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      ‘The Little Mermaid’ Review: Disney’s Renovations Are Only Skin Deep

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      Disney’s live-action remake, with Halle Bailey starring as Ariel and a diverse cast, is a dutiful corrective with noble intentions and little fun.The new, live-action “The Little Mermaid” is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing. The movie’s saying, “We tried!” Tried not to offend, appall, challenge, imagine. A crab croons, a gull raps, a sea witch swells to Stay Puft proportions: This is not supposed to be a serious event. But it feels made in anticipation of being taken too seriously. Now, you can’t even laugh at it.The story comes from Hans Christian Andersen, and when Disney made a cartoon musical of it in 1989, the tale’s tragedy and existential wonder got swapped for Disney Princess Syndrome, wherein one subjugation is replaced with another, an even exchange redrawn as liberating love. But the people who drew it had a ball with the hooey.In both movies, the mermaid Ariel wants out of her widowed father’s underwater kingdom and into the arms of the earthbound merchant prince whom she rescues in a shipwreck. Her father forbids, but that sea-witch, Ursula, fulfills Ariel’s wish, giving her three days to procure a kiss from that prince and remain human or spend the rest of her life enslaved to Ursula. Somehow mirth and music ensue. In the original, that’s thanks mostly to Ariel’s talking Caribbean crab guardian, Sebastian, and her Noo Yawky dingbat sea gull pal, Scuttle.This remake injects some contemporary misfortune (humans despoil the water, we’re told). It also packs on another 52 minutes and three new songs, trades zany for demure and swaps vast animated land- and seascapes for soundstagey sets and screensavery imagery. They’re calling it “live-action,” but the action is mostly CGI. There’s no organic buoyancy. On land, Ariel can walk but can’t speak, which means whoever’s playing her needs a face that can. Achieving that was a piece of cake in the cartoon. Ariel could seem bemused, enchanted, bereft, coquettish, alarmed, aghast, elated. And her scarlet mane was practically a movie unto itself.Now Ariel is in the singer Halle Bailey’s hands. And it’s not that she can’t keep par with the original’s illustrators. It’s that this movie isn’t asking her to. It takes the better part of an hour for the flesh-and-blood Ariel to go mute. And when she does, whatever carbonation Bailey had to begin with goes flat. This Ariel has amnesia about needing that kiss, taking “cunning” off the table for Bailey, too.With her sister, Bailey is half of the R&B duo Chloe x Halle. They’ve got a chilling, playful approach to melody that Bailey can’t fully unleash in this movie. For one thing, she’s got two songs, one of which — the standard “Part of Your World” — does manage to let her quaver some toward the end. But what’s required of her doesn’t differ radically from what Jodi Benson did in the first movie. Ostensibly, though, Bailey has been cast because her Ariel would differ. Bailey’s is Black, with long copper hair that twists, waves and locks. Racially, the whole movie’s been, what, opened up? Diversified? Now, Ariel’s rueful daddy, King Triton, is played by a stolid Javier Bardem, who does all the king’s lamenting in Spanish-inflected English. Instead of the Broadway chorines of the original, her mermaid siblings are a multiethnic, runway-ready General Assembly.The prince, Eric (Jonah Hauer-King), is white, English and now seems to have more plot than Ariel. “More” includes meals with his mother, Queen Selina (Noma Dumezweni), who’s Black, as is her chief servant, Lashana (Martina Laird). The script, credited to David Magee, John DeLuca, and the director Rob Marshall, informs us that the queen has adopted the prince (because somebody knew inquiring minds would need to know). As the bosomy, tentacled Ursula, who’s now Triton’s banished, embittered sister, McCarthy puts a little pathos in the part’s malignancy. She seems like she’s having a fine time, a little Bette Midler, a little Mae West, a little Etta James. And the sight of her racing toward the camera in a slithery gush of arms and fury is the movie’s one good nightmare image. But even McCarthy seems stuck in a shot-for-shot, growl-for-growl tribute to her cartoon counterpart and Pat Carroll’s vocal immortalization of it.The cartoon was about a girl who wanted to leave showbiz. She and her sisters performed follies basically for King Triton’s entertainment. The songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken aimed for the American Songbook’s Disney wing. The voices and evocations were Vegas and vaudeville. Dry land was, entertainment-wise, a lot dryer, but that was all right with Ariel. This new flesh-and-blood version is about a girl who’d like to withdraw her color from the family rainbow and sail off into “uncharted waters” with her white prince.Melissa McCarthy, as the villainous sea witch Ursula, channels a little Bette Midler, a little Mae West, a little Etta James.DisneyWhat’s really been opened