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      ‘The Beekeeper’ Review: Sting Like a, You Know

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      In this action thriller, Jason Statham plays a man who will do whatever it takes to protect his hive.“To bee or not to bee?” That is a question asked to Jason Statham in “The Beekeeper,” a delirious entry in the thriving genre of action flicks about gunslingers who list a different career on their LinkedIn. (See also: “The Painter” and “The Bricklayer,” both released just last week.) The director David Ayer’s previous shoot-em-up, “The Tax Collector,” was woefully short on quips about audits. He and the screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have not made that mistake here. Take a swig of mead every time Statham vows to protect the hive — by which he means society — and you’ll have a fine time. Either way, you won’t remember a thing about the plot.Statham (“The Mechanic,” “The Transporter”) plays Adam Clay, an honest-to-goodness beekeeper who opens the film jarring honey. (Kudos to the costumer Kelli Jones for designing a slim-cut quilted beekeeping suit that gives Statham the panache of a fencer.) In the first minutes, his landlord, a kindly retiree named Eloise (Phylicia Rashad) loses her life savings to a network of internet scammers who prey on the older and the naïve. This cabal of techno thieves rakes in millions every day and boasts the political connections to use the Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 as bodyguards. They’re still no match for a guy who can wipe out a hornet’s nest with a stun gun. As a corrupt former C.I.A. head (Jeremy Irons) sighs, “If a beekeeper says you’re going to die, you’re going to die.”The script’s ridiculous rationale — which our hero repeatedly intones like he’s hypnotizing us to believe it — is that certain beekeepers have pledged to prevent colony collapse, both apoidea and homo sapien. Sure, that’ll do. No less a scribe than William Shakespeare claimed that bees “teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”Really, Statham is simply the embodiment of death. There’s no hesitation, no heightened escalation, just kill kill kill. The fight choreography and editing are bludgeoning, though there’s a nifty cut where a goon gets flung over the camera and the cinematographer Gabriel Beristain flips around to watch the man’s body tumble down the stairs. When a marvelous heavy (Taylor James) slides on brass knuckles, the sound of a punch was so startling that I jumped (and giggled).Things drag whenever “The Beekeeper” goes through the motions of being sensible. There’s endless scenes of panicky phone calls and a go-nowhere moral debate between outsider justice and civilized law featuring Eloise’s daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), a heavy-boozing, monomaniacal F.B.I. agent who I suspect was funnier on the page. I’d forgo her subplot for more of Ayer’s giddy villains: the call center creepazoids Mickey (David Witts) and Rico (Enzo Cilenti), their skateboarding tech bro boss, Derek (Josh Hutcherson), and a rival bee freak, Anisette (Megan Le), who enters screaming and exits far too soon.Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama. Yet, Ayer makes it plain that he’s in on the joke. As Statham lays waste to a camo-clad squadron, the shoulder patches on their uniforms read: BS.The BeekeeperRated R for stinging language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Mel Brooks and Angela Bassett Feted at the Governors Awards

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      The academy honored Mel Brooks, Angela Bassett, the recently widowed editor Carol Littleton and Sundance’s Michelle Satter, whose son died in a shooting.Despite the chockablock ballroom full of Hollywood’s best and brightest, a jovial emcee in the comedian John Mulaney and honorees the audience seemed thrilled to celebrate, a pall of sadness was cast over the Governors Awards — an event created 14 years ago by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to shorten the Oscar telecast by relegating the honorary Oscars to its own untelevised confab.Held Tuesday night, the ceremony — which was delayed two months because of the Hollywood strikes — honored two women who had just experienced remarkable losses. The editor Carol Littleton’s husband of 51 years, the cinematographer and former academy president John Bailey, died in mid-November. Just two weeks later, Michelle Satter, the Sundance Institute’s founding director and the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, learned that her son, Michael Latt, 33, had been shot dead at his home in Los Angeles.“We need to talk through a broken heart,” the filmmaker Ryan Coogler said during his presentation to Satter, who had guided him through the making of his first feature, “Fruitvale Station.”Still, as they say, the show must go on. And with Oscar nomination voting set to begin Thursday, A-listers of all stripes were in full campaign mode, working valiantly to try to ensure their spot on the ballot when nominations are announced on Jan. 23.Boldfaced names mingling in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood included Christopher Nolan, Margot Robbie, Robert Downey Jr., Greta Gerwig, Leonardo DiCaprio, Colman Domingo, Ava DuVernay, Florence Pugh and scores of others.The first award of the night went to 97-year-old Mel Brooks, who the presenter Matthew Broderick said was older than penicillin, FM radio, polyester and the academy itself.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?  More

