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    ‘Birth/Rebirth’ Review: Staying (Not Quite) Alive

    Two women nurture a reanimated child in this grisly gynecological horror movie.Motherhood is both mad and monstrous in “Birth/Rebirth,” Laura Moss’s ultrasmart, ferociously feminist take on the Frankenstein myth. Yet while the story (by Moss and Brendan J. O’Brien) surges to corporeal extremes, the movie is most resonant when — like Prime Video’s “Dead Ringers” and the harrowing AMC+ drama “This Is Going to Hurt” — it resolutely records the gross indignities of everyday procreation.For Dr. Rose Casper (Marin Ireland), a chilly morgue technician, dead tissue is infinitely more interesting than living. In her dingy apartment in the Bronx, Rose experiments obsessively with reanimation, using embryonic stem cells. (How she obtains them involves a sick joke which I refuse to spoil.) A snuffling pig called Muriel has so far been Rose’s sole success.Elsewhere in Rose’s hospital, an overworked maternity nurse named Celie (a terrific Judy Reyes), struggles to find time for her lively six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister). But after Lila succumbs to a deadly infection, a guilt-wracked Celie and an avid Rose will find common purpose in revivifying the child’s corpse. What follows is a quietly freakish, slyly humorous tale of devoted co-parenting, with Lila serving as daughter to one woman and science experiment to the other.Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish. Pregnancy hasn’t been this perverse since the underappreciated “Alien 3” (1992); yet as the women’s behavior grows ever more shocking — and Ariel Marx’s nerve-plucking score intensifies — Moss offers no rebuke to their heedless amorality. There is only the audience to judge.And, perhaps, Lila. “I’m not getting enough attention,” she whispers to her mother early in the film. Little did she know that all she had to do was die.Birth/RebirthRated R for purloined placentas and stolen semen. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Yes, These Gays Are Trying to Murder You