up, here? For years now, Disney’s been atoning for the racism and chauvinism and de facto whiteness of its expanded catalog (it owns Pixar and Marvel, too), in part by turning its nettlesome cartoons into live-action corrections. This is important, culturally reparative work from a corporation that, lately, has more steadily inched humanity away from bottom-line priorities; consequently, it has found itself at war with the governor of Florida, where Disney World lives. Onscreen, though, that correctness tends to smell like compromise. For every “Moana,” “Coco” or “Encanto” — original, wondrous, exuberant animated musicals about relationships and cultures Disney didn’t previously notice or treat with care — there’s something timid and reactive like this.The brown skin and placeable accents don’t make the movie more fun, just utopic and therefore less arguable. Now, what you’ve got is something closer to the colorblind wish fulfillment of the Shonda Rhimes streaming universe, minus the wink-wink, side-eye and carnality. This “Little Mermaid” is a byproduct. The colorization hasn’t led to a racialized, radicalized adventure. It’s not a Black adaptation, an interpretation that imbues white material with Black culture until it’s something completely new; it’s not “The Wiz.” It’s still a Disney movie, one whose heroine now, sigh, happens to be Black. There is some audacity in that. Purists and trolls have complained. They don’t want the original tampered with, even superficially. They don’t want it “woke.” The blowback is, in part, Bailey’s to shoulder. And her simply being here confers upon her a kind of heroism, because it does still feels dangerous to have cast her. Sadly, the haters don’t have much to worry about.You don’t hire Rob Marshall for radical rebooting. He can do visual chaos and costume kitsch (“Chicago,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” “Into the Woods”). He can do solid. And he can usually give you a good set piece while he’s at it. This time, it’s the rowboat scene in which Ariel shows Eric how to say her name, a scene that produces “Kiss the Girl,” the calypso number that Sebastian (voiced with an island accent by Daveed Diggs) sings to cajole Eric into planting one on Ariel and unwittingly restoring her voice. (The lyrics have been tweaked to add more consent.) It’s the swooniest things get.Otherwise, the movie’s worried — worried about what we’ll say, about whether they got it right. That allergy to creative risk produces hazards anyway. I mean, with all these Black women running around in a period that seems like the 19th century, the talk of ships and empire, Brazil and Cartagena just makes me wonder about the cargo on these boats. And this plot gets tricky with a Black Ariel. When Ursula pulls a fast one and reinvents herself as Vanessa, a sexy rival who appears to be white and woos Eric with a siren song in Ariel’s voice, there’s a whole American history of theft and music to overthink, too.It’s really a misery to notice these things. A 9-year-old wouldn’t. But one reason we have this remake is that former 9-year-olds, raised on and besotted with these original Disney movies, grew up and had questions. In that sense, “The Little Mermaid” is more a moral redress than a work of true inspiration. Which isn’t to say there’s nothing inspired about it. In fact, the best sequence in the movie combines these ambitions of so-called inclusion with thornier American musical traditions. It’s the moment when Scuttle reveals that Eric’s about to marry Ursula.The song that breaks this news to Ariel and Sebastian is a rap called “The Scuttlebutt” with lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. And Awkwafina, who does Scuttle’s voice, performs most of it while Bailey looks on in what I’m going to call anguish. Here’s an Asian American performer whose shtick is a kind of Black impersonation, pretending to be a computer-generated bird, rhythm-rapping with a Black American man pretending to be a Caribbean crab. It’s the sort of mind-melting mess that feels honest and utterly free in its messiness, even as the mess douses a conveniently speechless Black woman.Watching it, you realize why the rest of the movie plays it so safe. Because fun is some risky business. This is a witty, complex, exuberant, breathless, deeply American number that’s also the movie’s one moment of unbridled, unabashed delight. And I can’t wait to see how Disney’s going to apologize for it in 34 years.The Little MermaidRated PG. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Wes Anderson’s ‘Asteroid City’ Premieres in Cannes