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      SAG Award Nominations 2024: The Complete List

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      The summer blockbusters each garnered four nominations. Notable snubs included Leonardo DiCaprio of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Box office behemoths “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” led this year’s nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which were announced Wednesday morning. Each film picked up four nominations, including ones for the guild’s top ensemble prize.In addition to that nomination, “Barbie” earned additional nods for lead actress Margot Robbie and supporting actor Ryan Gosling, as well as for its stunt ensemble. The other three nominations for “Oppenheimer” were for lead actor Cillian Murphy and the supporting performers Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt. Both Murphy and Downey prevailed in their categories during Sunday’s Golden Globes.Other nominees for the top award included “American Fiction,” “The Color Purple” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Still, the latter movie was dealt one of the morning’s biggest snubs when star Leonardo DiCaprio failed to crack the best-actor lineup. “May December” received the coldest shoulder, going zero for three with contenders Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore and Charles Melton.Rarely do actors win the Oscar without first scoring a nomination from their own guild. Last year, the entire quartet of SAG winners went on to repeat at the Oscars, while the SAG ensemble winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” also took the Oscars’ best picture prize.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?  More

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      Tina Fey on ‘Mean Girls’ Then and Now

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      With a new version of Regina George and the Plastics headed to theaters, she reflects on how different generations have reacted over the years.Tina Fey spent the summers of 2002 and 2003 hunched over an old desk in the mildewy back room of a Fire Island rental home. Fueled by coffee and Entenmann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts, Fey, at the time the head writer for “Saturday Night Live,” cracked the script that became “Mean Girls” on her laptop.“She would old-school just sit and eat doughnuts and drink coffee, like a secretary from the ’50s or something,” said her husband, the composer Jeff Richmond. “Not glamorous but very conducive to creativity.”In the two decades since, Fey has turned her first and only released screenplay into an empire. The original Paramount film, based on Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction book “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” earned $130 million during its 2004 theatrical run and helped make superstars of its cast, which included Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. In 2018, a musical stage adaptation with a book by Fey and music by Richmond, opened on Broadway. In June, that show will begin its West End run. And this week, a movie musical adapted from the past iterations, and written by Fey, arrives in theaters.(Last March, Wiseman criticized Fey and Paramount for not involving her in the subsequent versions. When asked about the criticism, Fey said she had no comment.)But beyond the commercial success of “Mean Girls,” Fey’s endlessly quotable script — “You can’t sit with us”; “The limit does not exist”; “I’m a cool mom”; “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen” — has embedded itself in our culture.“It became part of my vernacular, every single sound bite,” said Samantha Jayne, who directed the newest “Mean Girls” with her husband, Arturo Perez Jr., and was a teenager when the 2004 original came out. “It was in my DNA.”The 2024 movie mostly follows the characters and story that audiences know by heart, with the addition of singing and dancing: New kid Cady (Angourie Rice) teams up with outsiders Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) to take down the vicious Regina George (Reneé Rapp) and the Plastics, until Cady, too, gets swept up in their hurtful ways. Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their original roles as Ms. Norbury and Mr. Duvall, and there are still Mathletes, a Spring Fling and pink shirts on Wednesdays.