    Queer villains are all over our screens these days. What do they have to say?IT BECAME A meme the second the words came out of Jennifer Coolidge’s mouth. Trapped on a yacht with a small group of ornately charming men who’ve lured her into their world with calculated flattery, she now realizes they have no intention of letting her ever return to the luxury resort where they found her. In the final minutes of the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” Coolidge’s rich, lonely, addled Tanya McQuoid pleads her case to the boat’s captain. “Please! These gays,” she implores in her signature husky bleat. “They’re trying to murder me!”Listen to This ArticleThat moment — the line that launched a thousand GIFs, not to mention T-shirts, coffee mugs and emblazoned hand fans — was brilliantly designed for the decontextualization it quickly underwent. But it also marked a milestone in the history of gay representation in film and television because … it was true: Those gays were trying to murder her! What better way to obtain her fortune and secure their status as haute Mediterranean palazzo dwellers? Although poor Tanya isn’t long for this world, she does manage to take down most of them before exiting, like the trained hit woman she isn’t. And the gay men in the show’s audience? We were the first ones cheering.Why was this OK? (And yes, weirdly, it was OK.) It helped to know that a queer man, the show’s creator, Mike White, had originated the idea. If you’re gay, chances are you understood that you were on safe ground with the show — that this wasn’t homophobia but, rather, a joyous reclamation of the idea of gay monstrosity from the homophobes who held custody of it for decades.The scene also upended the conviction that negative stereotypes can be assiduously monitored and tallied to determine whether a film or drama or sitcom or line or joke is with us or against us. For many L.G.B.T.Q. consumers of culture, including me, that kind of tensed, hyperwary watching — “Is this good for the gays or bad for the gays?” — is a hard habit to break. Several generations of us grew up exposed to movies and TV shows that forced us to develop a bitter awareness that, at any minute, we could be confronted with an ugly caricature or made the target of a cruel slur deployed to generate laughs or cheers from a straight audience. Several younger generations of gay men were raised in an era when the industry regularly patted itself on the back for earnest “representation” designed to show straight viewers that gay people were “just like us,” though only rarely were gay characters allowed to be just like themselves. And still younger generations have come of age in a world in which gay creators have increasingly taken charge of the way queer characters are depicted. But a murderous cabal of gays? Not since Sgt. “Pepper” Anderson broke up a trio of kill-crazy lesbians who ran a nursing home in an early ’70s episode of the Angie Dickinson cop show “Police Woman” had television gone there, and even 50 years ago, that story line was viewed as sufficiently retrograde to warrant a rebuke from critics and gay activists alike.What “The White Lotus” did felt so backward that it was, paradoxically, transgressive — not to mention very gay. This punchline was so air quotes appalling that gay viewers could enjoy it without having to fret that straight viewers might get the wrong idea about us. (And if they did decide that gay people were lethal Eurotrash yacht queens? Better, I suppose, to be feared than hated.) In any case, “These gays …” was primarily about ownership. It wasn’t “We can take a joke”; it was “We can make a joke.”The 20th-century Manhattan writer Truman Capote (above, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the 2005 biopic) will be the focus of a Hulu series starring Tom Hollander.ShutterstockWHAT WASN’T APPARENT when the show aired is that those killer gays presaged a trend: We’re witnessing an explosion of out-and-proud gay villainy. Showtime’s forthcoming limited series “Fellow Travelers,” created by the gay writer Ron Nyswaner, whose credits stretch back to “Philadelphia” (1993), is a kind of idiosyncratic dramatized history of gay-movement politics from the McCarthy years through the early days of the AIDS crisis. Its protagonist, played by the gay actor Matt Bomer, is not a heroic activist or a noble victim but a ruthless, chilly, opportunistic user, an ambitious closeted husband, father and eventually grandfather who, in an early episode, manipulates the timid male lover he dominates into writing an anonymous letter that could destroy the life of a lesbian friend. The character is complex, but nobody would call him a good guy.Showtime recently canceled plans to air another limited series that is literally about a gay man who’s trying to murder people, but Netflix picked it up, and eight episodes of “Ripley,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” starring Andrew Scott as the obsessive killer, will likely be released next year. Readers first met Ripley in 1955, when Highsmith introduced him as a young American of indeterminate desires whose envy of the rich, indolent playboy he’s been hired to bring home from Italy shades into a kind of lethal longing — to be him, have him, replace him. Ripley’s sexuality is murky in Highsmith’s five novels, and in the hands of her many adapters, he’s been as heterosexual as when Dennis Hopper plays him in Wim Wenders’s “The American Friend” (1977) or as gay as when Matt Damon portrays him in Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999). And this time? We don’t know yet, but Scott has already described him as “a queer character.”A third limited series, “Capote’s Women,” a continuation of Ryan Murphy’s “Feud” anthology for FX and Hulu, will feature Tom Hollander — one of the murderous gays from “The White Lotus” — as Truman Capote. (Full disclosure: I am working with Murphy on an unrelated film project.) The Capote drama will apparently concentrate on the latter period of the writer’s life, in which Esquire’s publication of excerpts from his novel “Answered Prayers” (1987) was viewed as a friendship-rupturing betrayal by the society women whose company the author craved. Although it hasn’t been revealed which version or versions of Capote the show will bring forth, a degree of villainy is baked in, since Capote himself, on one talk show appearance after another, cultivated an image as a demonic, acid-tongued imp. It’s the Bad Gay renaissance we never asked for but somehow seem to have long wanted.To be specific, this is gay male villainy — lesbians and bisexuals, long underrepresented in a world of pop culture still dominated by male creators, are insufficiently ubiquitous in movies and TV to be reframed as fun bad guys. (A delightful recent exception: the homicidal lesbian elders played by Judith Light and S. Epatha Merkerson in Rian Johnson’s “Poker Face.”) And trans villainy is, right now, not an option in pop culture: The struggle for acceptance remains too imperiled for anyone to be glib or ironic about goals like positive representation. White gay men make better marks; as members of two dominant cultures, we’re easy targets in a world in which everyone’s hyperconscious of identity, and we have enough clout to be labeled part of the problem without that critique being racist or sexist.Last year, Hollander ushered in the latest Bad Gay renaissance when his character, Quentin, conspires to kill Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge, on the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus.”Courtesy of HBOThat itself is an indication of how far we’ve journeyed from, say, 1981, when the gay culture writer and activist Vito Russo published “The Celluloid Closet,” a book that traces Hollywood’s contempt for and mistreatment of gay characters from the earliest days of cinema. Russo explored a subject that had previously been viewed by moviegoers simply as the way things were — the treatment of gay people as pansies and wimps, perverts and tragedies, serial killers and suicides. He wrote the first edition of his book roughly a decade after the Stonewall uprising — during which, while television slowly but steadily humanized gay characters, giving them dignified guest appearances in ongoing comedies and dramas as well as the occasional TV movie, feature films continued to traffic in mincing best friends, bar-crawling lowlifes, killers and victims. The James Bond films, those bastions of heterosexual virility, toyed with a pair of gay hit men in 1971’s “Diamonds Are Forever” and, in general, big-screen queer sexuality was often murder adjacent (“Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “American Gigolo,” “Cruising,” “Dressed to Kill”) when it wasn’t comical, absurd or doomed.But what neither Russo nor his readers could have known was that AIDS was about to change the world. For the next 15 years, after the virus became prevalent, gay characters gradually became exemplary — the only choice during a struggle in which Hollywood felt compelled to represent the part of American society that didn’t want gay men demonized, marginalized or dead. This period, bracketed roughly by “Victor/Victoria” (1982) and “In & Out” (1997), wasn’t free of queer villains, but they were often greeted with ire and contempt: When the serial killer Buffalo Bill was showcased in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), backlash was so intense that its director, Jonathan Demme, turned around and made “Philadelphia,” about an admirable, likable gay lawyer seriously ill with AIDS. To say that many of these films were made with persuasion in mind is not to disparage them. Anti-gay agitprop had been a staple of Hollywood for decades; what was pro-gay agitprop but a long-overdue attempt to fight fire with fire?By the late ’90s, Good Gays had become staples of both movies and TV series — 1998 marked the beginning of “Will and Grace” — and, not soon after that, it finally became acceptable for a new kind of Bad Gay to stand