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      At the film’s Cannes premiere, the director’s customary cast, themes and even camera moves were all on display — well, except one.Wes Anderson’s directorial style is so distinctive and particular — so Wessy — that it’s spawned no end of recent A.I. parodies. But how do those imitations compare with the real thing?Many of Anderson’s signature obsessions are on display in his new movie, “Asteroid City,” a ’50s-set comedy about different sets of parents accompanying their space-obsessed kids to a convention in the desert, where they all must quarantine together after receiving an unexpected visitor from the skies. (Strained family dynamics, nerdy children and whimsical settings … check, check, check!)Critics appeared split on the movie after its Cannes Film Festival premiere on Tuesday: though “Asteroid City” got glowing notices in The Telegraph and IndieWire, Variety deemed it “for Anderson die-hards only.” That suggests this is his Wessiest movie yet, a case that could certainly be made when you consider the following:It’s filled with his favorite actors.The expansive cast includes several Anderson regulars, including Jason Schwartzman as a war photographer and Tilda Swinton as a kooky astronomer, plus Jeffrey Wright, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber and Tony Revolori. Scarlett Johansson, previously called on to do a voice in Anderson’s stop-motion “Isle of Dogs,” gets her first live-action role for the director as a self-absorbed actress who finds herself quarantined next door to Schwartzman. Only two Anderson veterans are missing: Bill Murray, who was originally cast in “Asteroid City” but reportedly had to drop out because of Covid-19, and Owen Wilson.There are big stars in small roles.Actors clamor to star in Anderson’s films, and he takes full advantage: Even the tiniest supporting roles are typically filled with heavy hitters (as in “The French Dispatch,” where Emmy winner Elisabeth Moss is essentially a featured extra). “Asteroid City” welcomes A-lister Tom Hanks into the fold as Schwartzman’s father-in-law, though he’s not as significant a presence as you might expect. Still, at least he’s got more to do than “Barbie” star Margot Robbie and recent Oscar nominee Hong Chau, who each pop in for the briefest of cameos. In future Anderson films, maybe they’ll be upgraded to the main ensemble.It’s got a complicated framing device.Anderson’s films often call attention to their own storytelling by nesting the narrative within another narrative: Perhaps it’s all taking place in a book, or the vignettes are stories in a magazine. In “Asteroid City,” the director indulges in his most complicated construction yet: We’re meant to be watching a TV broadcast (hosted by Bryan Cranston) that dramatizes the story of a playwright (Norton) who wrote an unproduced stage production called “Asteroid City.” Those framing segments are shot in black and white. It’s only when we leap into the idea of his play that Anderson transports us to the gorgeous teals and burnt oranges of the desert, where most of this story within a story (within a story!) unfolds.It all takes place on rigid lines.Though Anderson has become less fixated on placing his actors in the smack-dab middle of the frame, he still blocks his camera movements and choreography in “Asteroid City” so that everything and everybody moves on an x or y axis at all times. (If you want to sneak up on someone in a Wes Anderson movie, do it diagonally. They’d never think to look!)There are deadpan expressions of grief.Schwartzman’s war photographer has something he’s meaning to tell his children: Their mother has died. Or, more specifically, their mother died three weeks ago and he just hasn’t found the right moment to bring it up. The situation is outrageous, but Schwartzman’s performance is classic Wes deadpan, and though most of the cast members give the same steady line readings, that house style is at its best when you can sense real, troubled currents underneath a placid exterior.But it could have been even Wessier …If, after reading all this, you think “Asteroid City” couldn’t get more Wessy … well, it could! At the film’s Cannes news conference on Wednesday, the actor Steve Park said that before shooting began, Anderson created a feature-length, animated storyboard, or animatic, in which he did all the voices himself. “Release the animatics,” Jeffrey Wright intoned solemnly.… especially if it used slow-motion.Later in the news conference, a reporter confronted Anderson about one trademark that’s disappeared: Though he used to use slow-motion sequences fairly often — think Gwyneth Paltrow dramatically exiting her bus in “The Royal Tenenbaums” — recent films like “Asteroid City” have all but dropped the device. “I have a series of ways I like to stage things and I don’t know if I’m in command of them — it’s part of my personality,” Anderson said, before growing concerned. “That’s one of the tools that I’ve used often, and I should look for some spots for that,” he promised the reporter. “I’ll take the note. And I’ll do it!” More

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      ‘Force of Circumstance’ Comes to MoMA