“High school is the one remaining American experience that everyone has,” said Lorne Michaels, a producer of the new film along with Fey and others. He and Fey have worked on every version of “Mean Girls,” apart from a widely panned 2011 TV film. “It’s just a central, iconic thing.”But high school, and the nature of comedy itself, has evolved, onscreen and off. Now, rumors spread on social media. Viral videos are uploaded to TikTok. In the film, Coach Carr (Jon Hamm) no longer has sexual relationships with underage students, and North Shore High doesn’t have cafeteria cliques defined by race. With each “Mean Girls” iteration, Fey has tried to keep her script razor-sharp yet relevant and palatable to new generations and zeitgeists.“As long as I don’t accidentally make Monkey Jesus out of it — you know, like when that lady tried to fix that painting — then we’ll be in good shape,” Fey said.In a recent video interview, Fey discussed her more-than-20-year journey with the material and what’s next. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Bebe Wood, left, Rapp and Avantika in the new film, which has evolved to reflect how new generations spread rumors.Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesWhat was your original vision for what a “Mean Girls” movie could be when you read that 2002 article about Wiseman’s book and teenage relational aggression?I first imagined, Oh! It’s going to be about this teacher. It’s going to be like “Stand and Deliver.” And the more I read the book, the more research I did, [I realized] the girls were the most interesting part. The true stories of the way young women behaved were insidious, but they were also kind of funny in their vicious cleverness.How has your technical writing process changed over the years?The rookie mistake I made was, I asked to adapt a nonfiction book that did not have a story. I had these amazing behaviors and anecdotes, but I didn’t have characters or story. So, I literally read Syd Field, read “Save the Cat,” had a million index cards. And then the switch to the stage, on a technical level, you’re taking a three-act thing, and you have to break it into two acts. You don’t have voice-over, you don’t have close-ups. Things have to play in the balcony. Now, with the movie musical, you can have all the things in your arsenal: You can play things with just people’s eyes. You can have people sing about their emotions. Jokes can be big and visual, or they can be Easter eggs.As someone who was in high school in 2004, seeing the tagline “This isn’t your mother’s ‘Mean Girls’” in the musical movie trailer was a shock.That came from the Paramount marketing department. I want to comfort millennials by telling them that’s just an expression in the English language. And also, when the movie came out, some people who were older than you also went to it. Some people as old as 26 or 27 may have been in the theater with you.Much of the comedy in the original “Mean Girls” has held up incredibly well. But there are some jokes and story lines about race, sexuality and pedophilia that haven’t, and they were altered for later versions. How do you approach updating your writing?I was writing in the early 2000s very much based on my experience as a teen in the late ’80s. It’s come to no one’s surprise that jokes have changed. You don’t poke in the way that you used to poke. Even if your intention was always the same, it’s just not how you do it anymore, which is fine. I very much believe that you can find new ways to do jokes with less accidental shrapnel sideways.The original film, with Amanda Seyfried, left, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert and Lindsay Lohan, reflected Fey’s experience as a teenager in the ’80s.Paramount PicturesName calling is central to “Mean Girls,” and the way that they throw these barbs — —If we really had people speak to each other the way they spoke to each other in 1990, everyone would go to the hospital. People were really rough. People are still horrible, they’re just more likely to anonymously type it. I would like to take but not teach a graduate school class on the ways in which people are just as divisive and horrible as they ever were, but now they couch it in virtue.There are specific word changes throughout the new script. Like in the Burn Book, Dawn Schweitzer is now called a “horny shrimp” instead of a “fat virgin.” What goes into choosing those terms?I know that even Regina would know what wouldn’t fly. She’s going to find a way to inflict pain on people, but she’s not going to get herself in trouble. For example, there’s a joke in the original movie when Janis gets up on the table and Regina says, “Oh my God, it’s her dream come true: diving into a huge pile of girls.” It was mine and Sam Jayne’s feeling that Regina wouldn’t try that now because she knows the kids around her would be like, “That’s homophobic.” She would know not to be homophobic, and hopefully, truly would not be