up and be counted. Twenty-three summers ago, a group of strangers went to Borneo and had their adventures filmed for 39 days and, when it was over, one of them was a millionaire. Richard Hatch, then 39, was the first gay villain of the reality TV era, and a shock at a time when L.G.B.T.Q. television presences were supposed to model relatability and safeness. On the night of the first-season finale of “Survivor,” more than 51 million Americans watched as one competitor Hatch had beaten offered a disgusted endorsement, labeling him a snake and his rival a rat, then telling her fellow jurors that they should honor what nature intended and vote “for the snake to eat the rat.”It’s hard now to convey what a violation of accepted norms it was for a straight woman to use that language about a gay man on national television, especially since, in retrospect, Hatch’s malevolence was wildly overstated. All he was guilty of was figuring out how to work the game before everyone else did. What Hatch was doing — observing a playing field as only a lifelong outsider could, then using the ruthless detachment that exclusion can generate to his advantage — was, to many gay viewers, a recognizable survival strategy now revealed on a nationwide scale. The cultural ascent of a Bad Gay was a shock: Hatch had the dubious honor of becoming the first homosexual man America could hiss at when the country was only just past the most acute phase of the AIDS pandemic and beginning to uncouple male homosexuality from death. For gay people, the question was complex: Should we hate him, root for him or both?IF YOU’RE GAY and over 30, you’re probably at least somewhat used to assessing negative reflections of yourself on a spectrum that stretches from the flatly unacceptable to the semi-embraceable. At the most extreme end, for instance, there is the slur that gay people are groomers, a charge closely tied to the idea that homosexuality is a spreadable disease. Because social conservatives have always found the accusation of preying on children an irresistible way to threaten sexual minorities, it should not be surprising that in the last couple of years, the groomer libel has been transferred from gay men to drag queens and trans people.But history provides no shortage of other gay villain clichés from which to choose. There’s the trope that gay people — or gay-coded characters — are weak, cowardly, sniveling (think of Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith on the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space” whimpering, “Oh, the pain, the pain!”). That one’s almost more boring than it is defamatory — but it’s still defamatory, even when drolly done. There’s also the old, double-edged McCarthy-era insult, intriguingly played with in “Fellow Travelers,” that gay people are security risks on two fronts: They harbor a secret that makes them susceptible to blackmail, and their resentment toward the oppressive straight world makes them obvious candidates for double agentry; in other words, we’re potential victims and potential moles. Then there’s the having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too stereotype that gay people are fine but gay closet cases are all potential serial killers. Finally, there’s the broad-brush (and essentially misogynistic) derogation of gay men as effeminate, an old insult that has been so effectively reclaimed by happily effeminate gay men that it’s lost much of its sting. As Harvey Fierstein subversively states in the 1995 documentary version of “The Celluloid Closet,” “I like the sissy,” and that stereotype, the movie origins of which can be traced back to the silent era, can range from hurtful and belittling to joyful and empowering, depending on who’s doing the sashaying and shantaying, and to what end it’s being used.In “Fellow Travelers,” soon to be on Showtime, Matt Bomer plays Hawkins Fuller, a federal official with a vengeful streak.Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeThere’s one kind of gay villain, though, that seems especially alluring these days, including to gay men. It’s the Wicked Queen — the devious, manipulative, cunning, conniving male homosexual who has learned how to stay two steps ahead of anyone who thinks they can outsmart him. The Wicked Queen often shows up in stories that take place in a primarily gay universe: He’s the selfish one, the callous one, the one who’s a bitch to all his friends — his malice doesn’t need to be filtered through the gaze of the straight world. It’s our business, and it’s there for our delectation. At his most refined and extreme, the Wicked Queen seems not only to relish his criminality but to turn it into a louchely decadent performance piece. These are the gay villains who are currently having their moment in the spotlight. Performative, even showy gay (or gay-coded) villainy — the idea that we’re dark-souled masterminds who know how to be stylish and sociopathic in a single gesture — has been around forever; it’s evident in everything from George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt (technically straight but really not) in “All About Eve” (1950) to Cesar Romero’s Joker in the 1960s “Batman” TV series to Dr. Evil’s pinkie raised to his pursed lips in the “Austin Powers” movies to Divine’s early 1970s collaborations with John Waters to the latest seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Yes, it’s a vicious attack on our collective character but, honestly, as vicious attacks go, some of us kind of enjoy that one.Perhaps, on occasion, we even wear it proudly. The murderous gays in “The White Lotus” certainly do; they escort Tanya to an opera not long before they intend to kill her, almost as if they were event planners pulling together a theme weekend, and to win her confidence, they actually pretend to be a different gay cliché — the obsequious Gay Best Friends, forever fluttering around and consoling the heroine, happy to serve as her supporting characters. Using one stereotype to conceal a worse one? That’s so ruthless, it’s applause-worthy; it’s what one of the drag house members in Jennie Livingston’s documentary “Paris Is Burning” (1990) means when he explains, “Boys are the stupidest. They don’t know how to do a stunt right. Now, faggots will do a stunt and, I mean, you will never catch up with it until years later!” Translation: Gay people know how to play the long game because we have to know; we’re tough, we’re smart and we’re sly because that’s how we endure.It’s worth noting that the appealing Bad Gay is, and should remain, the province of fiction. In real life, if you internalize those personality characteristics too thoroughly, you do not become a fascinating charismatic antihero; you just become George Santos. But in pop culture, there’s something unexpectedly liberating, even progressive, about seeing gay characters unshackled from the necessity of making a good impression. (It’s why John Early’s staggeringly self-absorbed, needy gay millennial in the cult comedy series “Search Party” [2016-22] was so beloved by gay viewers.) In its first two seasons, the comedy series “The Other Two,” a savage and specific take on our boundless appetite for fame, presents one of its main characters, the aspiring actor Cary Dubek (played by Drew Tarver), as an essentially Good Gay, a young, appealing guy who came out on the late side and is now simultaneously learning to navigate the dating world and the thousand natural shocks and humiliations of struggling on the margins of show business.But in the recently concluded third and final season, Cary finally makes it, if not to the top then to the middle, and goes full Bad Gay. He becomes a camera-hungry, friend-shafting, insincere, self-dramatizing narcissist. In the hands of the show’s co-creators, the former “Saturday Night Live” head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, it feels clear that Cary doesn’t lose himself so much as find himself — the monster he has been all along was just waiting for a chance to emerge. It pains me to say it, but this is, in a way, what diversity looks like (at least, this is one of the things diversity looks like): the dead-on representation of a type that a lot of gay men have met in life but that rarely makes it onto a screen.It’s fair to ask whether we can afford this at a moment when those who hate and fear queer Americans are getting louder and bolder. But no minority culture has ever thrived by retreating to role model politesse in response to the menacing behavior of those who are never going to approve of them anyway. Besides, there’s something undeniably satisfying in saying to homophobes, “You think drag queens reading fairy tales to children is scary? We’ll show you scary.”It’s also a welcome change from a time in which every single movie or television show that was good for the cause had to be greeted with a dutiful round of applause or show of support, no matter its faults. Almost 40 years ago, in his 1987 revised edition of “The Celluloid Closet,” Russo wrote, “There is a tendency on the part of politically committed lesbians and gay men to make allowances for the aesthetic shortcomings of films that offer a more accurate picture of gay life than has been previously seen. This is the temporary cultural reaction of people grateful for a refreshing change in the way their lives are reflected on the screen. This will also moderate with time.” Russo was right, but I wonder how he’d react to the fact that gay culture has virtually inverted itself. Rather than make apologies for stories with good intentions and dubious entertainment value, we now get to see ourselves as worse people in better product. It seems odd that the fragile, perhaps precarious luxury of being able to enjoy an entertaining range of gay villains is a signpost of progress. But a qualified win is still a win, and this victory can, perhaps, be counted as one of the strange spoils of a larger, long-fought battle: the chance to be ourselves — all of ourselves — even when we’re monsters. More

