More stories

  • in

    Feel Good T.V. Is Great. But Lonely T.V. Gives Us What We Need.

    Dark comedies like “The Bear” and “Sunny,” provide a contrast to contemporary comedy’s relentlessly upbeat streak.Masa is a hikikomori — a shut-in or hermit of sorts — who has been holed up in his room for years. His dirty dishes are piled into towers. His mother is so worried about him that she calls his estranged father, Hiromasa, who offers for Masa to stay in his empty cabin on Lake Biwa, northeast of Kyoto. Masa will still be alone, but at least he will get a change of scenery.In the cabin, Masa retreats even further into his sullen isolation — until he meets Sho the trashbot. Sho is short and squat and looks like a glorified garbage can on wheels, complete with a claw arm to grab trash. He has been programmed to pick it up, but he is not very good at picking it out: Sho can’t quite tell why a KitKat wrapper goes in the garbage but Masa’s electronics don’t.Trained as an engineer, Masa suddenly has a passion project on his hands: He is determined to teach Sho the difference between trash and not-trash. When Hiromasa stops by to drop off groceries, he pauses at the doorstep, pleased by the scene unfolding behind the window: A gleeful Masa fist bumps Sho’s claw arm, pouring out a shot of whiskey to celebrate Sho’s finally figuring it out. The cabin floor is strewn with litter — remnants of countless trial runs — but Masa is grinning for the first time in years.This scene, from a recent episode of Apple TV+’s “Sunny,” is a rather pointed instance of something TV has been telling us for a while now: Mess brings meaning; people forge genuine connections in the midst of disorder. A spate of recent shows — “The Bear,” “Big Mood,” “Beef” and “This Is Going to Hurt” — pairs that somewhat saccharine sentiment with black comedy. Along with slightly older series like “Fleabag” and “I May Destroy You,” these shows stand in stark contrast to their relentlessly upbeat counterparts: “Ted Lasso,” “Abbott Elementary,” “The Good Place,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Parks and Recreation,” to name a few. In a world that’s bleak enough already, feel-good, heartfelt comedy feels like more of a salve; earnest sitcoms seem to counteract the vitriol of the real world. But the dark comedies, by their very nature, feel truer to life than their more wholesome peers. Rather than building worlds from novel, even quirky premises — an American football coach dispatched to lead an English soccer team, philosophy lessons set in an off-kilter heaven, musical theater in an exuberant precinct — these new shows settle into grittier worlds. Dark comedies accomplish what classic sitcoms like “All in the Family,” “Good Times,” “Maude” and “Roc” did: They plumb humor from everyday tragicomedy.Sometimes the subject of a dramedy leads to category confusion. “The Bear” has spawned a debate over whether it is, in fact, a comedy at all, because it deals so often with such heavy themes: the punishing atmosphere of restaurant kitchens, family dysfunction, alcoholism, addiction, trauma. The dramedy follows Carmen Berzatto, known as Carmy, in the aftermath of his older brother Michael’s suicide. Carmy interrupts his prestigious culinary career to come home to Chicago and run the family’s Italian-beef sandwich shop, inherited from Michael. Under Carmy and his sous chef, Sydney, the original no-frills sandwich shop evolves into a high-end restaurant, hungry for a Michelin star. “The Bear” is at its best in episodes like the critically acclaimed “Fishes,” bursting with the sheer chaos of the Berzatto family. In the show’s third, most recent season, the episode “Ice Chips” opens on Carmy’s sister, Natalie Berzatto, who goes by Sugar, sweating on a Chicago highway, en route to the hospital. She is in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and she is going into labor. Sugar has called every person she can think of, and no one is picking up. She grits her teeth and, as a last resort, calls her mother.Donna Berzatto is an alcoholic with mood swings and a fiery temper — she drove a car through the wall of the Berzatto family home at Christmas in “Fishes.” And right now, she is getting on Sugar’s last nerve. Donna insists that Sugar use a specific breathing technique (“hee, hee!”) and scares her off of delivering without drugs. But as the episode progresses, the “hee, hee!” starts to help, and when Donna suggests that ice chips might be soothing, something between mother and daughter starts to soften.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

  • in

    Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs?