homophobic.I was waiting for Ms. Norbury’s speech telling the girls to stop calling each other “sluts” and “whores,” and it didn’t happen. But I realized they weren’t calling each other those words much in this script anyway.Some of that was just needing to go faster to make room for songs. That one is not necessarily a moral edit.Gen Z has seen body positivity and body neutrality movements. When Regina gains weight in the movie musical, the other students’ initial reaction is positive — but then she’s still shamed. Why was it important to have weight still be an issue here?Look at the famous people that influence Gen Z, and we’re still always talking about their bodies. We’re either attacking other people for talking about it, or commending people for being a size, or we’re questioning how they got to a different size. It felt like a line to figure out. We still want to be talking about how weird and messy everything is for girls, while acknowledging that these standards aren’t mandatory — but a lot of people are still signing up for them.Were there any cultural shifts that you saw in updating the script from the 2018 stage show to now?If anything, these behaviors have jumped way beyond just young women. It’s in our politics. It’s in everything. People now like to candy-coat and be very virtuous pointing out why you’re a problem, but it’s the same behavior. It’s still, “Don’t look at me. Look at them. I’m doing great. I might not have nice hair, but she’s fat.”We learned so much with the [stage] show that there doesn’t have to be rigidity in the casting of these roles, in terms of what they look like and how they identify. This story works in many interesting permutations. Anyone with charisma is a good Regina. Anyone who looks like they might come apart can be a great Gretchen.How do you stay in tune to what the teens are doing today? Is that through your daughters, Alice, 18, and Penelope, 12?I did poll some young people I know, including some young people that live in my house. Things like, “Should the Burn Book be a physical book or does it have to be a Snapchat or something?” They were like, “No, don’t pander to us. It’s a book. Tell the story. We get it.”Have you toyed with the idea of doing a sequel that brings back the original cast to play their characters as adults?I have a feeling Paramount would love that. I have not really thought much about that. To me, part of why the stakes are so high in the story is because everyone’s so young and feelings are huge, love is huge and friendship is huge in a way [that it isn’t with] middle-age moms. I love writing about middle-aged people, but I don’t know.There were reports that you tried to get all four of the original main actresses back in small roles in this film. What would that have looked like?We’ll never know. They’re busy people, so it didn’t come together, but we tried, and we all love each other.What’s the appeal of going back to this material again versus doing something different?I have other things that I’d like to do. But I have so much gratitude that this movie seemed to stick with people. When I look at it, I am reminded of how hard I worked on it in the first place. I feel like the bricks and mortar of it were the absolute best possible job I was capable of at the time. It’s not perfect, but it holds water. More

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      Herman Raucher, Screenwriter Best Known for ‘Summer of ’42,’ Dies at 95

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      His screenplay, based on his own youthful experience, was nominated for an Oscar. His other films included “Sweet November,” based on his own unproduced play.Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, which included a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, Conn. He was 95.His daughter Jenny Raucher confirmed the death, in a hospital.Mr. Raucher spent the 1950s and ’60s writing scripts for anthology television series and advertising copy for the Walt Disney Company and various agencies.But recollections of his own summer of ’42 lingered. So did the memory of one of his close friends, Oscar Seltzer, a medic who was killed on Mr. Raucher’s 24th birthday, in 1952, while caring for a wounded soldier during the Korean War.“Summer of ’42” tells the story of three 15-year-old friends — Hermie, Oscy and Benjie — and their early exploration of girls and, tentatively, sex, during a summer vacation on a Nantucket-like island early in World War II.Hermie (played by Gary Grimes) becomes infatuated with Dorothy (Jennifer O’Neill), a woman in her early 20s. In one scene, he visibly trembles on a ladder as she hands him boxes for him to place in her dusty attic. Their tender lovemaking occurs after she receives a telegram telling her that her husband was killed in the war.The scene parallels Mr. Rauch’s real-life experience at age 14 with a woman on Nantucket, Mass.