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    Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone.

    Many of us stream shows and movies with the subtitles on all the time — and not because it’s cool.“What did he just say?”Those are some of the most commonly uttered words in my home. No matter how much my wife and I crank up the TV volume, the actors in streaming movies and shows are becoming increasingly difficult to understand. We usually end up turning on the subtitles, even though we aren’t hard of hearing.We’re not alone. In the streaming era, as video consumption shifts from movie theaters toward content shrunk down for televisions, tablets and smartphones, making dialogue crisp and clear has become the entertainment world’s toughest technology challenge. About 50 percent of Americans — and the majority of young people — watch videos with subtitles on most of the time, according to surveys, in large part because they are struggling to decipher what actors are saying.“It’s getting worse,” said Si Lewis, who has run Hidden Connections, a home theater installation company in Alameda, Calif., for nearly 40 years. “All of my customers have issues with hearing the dialogue, and many of them use closed captions.”The garbled prattle in TV shows and movies is now a widely discussed problem that tech and media companies are just beginning to unravel with solutions such as speech-boosting software algorithms, which I tested. (More on this later.)The issue is complex because of myriad factors at play. In big movie productions, professional sound mixers calibrate audio levels for traditional theaters with robust speaker systems capable of delivering a wide range of sound, from spoken words to loud gunshots. But when you stream that content through an app on a TV, smartphone or tablet, the audio has been “down mixed,” or compressed, to carry the sounds through tiny, relatively weak speakers, said Marina Killion, an audio engineer at the media production company Optimus.It doesn’t help that TVs keep getting thinner and more minimal in design. To emphasize the picture, many modern flat-screen TVs hide their speakers, blasting sound away from the viewer’s ears, Mr. Lewis said.There are also issues specific to streaming. Unlike broadcast TV programs, which must adhere to regulations that forbid them from exceeding specific loudness levels, there are no such rules for streaming apps, Ms. Killion said. That means sound may be wildly inconsistent from app to app and program to program — so if you watch a show on Amazon Prime Video and then switch to a movie on Netflix, you probably have to repeatedly adjust your volume settings to hear what people are saying.“Online is kind of the wild, wild west,” Ms. Killion said.Subtitles are far from an ideal solution to all of this, so here are some remedies — including add-ons for your home entertainment setup and speech enhancers — to try.A speaker will helpDecades ago, TV dialogue could be heard loud and clear. It was obvious where the speakers lived on a television — behind a plastic grill embedded into the front of the set, where they could blast sound directly toward you. Nowadays, even on the most expensive TVs, the speakers are tiny and crammed into the back or the bottom of the display.“A TV is meant to be a TV, but it’s never going to present the sound,” said Paul Peace, a director of audio platform engineering at Sonos, the speaker technology company based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “They’re too thin, they’re downward and their exits aren’t directed at the audience.”Any owner of a modern television will benefit from plugging in a separate speaker such as a soundbar, a wide, stick-shaped speaker. I’ve tested many soundbars over the last decade, and they have greatly improved. With pricing of $80 to $900, they can be more budget friendly than a multispeaker surround-sound system, and they are simpler to set up.Last week, I tried the Sonos Arc, which I set up in minutes by plugging it into a power outlet, connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable and using the Sonos app to calibrate the sound for my living room space. It delivered significantly richer sound quality, with deep bass and crisp dialogue, than my TV’s built-in speakers.At $900, the Sonos Arc is pricey. But it’s one of the few soundbars on the market with a speech enhancer, a button that can be pressed in the Sonos app to make spoken words easier to hear. It made a big difference in helping me understand the mumbly villain of the most recent James Bond movie, “No Time to Die.”But the Sonos soundbar’s speech enhancer ran into its limits with the jarring colloquialisms of the Netflix show “The Witcher.” It couldn’t make more fathomable lines like “We’re seeking a girl and a witcher — her with ashen hair and patrician countenance, him a mannerless, blanched brute.”Then again, I’m not sure any speaker could help with that. I left the subtitles on for that one.Dialogue enhancers in appsNot everyone wants to spend more money to fix sound on a TV that already costs hundreds of dollars. Fortunately, some tech companies are starting to build their own dialogue enhancers into their streaming apps.In April, Amazon began rolling out an accessibility feature, called dialogue boost, for a small number of shows and movies in its Prime Video streaming app. To use it, you open the language options and choose “English Dialogue Boost: High.” I tested the tool in “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the spy thriller with a cast of especially unintelligible, deep-voiced men.With the dialogue boost turned on (and the Sonos soundbar turned off), I picked scenes that were hard to hear and jotted down what I thought the actors had said. Then I rewatched each scene with subtitles on to check my answers.In the opening of the show, I thought an actor said: “That’s right, you stuck the ring on her — I thought you two were trying to work it out.”The actor actually said, “Oh, sorry, you still had the ring on — I thought the two of you were trying to work it out.”Whoops.I had better luck with another scene involving a phone conversation between Jack Ryan and his former boss making plans to get together. After reviewing my results, I was delighted to realize that I had understood all the words correctly.But minutes later, Jack Ryan’s boss, James Greer, murmured a line that I could not even guess: “Yeah, they were using that in Karachi before I left.” Even dialogue enhancers can’t fix an actor’s lack of enunciation.In conclusionThe Sonos Arc soundbar was helpful for hearing dialogue without the speech enhancer turned on most of the time for movies and shows. The speech enhancer made words easier to hear in some situations, like scenes with very soft-spoken actors, which could be useful for those who are hearing-impaired. For everyone else, the good news is that installing even a cheaper speaker that lacks a dialogue mode can go a long way.Amazon’s dialogue booster was no magic bullet, but it’s better than nothing and a good start. I’d love to see more features like this from other streaming apps. A Netflix spokeswoman said the company had no plans to release a similar tool.My last piece of advice is counterintuitive: Don’t do anything with the sound settings on your TV. Mr. Lewis said that modern TVs have software that automatically calibrate the sound levels for you — and if you mess around with the settings for one show, the audio may be out of whack for the next one.And if all else fails, of course, there are subtitles. Those are foolproof. More