    When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

  • in

    ‘The Quiet Girl,’ an Oscar Contender, Explores Irish Loneliness

    The first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, directed by Colm Bairéad, tells a gentle story of cultural reticence.This article contains spoilers for the film “The Quiet Girl.”For the first 55 minutes of “The Quiet Girl,” the film’s audience does not know why the titular child has been sent to live with strangers in the Irish countryside. Cáit (Catherine Clinch), 9, does not know either. Her parents do not talk to her, and they barely speak to each other.Cáit eventually learns the truth from a nosy neighbor: While her parents prepare for the birth of yet another baby, she has been shuttled from her chaotic family home to spend the summer with some middle-aged relatives, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett), who have their own silent sorrow.This uneasy, unanswered isolation is at the heart of “The Quiet Girl,” which arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday, and is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar. A “hushed work about kith and kindness,” as Lisa Kennedy wrote in her review for The New York Times, the film tells a quintessentially Irish story, yet one that is rarely seen by international audiences on the big screen.Irish cinema often features a cast of gregarious men and pious, conservative women, like in Ken Loach’s “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”; “Brooklyn,” starring Saoirse Ronan; and Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-nominated “Belfast.”“Irish people are always known for the gift of the gab,” said Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, the producer of “The Quiet Girl.” “It becomes almost a caricature.” But in Chrualaoí’s film, Cáit and her new guardians cautiously try to connect through their loneliness and pain.When Cáit (Clinch), left, and Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) first meet, Cáit is slow to warm to her elder relative.Super, via Associated PressThe depiction of such struggles to communicate has resonated deeply with Irish audiences. The feature — called “An Cailín Ciúin” in Ireland — was named the best film of 2022 by the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle, and screenings in the country have regularly left viewers in tears.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.For Colm Bairéad, the film’s director, miscommunication is at the heart of both “The Quiet Girl” and its source material, Claire Keegan’s novella “Foster.”“So much of it is under the surface,” he said in a recent video interview, noting that Keegan’s prose was able to capture an Irish inability to open up. “There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” he added.Irish people “don’t talk about our feelings in the way other cultures do,” said Siobhan O’Neill, a professor at the University of Ulster, whose work focuses on intergenerational trauma. “People who are traumatized,” she added, “don’t want to talk about it.”In both Cáit’s fictional childhood — set in the ’80s, in the countryside — and my own, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the two subsequent decades, the effects of the historically religious and conservative society hung in the air. Like Cáit, as a child I attended wakes and was aware of the way gossip moves in small communities.This social history had wider implications: I was 4 when the last “Magdalene laundry” — abject institutions usually run by the Catholic Church where thousands of women worked without pay — closed. Like many children of the “cease-fire baby” generation, born just before the end of the Troubles, I struggled to communicate with my parents through an atmosphere of generalized anxiety.The same intergenerational malaise permeates “The Quiet Girl.” While most of the film’s dialogue is in Irish, Cáit’s cold father (Michael Patric) is the only character who speaks exclusively in English, reflecting the distance between him and Cáit.The film’s preference for Irish dialogue has been widely praised in Ireland, as a wider so-called Celtic revival across music, politics and fashion has recently been celebrating the language. Less than 2 percent of the Irish population speaks the country’s native language on a daily basis, but recent Irish-language interviews from Paul Mescal and Brendan Gleeson on the red carpet at the British Academy Film Awards attracted much attention online, including Mescal’s praise for “The Quiet Girl.”When Bairéad, who has raised his children with Ní Chrualaoí speaking Irish at home, read “Foster,” in 2018, he said he knew he wanted to make it an Irish-language film. The book could “be an authentic Irish-language story,” he said. “We weren’t forcing the language into a scenario.”“There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” said Colm Bairéad of his film “The Quiet Girl.” Nacho Gallego/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the time, he and Ní Chrualaoí were expecting their second child, and both felt drawn to Cáit’s aching loneliness, Bairéad said. In the film, the absence of Cáit’s world unfolds in slow, dreamy glimpses rather than via dialogue: a glove box filled with cigarettes, a child sitting alone in the bath. The pair were also aware, Bairéad said, of how rarely figures like Cáit were the protagonists in Irish stories.“There’s been a tendency in our cinema to pander to something that’s expected of us,” Bairéad said. But a recent wave of Irish films feel “very sure of themselves in terms of their identity,” he added. “They’re coming from the inside out, rather than the outside in.”These films include the fellow Oscar contender “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in which Colm’s (Brendan Gleeson) ennui becomes a self-destructive determination to create a musical legacy. In the 2022 film “The Wonder,” the protagonist’s inability to speak about girlhood sexual abuse is transformed into a belief that God is speaking through her body.In “The Quiet Girl,” we see Cáit grow from a lonely little girl to a more confident and open child. The film tackles the effect of societal traumas, O’Neill said, by addressing what goes “deeper than words,” and how comfort, sometimes, has to come from somewhere other than talking.With words still scarce, Cáit finds comfort in the softness of Eibhlín’s touch, and her discovery — thanks to Seán — of the joy of movement. Although verbal expressions of emotion might continue to be culturally difficult for Cáit and for those around her, in the film’s powerful final moments, we see the child running, silently, toward love. More

  • in

    Comfort Viewing: 3 Reasons I Love ‘Recovery of an MMO Junkie’

    During a pandemic year in isolation, our critic found solace in this anime rom-com about the ways we avoid or ultimately give in to intimacy.At this point, I’m pretty good at faking my way through social interactions. There are no external signs of discomfort, no indications that I spent the route there debating, Hamlet-style, whether or not to bail. No evidence of the way a post-meeting panic attack can start me on an apartment cleaning spree. I’m notorious for my disappearing acts. And my apartment is always spotless. More