“I was in love with her before the incident ever happened,” Mr. Raucher told The Stuart News of Florida in 2002.In “Summer of ’42,” Hermie, a teenage character based on Mr. Raucher and played by Gary Grimes, falls in love with an older woman, played by Jennifer O’Neill.Warner Bros.“Summer of ’42” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $32 million (or about $245 million in today’s dollars) at the box office.Herman Raucher was born on April 13, 1928, in Brooklyn. His Austrian-born father, Benjamin, was a traveling salesman who had been a soldier, a boxer, a bouncer and, Mr. Raucher said in an interview, possibly a gun runner in Cuba. His mother, Sophie (Weinshank) Raucher, was a homemaker.Mr. Raucher graduated in 1949 from New York University, where he majored in marketing and created cartoons for a campus newspaper and magazine. He was soon hired by 20th Century Fox as a $38-a-week office boy. He was drafted into the Army in 1950 and served two years stateside during the Korean War.After being discharged, he got a call from Disney — he did not know how the company discovered him — and he worked in the company’s advertising department. He also wrote for ad agencies in the 1950s and ’60s, and was hired by Gardner Advertising as a vice president in 1964.He had begun writing for television and the stage in these years, including scripts for the anthology shows “Studio One,” “The Alcoa Hour” and “Goodyear Playhouse,” as well as a play, “Harold,” starring Anthony Perkins and Don Adams, that opened on Broadway in 1962 but closed after 20 performances.Mr. Raucher adapted his unproduced play, “Sweet November,” into a romantic melodrama starring Anthony Newley and Sandy Dennis in 1968. He then collaborated with Mr. Newley on the script for “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” (1968), which was a notorious failure. Mr. Newley, who was also the star and director, plays a singing star simultaneously making and showing a movie about his self-indulgent life.Mr. Raucher’s next film, “Watermelon Man” (1970), starred the comedian Godfrey Cambridge as a bigoted white insurance salesman who overnight turns Black. Critics were not kind; writing in The Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas said the “script is so uninspired and the direction so inept that ‘Watermelon Man’ runs out of gas long before the end is in sight.”Mr. Raucher told the film website Cinedump in 2016 that the director Melvin Van Peebles turned “Watermelon Man” into “more of a Black power film than I’d wanted.”Then came “Summer of ’42,” his biggest cinematic success. He had written the screenplay in 1958, but movie companies had rejected it, by his count, 49 times by the time Warner Bros. acquired it in 1970 and put it in the hands of Robert Mulligan, who had been nominated for an Oscar for directing “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962).“Bob fell in love with the screenplay,” Mr. Raucher told Cinedump. “They asked how big a budget it was, he said a million dollars,” he added, referring to Warner Bros. executives. “They said go make it; they never read the script, they left us alone.”The studio did, however, ask that Hermie be 15, not 14 as Mr. Raucher had been.After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay. It was published before the film was released.During the filming, on the coast of Mendocino in Northern California, Mr. Mulligan told The San Francisco Examiner, “The story deals rather simply with the process of growing up, not unlike Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ which has some of the same comic spirit.”In the film, Dorothy leaves the island after her romantic interlude with Hermie and writes him a farewell note. The same thing happened to Mr. Raucher.Sometime after the film’s release, Mr. Raucher said, he received a letter, with no return address, from a woman in Ohio who he believed was the widow.“She wrote that the ghosts of that time were better left alone,” he told The New York Times in 2001 when a stage musical version of “Summer of ’42” was being performed in Connecticut.Mr. Raucher wrote several more screenplays, including “Class of ’44” (1973), a sequel to “Summer of ’42”; “Ode to Billie Joe” (1976), which was inspired by Bobbie Gentry’s song of the same name and directed by Max Baer Jr.; and “The Other Side of Midnight” (1977), based on Sidney Sheldon’s novel about love and vengeance set in Washington, Paris, Athens and Hollywood.He also wrote the novels “A Glimpse of Tiger” (1971), about two con artists; “There Should Have Been Castles” (1978), about a playwright and a dancer in the 1950s; and “Maynard’s House” (1980), about a troubled Vietnam veteran who is bequeathed a house in Maine by a slain comrade.Besides his daughter Jenny, Mr. Raucher is survived by another daughter, Jacqueline Raucher-Salkin, and two granddaughters. His wife, Mary Kathryn Martinet-Raucher, a dancer, died in 2002.After the filming of “Summer of ’42” was completed, it was in postproduction for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay.“As fate would have it, the book comes out and becomes a best seller,” he told Cinedump. “So when the movie is finally released, the ad line is ‘Based on the national best seller.’ Which is absurd, because the book was written after the movie!” More