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    Leonard Bernstein’s Children Defend Bradley Cooper’s Prosthetic Nose in ‘Maestro’

    A teaser for the Netflix biopic has ignited a new round of criticism that the family described as a misunderstanding.Leonard Bernstein’s three children came to the defense of the actor and director Bradley Cooper on Wednesday after he drew fresh criticism for wearing a large prosthetic nose in his portrayal of the midcentury American composer and conductor, who was Jewish, in the forthcoming movie “Maestro.”When the makeup was first revealed last year, some questioned the decision by Cooper, who is not Jewish, to play Bernstein, who died in 1990. In the Netflix film, he stars opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein.The debut of a teaser trailer on Tuesday prompted further discussion on social media about both the prosthesis, which critics said played into an antisemitic trope, and about whether an actor who is Jewish should instead have been cast to play Bernstein, the “West Side Story” composer and music director of the New York Philharmonic.David Baddiel, a British comedian and author of the 2021 book “Jews Don’t Count,” cited Cooper as the latest instance of a gentile actor objectionably portraying a real-life Jewish figure. “I’ve talked about authenticity casting not applying to Jews — and what that means — many times,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The only difference here is it’s more — well — on the nose.”In a series of posts on X, the Bernsteins’ three children — Jamie, Alexander and Nina Bernstein — said that Cooper had consulted with them “along every step of his amazing journey.”“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations or misunderstandings of his efforts,” they said of Cooper. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that. We’re also certain that our dad would have been fine with it as well.”They added, “Any strident complaints around this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch.”Through a representative, Cooper declined to comment. Netflix did not reply to a request for comment.“Maestro” premieres next month at the Venice Film Festival and, in North America, in October at the New York Film Festival. A theatrical release in the United States will follow in November before a December debut on Netflix.In recent years, the question of which actors are eligible to play certain roles has been a hot-button issue in movies, television and theater, with an increasing consensus against actors’ portraying characters from marginalized groups whose traits they do not share.Tom Hanks told The New York Times Magazine last year that in contemporary times he would correctly not be cast as a gay man with AIDS, as he was in the 1993 drama “Philadelphia.” At the 2016 Emmy Awards, the actor Jeffrey Tambor said he hoped to be the last cisgender man to play a transgender character, as he did in the series “Transparent.”Some critics, like Baddiel, argue that there is a double standard when it comes to casting Jewish characters, whose portrayal by gentiles is widely tolerated.Helen Mirren, who is not Jewish, plays the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in a biopic coming out this month (even as Liev Schreiber, who is Jewish, plays Henry Kissinger in the film, “Golda”). In the recent biopic “Oppenheimer,” the Jewish title character was played by the non-Jewish actor Cillian Murphy. More

