mariah Carey and the Pakistani artist Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.According to Sethi, his hit single “Pasoori” is at once “a love song, a bit of a flower bomb thrown at nationalism, a queer anthem, a protest song, a power ballad [and] a song of togetherness.”Philip CheungThe book was well received, though Sethi now thinks its realist form couldn’t fully accommodate Pakistan, a society in flux. As he was finishing the novel in Lahore in 2007, the country was besieged by sectarian violence. His father, Jugnu Mohsin — both he and Sethi’s mother, Najam Sethi, are prominent journalists and publishers — received death threats, and Sethi spent over a year in hiding, staying in the basements of friends. In 2011, he traveled to India to work as an adviser on Mira Nair’s 2012 film, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” adapted from Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel. One evening, when everyone was eating and singing, Nair was so moved by Sethi’s version of a ghazal famously sung by Khanum, “Dil Jalane Ki Baat,” that she urged him to record it. The song became part of the soundtrack and the first step toward Sethi’s recording career.Storytelling is still inherent to his work. Whether at concerts or on Instagram, Sethi often describes the inclusive nature of traditional South Asian music. Because it’s always been “anciently multiple” and cosmopolitan, it contains the “antibodies,” he says, to heal a divisive culture from within. But there are moments when he wishes to not represent but present for a while. He plans to write another novel, in the more experimental form of lyrical autofiction. Today, the burden of being an ambassador is lightened by the presence of other queer South Asian artists, including the writers Bushra Rehman and Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Sethi’s own partner, the painter Salman Toor. Last year, Sethi appeared at Coachella along with several other South Asian musicians, whose multilingual sets slotted right in alongside the Spanish artist Rosalía and Nigeria’s Burna Boy, who performed in English and their native languages.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 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      By the Book Interview With Judi Dench

      by

      What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?That’s an impossible question. The best in 89 years? How do I know? I remember being given A.P. Wavell’s “Other Men’s Flowers” as a birthday present when I was young. It’s a collection of poetry, which opened my eyes to the power of verse. But then I also adored “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” by Patricia Highsmith. My husband, Michael [Williams], bought it for me as a holiday read. I devoured it and didn’t want it to end. I had to ration myself to a couple of pages a day.What’s the last great book you read?“Dormouse Has a Cold,” by Julia Donaldson. It’s a lift-the-flap children’s book, sent to me when I was recovering from a cold.Have you ever gotten in trouble for reading a book?After lights out at boarding school when I was 15. I was in bed under the covers with a torch reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”How do you organize your books?I don’t. I have so many books, but never enough shelves, so I have books everywhere — piled up on tables, chairs, running along window sills, books in every available nook and cranny. Because of my eyesight I can no longer read, but I love being surrounded by books — they’re snapshots of the past: first-night gifts, holidays abroad, memories of lost friends and loved ones. I still have my father’s individual copies of the Temple Shakespeare from 1903. They’re small, red-leather-bound copies with gilt lettering on the cover, and if I hold one I can be transported back to my childhood and family quizzes about Shakespeare.Shakespeare’s writing, you say in the new book, “has the capacity to make us feel less alone.” What other writing has done that for you?Oh so many — Iris Murdoch, Chekhov, Zoë Heller, J.D. Salinger — any writer who can reflect us back to ourselves and help us discover who we are.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 Shares70 Views

      in Music

      Cass Elliot’s Death Spawned a Horrible Myth. She Deserves Better.

      by

      Onstage with her group the Mamas & the Papas at the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967, Cass Elliot, the grand doyenne of the Laurel Canyon scene, bantered with the timing of a vaudeville comedian. “Somebody asked me today when I was going to have the baby, that’s funny,” she said, rolling her eyes. The unspoken punchline — if you could call it that — was that she had already given birth to a daughter six weeks earlier.“One of the things that appeals to so many people about my mom is that there’s a certain level of triumph over adversity,” that daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, said over lunch at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles on a recent afternoon. “She had to prove herself over and over again.”Elliot was a charismatic performer who exuded infectious joy and a magnificent vocalist with acting chops she did not live to fully explore. July 29 is the 50th anniversary of her untimely death at 32, a tragedy that still spurs unanswerable questions. Might Elliot, who was one of Johnny Carson’s most beloved substitutes, have become the first female late-night talk show host? Would she have achieved EGOT status?Half a century after her death, her underdog appeal continues to inspire. Last year, “Make Your Own Kind of Music” — a relatively minor 1969 solo hit that has nonetheless had cultural staying power — became such a sensation on TikTok that “Saturday Night Live” spoofed it, in a hilariously over-the-top sketch in which the host Emma Stone plays a strangely clairvoyant record producer. “This song is gonna be everywhere, Mama,” she tells Elliot, played by Chloe Troast. “Then everybody’s gonna forget about it for a long, long time, but in about 40, 50 years, I think it’s gonna start showing up in a bunch of movies, because it’s a perfect song to go under a slow-mo montage where the main character snaps and goes on a rampage.”Cass Elliot performing on her television special “Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore” in September 1973. After she went solo, she found it hard to shake her nickname.CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images“S.N.L.” didn’t make a single joke about Elliot’s weight — something that was unthinkable half a century ago. During the height of her fame, Elliot seemed to co-sign some of the jabs at her expense with a shrugging grin.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