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      Jewish Group Assails Film Academy’s Diversity Efforts

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      An open letter signed by notable actors and producers criticized the organization for not including Jews as an underrepresented group as part of a new initiative.More than 260 Jewish entertainment figures — including the actors David Schwimmer, Julianna Margulies and Josh Gad, and the producers Greg Berlanti and Marta Kauffman — signed an open letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences on Tuesday, criticizing the organization for excluding Jews as an underrepresented group in its diversity efforts.In 2020, the academy issued a set of standards as part of its diversity initiative that recognized a number of identities as “underrepresented,” including women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or those with cognitive or physical disabilities.Religion is not one of the categories considered.These initiatives will become part of the standards required for a film to compete in the best picture category beginning this year. For a film to be eligible, at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. The academy has said that includes actors who are Asian, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.“An inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands antisemitism,” said the letter, which was organized by the Hollywood Bureau of the group Jew in the City. “It erases Jewish peoplehood and perpetuates myths of Jewish whiteness, power, and that racism against Jews is not a major issue or that it’s a thing of the past.”The letter added that Judaism was not just an issue of faith, but also an ethnicity.This is not the first time in recent years that the academy has faced criticism from the Jewish community. When the organization opened its long-awaited museum in Los Angeles in 2021, the contributions of Jewish immigrants like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer, who were largely responsible for the founding of the Hollywood studio system, were barely acknowledged. In response, the academy said it would open a permanent exhibition dedicated to the birth of Hollywood and the Jewish filmmakers who established it. Called “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” the exhibit will debut on May 19.According to Allison Josephs, the founder and executive director of Jew in the City, the letter has been in the works since the summer, months before the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, as the new academy standards were being discussed.“It feels like a very big mistake to not recognize that we are maybe the most persecuted group throughout all time,” she said in an interview.The academy declined to comment. More

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      What Songs Would ‘Saltburn’ Characters Have Spun in 2007?

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      The soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s movie has been a talker. Hear tracks by M.I.A., Girl Talk, Nelly Furtado and others that would have been a good fit.“Saltburn” has catapulted the 2001 song “Murder on the Dancefloor” back to the charts, but there’s a lot more to discuss about the film’s soundtrack.Chiabella James/Amazon StudiosDear listeners,Over the weekend, I finally watched “Saltburn,” the provocative, polarizing and occasionally downright icky coming-of-age thriller that no one can stop talking about right now.The movie, written and directed by the “Promising Young Woman” filmmaker Emerald Fennell and starring the current It Boys Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, charts the fates of two unlikely friends who meet at Oxford and later spend a debauched summer at the titular estate where the (much) wealthier of the two boys lives with his aristocratic family.“Saltburn” plays out like a diabolically dark, millennial take on “Brideshead Revisited.” And the operative word there is millennial, since the 38-year-old Fennell delights in planting innumerable period-specific details — including an evocative soundtrack — that remind viewers that these boys belong to the Class of 2006.The soundtrack has elicited such potent nostalgia that it has catapulted Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s 2001 neo-disco hit, “Murder on the Dancefloor,” used in a crucial scene, back into the Top 10 on the British charts. This week, the song cracked the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time.Fennell has confirmed that most of the movie takes place in summer 2007, and ever since, armchair script supervisors on social media have made a sport out of pointing out the film’s most chronologically questionable cultural