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    ‘Miguel Wants to Fight’ Review: A Rite of Passage

    In Oz Rodriguez’s coming-of-age film, a martial arts-obsessed teenager is determined to throw his first punch.In the lives of the four protagonists of “Miguel Wants to Fight,” brawls are ubiquitous. But when a fight breaks out on a basketball court and the martial arts film aficionado of the group, Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores), doesn’t participate, it becomes clear that he has never actually thrown a punch.After his parents break the news that his family will be moving soon, Miguel becomes obsessed with picking a fight before he leaves — a misguided way to cope with his anger.Directed by Oz Rodriguez (“Vampires vs. the Bronx”), “Miguel Wants to Fight” is an endearing and offbeat take on the teenage coming-of-age film. It centers on best friends Srini (Suraj Partha), Cass (Imani Lewis), David (Christian Vunipola) and Miguel, who grew up together in Syracuse, N.Y., immersed in the boxing world. Miguel’s father Alberto (Raúl Castillo), owns a gym, and David’s father was a boxing star. Miguel spends his time making TikTok reels of fight scenes starring his friends.There are some laughs and the cast is talented, but the movie ultimately falls flat, missing an opportunity to delve into the insecurity, teen bravado and anger that leads to physical fighting in the first place.Instead, it leans too heavily into references to and re-enactments of classic films, like “The Matrix” or “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which take up space in the film that could instead have been devoted to character development. As a result, “Miguel Wants to Fight” ends up feeling one-note, lacking the depth that might have elevated it to a must-watch movie.Miguel Wants to FightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch it on Hulu. More

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    ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ Windmill Is for Sale in England

    The property, which was the home of Dick an Dyke’s character in the 1968 film, is listed for 9 million pounds, or $11.4 million.A historic windmill in the English countryside that appeared alongside Dick Van Dyke and a magical flying car in the 1968 movie “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” has gone up for sale.The black-and-white Cobstone Mill, in Buckinghamshire, England, just outside London, is part of a property that also includes a main house, about 37 acres of land and a swimming pool. It could be yours for 9 million pounds (about $11.4 million).The mill is thought to have been built around 1816 and was used to grind cereal until 1873, according to Savills, the real estate firm selling the property. Before the windmill could be used as a movie location it needed substantial renovations. The property had been damaged by a fire and, according to local media reports at the time, squatters had been living in it.In the film, which was loosely based on a children’s book by the James Bond creator Ian Fleming, the windmill served as the home for Mr. Van Dyke’s character, a nutty, widowed inventor named Caractacus Potts, who lives with his children, Jeremy and Jemima. Together with his love interest Truly Scrumptious, played by Sally Ann Howes, and his car, named Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for its distinctive engine sounds, they journey to the land of Vulgaria to battle the tyrant Baron Bomburst.The windmill survived this encounter with Van Dyke’s character’s latest invention. Hughes Warfield/United Artists Britain, via ShutterstockBut the windmill’s film industry connections didn’t end there.In 1971, the actress Hayley Mills bought the property at auction with her husband, Roy Boulting, a film director. Ms. Mills wrote about the first time she saw the property in her 2021 memoir, “Forever Young.”“I recognized it at once as the children’s home in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ and it was love at first sight,” she wrote, envisioning her and her husband watching their child play in the afternoon sun, even though the property was “utterly impractical.”Mr. Boulting then surprised her by buying it at auction for 30,000 pounds (about $38,000). “It was crazy, completely, marvelously crazy,” she wrote. While she hoped the windmill would become her dream home in the country, and while she started renovating the property to make it livable, the windmill’s renovations weren’t finished, according to the autobiography, and the couple later divorced.The property was later owned by David Brown, an English industrialist and a former owner of the automaker Aston Martin. In the 1980s, the property was sold to the current owner, according to Stephen Christie-Miller, one of the realtors on the listing.“It’s such a landmark when you drive through the valley,” Mr. Christie-Miller said, “It dominates.”The windmill is a Grade II-listed building, which means it’s considered of national importance and is legally protected from being demolished or significantly altered without special permission.Though the price tag is steep, there has been interest in the property, Mr. Christie-Miller said, especially for the usually slow month of August during which many prospective buyers are on vacation.“So many people know it,” he said, adding that he was planning to show the windmill to two potential buyers on Wednesday and had already showed it to one couple who were, he said, “very keen.”Since peaking in August last year, house prices in Britain have begun to drop. Last month, prices fell 3.8 percent compared with a year earlier, according to Nationwide Building Society, the steepest annual drop in more than a decade.Between the windmill and the house, the property has six bedrooms and four bathrooms, according to the listing. The windmill’s sails were restored in the past 18 months, according to Savills.With views over the nearby countryside, “the windmill itself would be a lovely place to have an office,” Mr. Christie-Miller said, but added, “not that you’d get any work done.”It’s not just “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” fans who might be excited. The windmill looks over the village of Turville, where scenes from the 1990s English sitcom “Vicar of Dibley” were filmed.Mr. Christie-Miller said the listing stands out in his 40-year career. “It comes up once in a generation,” he said. “It was last on the market in 1988. The next person will probably own it for another 30 years.” More