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      Liza Béar’s deadpan anti-thriller returns to the Museum of Modern Art for a limited engagement.A young Moroccan woman slips into Washington, D.C., hoping to provide a journalist with intel on the United States’ clandestine involvement in a war for the contested Western Sahara. Once there, she crosses paths with two clownish compatriots looking to purchase a Washington safe house for the king of Morocco.Shot in 1984, unreleased until 1990, and revived decades later in the Museum of Modern Art’s annual restoration series “To Save and Project,” Liza Béar’s deadpan anti-thriller, “Force of Circumstance,” returns to MoMA for a limited engagement.A triumph of low-budget production design, the movie opens in a North African shantytown, impeccably realized in a vacant East Village lot. Thanks to the film composer Mader’s evocative score and ambient sound that Béar recorded in Casablanca, the scene, which introduces the young courier Mouallem (Boris Major), has a hyperreal authenticity.Cut to Washington, Mouallem peers through a taxi window as the Watergate complex whizzes past. This strange landscape, through which she is shadowed by the royal envoy (Eric Mitchell) and his bodyguard (Filip Pagowski), takes another form when her hotel room TV broadcasts — what else?—“Casablanca.”“Force of Circumstance” can’t sustain this suavely contrived mixture of dis- and reorientation. Still, Béar’s spectacle of downtown artists playing spy vs. spy in an assortment of Washington locations — a descendant of Louis Feuillade’s World War I serials in which fantastic crimes were staged on the streets of Paris — transcends the soggy plot, created in collaboration with the East Village writer Craig Gholson.Mysteries proliferate and evaporate like puddles after summer rain. The envoy and the bodyguard wander through Georgetown searching for a colonial mansion. Mouallem, always wearing a new outfit, is never far away, hoping to contact the feisty journalist Katrina (Jessica Stutchbury), who is having an affair with Hans (Tom Wright), the dissolute rich boy looking to unload his ancestral home.Béar, a central figure in New York’s 1980s art world, has said that her film was inspired by the Casablanca bread riots in 1981. The movie is dated less by its historical references than by its green-character-displaying computer screens and a cast seemingly culled from a Club 57 theme party: Major (a member of Squat Theater); a pre-Hollywood Steve Buscemi; the musician Evan Lurie; the scene-maker Glenn O’Brien; the performance artist Rockets Redglare; and the filmmaker Eric Mitchell, who cast both Stutchbury and Wright in his own downtown movies. Capped with a fez, speaking some sort of French patois, Mitchell brings his own campy aura to the movie, including the portentous punchline: “Choice is a Western concept.”The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, who had little sympathy for the film, wrote that “the avidity with which Ms. Béar, absorbs and mimics big-budget clichés is a lot more impressive than the way those clichés have been used.” Indeed, “Force of Circumstance,” which appropriates a title used by both W. Somerset Maugham and Simone de Beauvoir, is more an art object than a conventional movie, even ending with a screen full of actual documents, as a conceptual piece from the early ’70s might.This faux “thriller” has a sustained look, an intriguing cast, an entertaining attitude and a propulsive score. Its main flaw is the script — which, given the current Writers Guild of America strike, makes it all the more timely.Force of CircumstanceThrough May 30 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan; moma.org. More

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      Kenneth Anger, 96, Dies; Experimental Filmmaker Left a Pop Culture Legacy

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      His movie, “Scorpio Rising,” proved that sound and image could be combined to create something powerful, influencing the rise of music video.Kenneth Anger, a child of Hollywood who became one of the most important experimental filmmakers of his generation and whose influence can still be felt in popular visual culture, from movies to music videos, died on May 11 in Yucca Valley, Calif., a town bordering Joshua Tree National Park. He was 96.His death, at an assisted living center, was confirmed on Wednesday by Spencer Glesby, a spokesman for Sprüth Magers, a gallery that has represented Mr. Anger since 2009. He said an announcement of the death had been delayed while matters involving Mr. Anger’s estate were being put in order.Mr. Anger embodied the love-hate relationship between underground art and mass culture. Few other avant-garde filmmakers borrowed so liberally or so subversively from popular iconography. And with his sensuous, mystical imagery and pioneering use of pop soundtracks, perhaps none saw their work so readily absorbed back into the mainstream.Mr. Anger’s best-known film, “Scorpio Rising” (1963), a fetishistic look at a gang of Brooklyn bikers with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop hits — sung by Elvis Presley, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles and Little Peggy March, among others — proved that sound and image could be combined to create something more potent than the sum of their parts. It is widely considered a precursor of the music video, and its influence can be felt in movies as varied as Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” and David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” (The