references. (For example: Some of the characters are watching a DVD of “Superbad,” which was still only out in theaters that summer.)The most egregious music cue is a karaoke scene featuring Flo Rida’s party anthem “Low,” which was released in October 2007 and didn’t become a global smash until early 2008. Eagle-eared listeners have also pointed out that an Arcade Fire song released in mid-2007 plays in a pub scene meant to take place near the beginning of the 2006 school year, and that MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” the song that’s the soundtrack to a languid summer 2007 montage, appeared on an album that didn’t come out until that fall. (The movie’s music supervisor has responded, “It’s as close as possible, really, just to put you back in that space. If it had been a couple of years later, that would have been an absolute no.”)Still, ever since watching the movie, I’ve become obsessed with these quibbles and consumed with one question: What would the characters in “Saltburn” have actually been listening to in summer 2007? Today’s playlist is my attempt to answer that.I am not a professional music supervisor, nor am I member of the king’s nobility — I’m not even British. But I do have credentials that make me exceptionally qualified to create this particular playlist: In the summer of 2007, I was a rising junior in college with a nearly full 160GB iPod.I consulted a number of primary sources, including a playlist on said iPod that I actually created at the end of the year “Saltburn” takes place (titled, with undergraduate melodrama and for reasons I now truly do not recall, “2007 Was a Bad Year”). It features a few artists whose music does appear in “Saltburn” (MGMT, Bloc Party) and quite a few whose songs do not, but whose sounds I think would have potently conjured the era (M.I.A., Hot Chip, that auteur of the aughts sound Timbaland). It is probably not as quintessentially British as the film’s actual soundtrack, but alas, I did not go to uni, I went to “college.”As you can probably already tell, I had way too much fun putting this playlist together. You may call this sound “indie sleaze,” but I just call it my early 20s.Listen along on Spotify while you read.1. MGMT: “Time to Pretend”Hilariously, or perhaps just fittingly, the first song on my actual 2007 iPod playlist is a song that was prominently featured in “Saltburn.” Few albums were debated as hotly around my college radio station office that year as MGMT’s glam-pop debut, “Oracular Spectacular.” While it technically wasn’t released until Oct. 2, this song is such a perfect, montage-ready encapsulation of that era’s sound that I will permit Fennell a little poetic license with this one. (Listen on YouTube)2. Spoon: “Don’t You Evah”Another one from my 2007 iPod playlist, from another album I played a lot that summer: Spoon’s effortlessly tuneful sixth album, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.” I can picture the elegantly wasted denizens of Saltburn vibing to this bass line. (Listen on YouTube)3. Johnny Boy: “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve”Any 2007 playlist worth its salt had to have at least one semi-obscure, critically adored indie-pop track downloaded from a music blog. This 2006 should-have-been-smash from the short-lived British duo Johnny Boy checks that box, with flair. (Listen on YouTube)4. M.I.A.: “Boyz”It was also the summer of “Kala,” M.I.A.’s bold, blown-out sophomore album, which I think still stands as her greatest achievement. Though “Kala” was not released until early August, this exuberant single came out in June, setting the season’s tone. (Listen on YouTube)5. Hot Chip: “Boy From School”I actually cannot believe this song was not used in “Saltburn”: The title says it all! Though released in 2006, the British electro-pop group Hot Chip’s moody dance floor anthem would still have been getting plenty of play the following summer, especially in Britain, where it peaked at No. 40 on the singles chart. (Listen on YouTube)6. Justin Timberlake featuring Timbaland: “SexyBack”Another 2006 banger that would have still been ubiquitous the following summer, the Timbaland-produced “SexyBack” was released at the height of Justin Timberlake’s commercial popularity and his poptimist-approved hipster cred. (Listen on YouTube)7. Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone: “Ridin’”This is the song I would have put in place of “Low”: another instantly recognizable, era-defining hip-hop track, but one that would have by then been out for long enough that an out-of-touch bloke could have credibly mangled it at karaoke. (Listen on YouTube)8. Nelly Furtado: “Maneater”It was simply not a party in the summer of 2007 until someone put on “Maneater,” the sublime and slightly hipper alternative to Furtado’s other 2006 single about a lascivious woman. (Listen on YouTube)9. Bloc Party: “Banquet”Of course there was song from the post-punk revivalists Bloc Party’s 2005 debut, “Silent Alarm,” in “Saltburn”; I just would have chose this more propulsive and admittedly on-the-nose selection instead of “This Modern Love.” (Listen on YouTube)10. Girl Talk: “Bounce That”And finally, nothing said “college party in the mid-to-late-aughts” like a cut from Girl Talk’s 2006 hyperactive mash-up opus, “Night Ripper” — or maybe just someone stealing the aux cord and playing the entire album from start to finish. (Listen on YouTube)Take ’em to the chorus,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“2007: The Summer of ‘Saltburn’” track listTrack 1: MGMT, “Time to Pretend”Track 2: Spoon, “Don’t You Evah”Track 3: Johnny Boy, “You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve”Track 4: M.I.A., “Boyz”Track 5: Hot Chip, “Boy From School”Track 6: Justin Timberlake featuring Timbaland, “SexyBack”Track 7: Chamillionaire featuring Krayzie Bone, “Ridin’”Track 8: Nelly Furtado, “Maneater”Track 9: Bloc Party, “Banquet”Track 10: Girl Talk, “Bounce That”Bonus TracksAfter I featured the British musician and poet Labi Siffre in Friday’s newsletter, a Times editor sent me a link to Siffre’s exquisitely funky 1975 song “I Got The …” — which is prominently sampled in Eminem’s star-making 1999 single, “My Name Is.” I admit that this kind of blew my mind. It also led me to two fascinating facts I’d like to share with you.First, that Beck and his producers the Dust Brothers were planning to sample “I Got The …” on a single from the 1999 album “Midnite Vultures,” but Eminem beat him to it. (What could have been!) Also, even more impressively, Siffre refused to clear the Eminem sample for the producer Dr. Dre until they removed all lyrics that Siffre had deemed homophobic. “Diss the bigots not their victims,” Siffre said years later in an interview. “I denied sample rights till that lazy writing was removed.” If only every Eminem song had undergone the Labi Siffre test! More

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      Jo Koy Responds to Golden Globes Criticism: ‘It’s a Tough Room’

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      In an interview on the ABC program “GMA3” the morning after the awards show, Koy said he would “be lying” if he said the criticism “doesn’t hurt.”Hosting a Hollywood awards show can be a notoriously difficult job, with its audience of image-conscious A-list celebrities on the receiving end and a large television audience scrutinizing the material in real time. After Jo Koy’s performance as the host of this year’s Golden Globes drew criticism, he acknowledged Monday that it had been “a tough room.”“Well, I had fun — you know, it was a moment that I’ll always remember,” Koy said Monday on the ABC program “GMA3,” noting that he had only had a week and a half to prepare. “It’s a tough room. And it was a hard job, I’m not going to lie. Getting that gig, and then having the amount of time that we had to prepare — that was a crash course.”At Sunday’s awards show, parts of Koy’s opening monologue seemed to fall flat in the ballroom, drawing a defensive aside from the comedian. “I got the gig 10 days ago!” he said. “You want a perfect monologue? Yo, shut up. You’re kidding me, right? Slow down, I wrote some of these — and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”Koy’s material gravitated toward more standard celebrity teasing. Last year, when Jerrod Carmichael was the host, he delivered a provocative performance, immediately addressing the turmoil over a lack of Black voting members at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization that ran the Golden Globes until it was dissolved.Koy’s opener did address diversity, pointing out the whiteness in the room, but it otherwise stuck with more standard fare, including a joke about Hollywood’s favorite weight loss drug. (“By the way, ‘The Color Purple’ is also what happens to your butt when you take Ozempic,” he joked.)Many of the onscreen cutaways showed tepid reactions, but the responses on social media and from some critics were harsher. (A headline in The Guardian read: “The joke’s on Jo Koy: Golden Globes host delivers a bad gig for the ages.”)Koy said in the interview that he would “be lying” if he said the criticism “doesn’t hurt.”“I hit a little moment there where I was like, ‘Ah, hosting is just a tough gig,’” Koy said. “Yes, I am a stand-up comic but that hosting position, it’s a different style.”One reaction from the crowd became an instant meme: When Koy joked that the Globes would have “fewer camera shots of Taylor Swift” than N.F.L. telecasts — referring to the frequent reaction shots of her recent appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games to cheer on the team’s tight end, Travis Kelce — Swift, who was seated in the audience, looked unamused, coolly sipping from her drink. In his interview, Koy acknowledged that the joke fell “just a little flat.”So, one of the interviewers asked, if he could do it all again, would he say yes to the hosting invitation?“That’s a tough gig,” he replied, “I’m not going to lie.” More