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    A Dormant Dome for Cinephiles Is Unsettling Hollywood

    Since the November night in 1963 when the Cinerama Dome opened its doors with the premiere of “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World” — drawing Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett and Ethel Merman to the sidewalks of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood — the theater, and the multiplex that later rose around it, has been a home for people who liked to watch movies and people who liked to make movies.Its distinctive geodesic dome, memorialized by Quentin Tarantino in the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” has become more retro than futuristic over the years, a reminder of a Technicolor past. Yet through it all, the complex known as the ArcLight Hollywood remained a cinephile favorite, with no commercials, no latecomers admitted and ushers who would, after introducing the upcoming show, promise to stay behind to make sure the sound and picture were “up to ArcLight standards.”But today the ArcLight Hollywood is closed, both a victim of the coronavirus pandemic and a symbol of a movie industry in turmoil, even in its own backyard.“There was nothing like the ArcLight — I was really surprised they closed,” said Amy Aquino, an actor who played Lt. Grace Billets in the television show “Bosch” and who had been drawn by the theater’s serious approach to moviegoing since seeing “Sideways” there in 2004.Her husband, Drew McCoy, said he now worried every time he passed the abandoned complex. “It’s too strange that a pre-eminent structure that was once killing it is sitting there like a white elephant,” he said.The shuttered complex — its entrance marked by plywood boards instead of movie posters — stands as a reminder of the great uncertainty that now shadows old-fashioned cinema in American culture. Dual strikes have shut down production. Competition from streaming services, as well as shortened attention spans in a smartphone era, has led movie theaters around the nation to shut their doors.The theater, with its distinctive geodesic dome, was memorialized by Quentin Tarantino in the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.” Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe record-shattering box office for “Barbie” and the strong showing for “Oppenheimer” this summer gave a beleaguered industry hope after what had been a long, slow decline in moviegoing, accelerated by the pandemic. But other big-budget would-be blockbusters have been humbled by soft ticket sales, and the lingering strike has prompted some studios to delay major releases. The fundamental challenges to theatergoing have not gone away, and the boarded-up ArcLight is a daily reminder of that.“Times are sad,” said Bill Counter, a cinema historian who has documented the history of the ArcLight. “The theaters that survive will be those that make filmgoing an event by offering the sort of amenities that made ArcLight a destination originally.”It is only fitting the ArcLight has become a Los Angeles mystery, the subject of speculation that befits a movie theater that was always more than just another neighborhood cinema.When the company that owns the ArcLight, the Decurion Corp., applied for a liquor license last year, movie fans seized on even that slight bit of movement as a sign that coming attractions might not be far behind. And executives at Decurion, which closed 11 ArcLight theaters across the country as part of a bankruptcy reorganization, have assured theater preservation groups that they will not walk away from what was known as the ArcLight Hollywood. But it has remained closed.“Everybody has been hoping it was on the verge of reopening,” Counter said. “Periodically things leak out. You hear about an architecture firm. It would be lovely to think about reopening for its 60th anniversary, which would be November.”The closing of the theater, a favorite among people who make movies and people who like movies, comes as Hollywood’s strikes have brought new production to a halt.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“Everyone loves it,” he added. “Filmmakers want to go there. It will reopen. They are just taking their time.”But Decurion continues to offer little insight into its intentions. “Thank you for reaching out,” Ted Mundorff, a senior executive with Decurion, said by email. “We are not commenting on the Hollywood property.”There has been some encouraging news recently for film enthusiasts in Los Angeles. The New Beverly Cinema, a revival movie house that Tarantino took over in 2014, reopened in June 2021 after being shut down because of Covid-19. Its motto: “All Shows Presented in Glorious 35 mm (unless noted in 16 mm).” Vidiots, the landmark store that closed in 2017 in Santa Monica, reopened in the old Eagle Theater in June, renting videos and showing a rich array of old movies. And a 12-screen multiplex opened this summer at Hollywood Park, across the way from the new SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.The concern about the ArcLight’s future is unfolding in a city where landmarks and institutions can disappear overnight in a burst of construction dust. Amoeba Music, a revered record store a block away from the ArcLight, recently bowed to the demands of a developer and abandoned its building for a new complex on Hollywood Boulevard. (“The building may be new, but Amoeba’s personality shines throughout,” its website promises.)“People have every right to be cautious when something closes in L.A.,” said Tiffany Nitsche, the president of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Historic Theater Foundation. “We lose things so fast.”Fans have jumped on any indication that the complex could reopen. Alex Welsh for The New York TimesThe murkiness of the deliberations has fed the concern. “I don’t know what they are doing,” said Antonio Villaraigosa, the former Los Angeles mayor who “went all the time” when he lived 10 minutes away in the Hollywood Hills. “If they are bringing it back, I’d like to be a part of it. Why wouldn’t we want to restore that beautiful place?”The Cinerama Dome, a geodesic dome modeled after a Buckminster Fuller design, rises like a 70-foot-high golf ball along Sunset Boulevard. As an officially designated Los Angeles cultural monument, the Dome is protected, which means it would be difficult — though not impossible — to knock it down for, say, an office building.“It’s very iconic,” said Linda Dishman, the president of the Los Angeles Conservancy.In 2002, the Dome expanded with the addition of an adjacent three-level 14-screen multiplex. Those theaters in particular drew a discriminating audience who appreciated the top-of-the-line sound and picture (and were willing to pay the premium prices). It was rare to hear anyone talk once the lights down, much less spot anyone sneaking a text. The coming attractions before the feature film were kept relatively short, and never cluttered by on-screen advertisements for, say, Coca-Cola. It became a popular place for premieres.Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose Los Angeles City Council district includes the ArcLight, said his constituents regularly press him on what was going on with the theater; he is as mystified as everyone else.Nitsche said that for all the mystery, she remained certain the ArcLight would be back. “We’ve watched theaters struggle for the last two years,” she said. “I’m not sure anyone is jumping to get back into that game.”“But I can’t imagine the ArcLight not reopening,” she said. “ I just don’t know when.”Nicole Sperling More