    • 175 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      He Sang ‘What a Fool Believes.’ But Michael McDonald Is in on the Joke.

      by

      The voice of Michael McDonald has been compared to velvet, silk and sandpaper, melted chocolate and last year, by a besotted 11-year-old girl, an angel. He has harmonized with the best in the business. But his latest duet might cause even the most Botoxed foreheads of Hollywood to furrow.“How you like us so far?” joked Paul Reiser, the actor and comedian, from one corner of a squishy sofa in McDonald’s Santa Barbara, Calif., aerie on a recent Tuesday morning. He was there to talk about the singer’s memoir, which they wrote together and will be published by Dey Street Books on May 21.In the other corner, emanating the equanimity that’s as beloved as his baritone, was the man whose 50-plus-year career has included backup vocals for Steely Dan, Elton John, El DeBarge, Toto, Bonnie Raitt and on and on — backup so extensive and distinctive it’s inspired playlists on Apple Music and Spotify. He was wearing a paisley-patterned shirt, black trousers and, as one might expect of an angel who must tread this cursed Earth, puffy Hoka sneakers.McDonald, 72, has also spent decades in the spotlight, albeit sidlingly, often with his famous blue eyes shut. (“Singing is such an intimate act,” he explains in the book, “and like kissing, it does no real good to see what the other person is doing.”) He led the Doobie Brothers in various iterations with his gospel-inflected keyboard style; released nine solo studio albums traversing multiple genres and continues to make live appearances at venues from Coachella to the Carlyle.Paul Reiser, left, with McDonald. The actor, known for “Mad About You,” said his musical collaborator is “very introspective.”Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe book is titled “What a Fool Believes,” after the Grammy-winning hit McDonald wrote in 1978 with Kenny Loggins, though with some hesitation. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s just too obvious,’” he said. “I wanted it to be something clever and mind-provoking, and I couldn’t really think of anything because, you know, I have a problem provoking my own mind.”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 Shares93 Views

      in Television

      Five Places to Visit in Toronto, With Eugene Levy

      by

      As you might guess from the title of Eugene Levy’s latest series — “The Reluctant Traveler” — he’s a guy who’s happy to stay put.The show, now in its second season on Apple TV, follows Mr. Levy, a 77-year-old comedy legend known for his roles in “Waiting for Guffman,” “American Pie,” “Schitt’s Creek” and more, as he defies his anxieties about airports, heights, temperatures, textures and vast swaths of the animal kingdom. With great consternation, he leaves his comfort zone — Canada, as he often reminds viewers — to shadow an expert moose caller in Sweden, herd 600 sheep through a German resort town and politely avoid an octopus aboard a Greek trawler.Mr. Levy, 77, was raised in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles from Toronto, but has called Toronto home since he got his big break in a 1972 theater production of “Godspell.”Heather Sten for The New York TimesRaised in Hamilton, Ontario, about 40 miles southwest of Toronto, Mr. Levy got his big break in 1972 alongside Martin Short, Gilda Radner, Victor Garber, Andrea Martin and Paul Shaffer in a celebrated production of “Godspell” at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater. He has since called the city — and one historic, leafy neighborhood — home.“Rosedale is a residential area that is right in the heart of Toronto,” he told me over coffee at Tavern on the Green, in New York, where he’d joined the cast of the fourth season of “Only Murders in the Building.” With new skyscrapers going up “a mile a minute” in Toronto, he said, the scene from our table in Central Park looked a little like his view from Rosedale. He and his wife, Deborah Divine, are neighborhood loyalists — Avant Goût, a local bistro, has been their go-to for decades — but spots in other areas rank high, too.Here are five of Mr. Levy’s favorite places in Toronto.Terroni Bar Centrale is in Summerhill, a neighborhood bordering Rosedale, where Mr. Levy and his wife, Deborah Divine, live.Eugen Sakhnenko for The New York TimesWe 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 Shares74 Views

      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): How Kendrick Lamar Out-Drake’d Drake

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The back story of the tension between Kendrick Lamar and DrakeThe early songs: “First Person Shooter,” “Like That” and “7 Minute Drill”Drake responds: “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle”Kendrick Lamar responds: “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA”Drake responds, and shifts the tone of the battle to the personal: “Family Matters”Kendrick responds, upping the personal ante: “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us”Drake bows out?: “The Heart Part 6”How this battle will play out for Drake and Kendrick Lamar as musiciansHow this battle will play out for Drake and Kendrick Lamar as peopleA snack of the week, chat about TikTok, “Challengers” & the most annoying songs of the N.B.A. playoffsConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More