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    8 TikTokers Redefining the Movie Review

    The personalities of MovieTok are not critics in the traditional sense. Their upbeat videos earn them contracts with Hollywood studios in addition to the devotion of movie lovers. These accounts offer a sampling of the new breed of movie reviewers.@straw hat goofy

    @straw_hat_goofy ♬ original sound – Straw Hat Goofy Name: Juju GreenAge: 31Followers: 3.4 millionSpecialty: Easter eggs and red carpet interviewsPast Clients: Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., ParamountBefore TikTok: Worked as an advertising copywriterMovie Hall of Fame: “Her” (2013)@maddikoch

    @maddikoch Why won’t they let him leave??? #plottwist #movie #movierecommendation #moviesuggestions #movieclips ♬ original sound – Maddi Moo Name: Maddi KochAge: 22Followers: 3 millionSpecialty: Movies you might have missedPast Clients: Peacock, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+Outside of TikTok: Studying finance at Virginia TechMovie Hall of Fame: “What Happened to Monday” (2017)@kodak_cameron

    @kodak_cameron Even technologically these movies are on par with Lord of The Rings. #spiderman #milesmorales #acrossthespiderverse #intothespiderverse ♬ Aesthetic – Megacreate Name: Cameron KozakAge: 21Followers: 1.5 millionSpecialty: News and analysisPast Clients: A24, Neon, PeacockOutside of TikTok: Studying film production at Oakland University in MichiganMovie Hall of Fame: “Whiplash” (2014)@cvnela

    @cvnela INFINITY POOL: CRAZIEST HORROR MOVIE⁉️ GO SEE IT IN THEATERS NOW TO DECIDE FOR YOURSELF #creepy #scary #horror #movierecommendations ♬ Creepy and simple horror background music(1070744) – howlingindicator Name: Monse GutierrezAge: 26Followers: 1.4 millionSpecialty: HorrorPast Clients: Neon, Amazon Prime VideoBefore TikTok: Worked as a substitute teacherMovie Hall of Fame: “Pan’s Labyrinth” (2006)@cinema.joe

    @cinema.joe #fyp #foryou #movies ♬ original sound – Cinema.Joe Name: Joe AragonAge: 33Followers: 931,000Specialty: Monthly movie guidesPast Clients: A24, Peacock, Apple, Lionsgate, HuluBefore TikTok: Worked for an insurance companyMovie Hall of Fame: “Anything by David Fincher”@jstoobs

    @jstoobs It’s finally getting a wide release this month so see it and cry your eyes our #film #movies #pastlives ♬ original sound – stoobs Name: Megan CruzAge: 34Followers: 535,000Specialty: Women filmmakersPast Clients: Disney, Warner Bros.Before TikTok: Worked in restaurantsMovie Hall of Fame: “Jennifer’s Body” (2009)@stoney_tha_great

    @stoney_tha_great They Cloned Tyrone is GENIUS #TheyClonedTyrone #Netflix #MovieReview #JamieFoxx #JohnBoyega #SciFi #Comedy #Blaxploitation #BlackTikTok #conspiracytiktok #MovieTok #CapCut ♬ original sound – Stoney Tha Great Name: Bryan LuciousAge: 31Followers: 387,000Specialty: HorrorPast Clients: A24, Sony Pictures, Hulu, MGM+, Peacock, NetflixOutside of TikTok: Works for a tech companyMovie Hall of Fame: “Twister” (1996)@sethsfilmreviews

    @sethsfilmreviews #oppenheimer #moviereview #movies #foryou #fyp #filmtok #movietok ♬ original sound – Sethsfilmreviews Name: Seth Mullan-FerozeAge: 24Followers: 256,000Specialty: Audience polls, art house and foreign cinemaPast Clients: Mubi, Lionsgate, StudioCanal, HBOOutside of TikTok: Works as an online personal trainerMovie Hall of Fame: “Persona” (1966) More