Bobby Vinton hit that gave the Lynch film its title is also heard in “Scorpio Rising.”)Hailed in his later years as a progenitor of remix culture, Mr. Anger prided himself on being an outsider who belonged to no particular movement. Asked in 2004 about his stature as a godfather of queer cinema, he responded, “I don’t like being put in a cubbyhole.”An image from Mr. Anger’s best-known film, “Scorpio Rising,” a fetishistic look at a gang of Brooklyn bikers with a soundtrack of pop hits. PhotofestHe was comfortable in the company of the famous. His acquaintances, some of whom collaborated with him, included the poet and artist Jean Cocteau, the playwright Tennessee Williams, the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, the writer Anaïs Nin and members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.But he also scandalized the celebrated in his lurid tell-all book, “Hollywood Babylon.” That book, rife with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars like Rudolph Valentino — Mr. Anger’s grandmother was a wardrobe mistress in silent films — was first published in France in 1959 and widely bootlegged before its official publication in the United States in 1975.Mr. Anger’s reputation as a filmmaker rested on a relatively small body of work: nine short, wordless films, totaling under three hours and made between 1947 and 1972, that came to be known as the Magick Lantern Cycle. Some of them, like “Puce Moment” (1949) and “Kustom Kar Kommandos” (1965), were fragments of longer works that were never finished for lack of money. Mr. Anger often abandoned and restarted projects, and he sometimes revised his films and presented slightly modified versions of them.He was intrigued by the interplay of ancient myths and pop culture. Several of his films simultaneously portray and enact rituals, using sound and editing to create trancelike, incantatory works, such as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954), which depicts a party whose guests are dressed as pagan deities. Mr. Anger likened the making of a movie to the casting of a spell.Mr. Anger’s memoir scandalized the celebrated, its pages rife with Tinseltown scandals and rumors about the sexual habits of stars.Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer was born on Feb. 3, 1927, in Santa Monica, Calif., to Wilbur and Lillian (Coler) Anglemyer. His father was an electrical engineer at Douglas Aircraft. Many details of his biography as he told it — much like the scandalous stories in “Hollywood Babylon” — are hard to corroborate. (He claimed to have had the role of the young prince in the 1935 movie “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” though Mickey Rooney, a star of the film, said the part was played by a girl.) He said he started making films as a child.Mr. Anger’s earliest surviving film, “Fireworks” (1947), made when he was 20, is a cinematic landmark in both form and content: a dreamlike psychodrama and an autobiographical coming-out movie, shot in his parents’ house while they were away for a funeral. Mr. Anger appears in it as a young man who has a sadomasochistic encounter with a group of musclebound sailors, one of whom undoes his pants to reveal a Roman candle.According to Mr. Anger, the guests at the film’s first screening included Alfred Kinsey, who he said bought a print of “Fireworks” for his collection, and the filmmaker James Whale, best known for “Frankenstein.” In 1950, encouraged by an admiring letter from Jean Cocteau about “Fireworks,” Mr. Anger moved to Paris, where he spent much of the following decade and worked as an assistant to Henri Langlois, the director of the Cinémathèque Française.Mr. Anger completed one film during his time in Europe: “Eaux d’Artifice” (1953), shot in the fountain-filled gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. The footage for another, “Rabbit’s Moon,” which features characters from the commedia dell’arte theater tradition, was left in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française for two decades; two versions of the film were released in the 1970s.He shot “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” while on a visit home to Los Angeles. With financing hard to come by, he supported himself by writing “Hollywood Babylon.” Images from Mr. Anger’s film “Lucifer Rising,” from 1972. Its theme of rebirth, stands in contrast to his death-obsessed work of the previous decade. Mary Evans/Ronald Grant, via Everett CollectionBack in the United States in the 1960s, Mr. Anger entered a productive phase that resulted in some of his most admired works. “Scorpio Rising,” one of the best-known experimental movies of all time, shows leather-clad bikers tending to their motorcycles, fueling a raucous Halloween party and desecrating a church. Mr. Anger included provocative juxtapositions: Nazi imagery and excerpts from a life-of-Jesus movie.The manager of a Los Angeles theater that showed “Scorpio Rising,” which contains frontal nudity, was arrested on an obscenity charge, and an indecency case against the film went to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Anger’s favor.As the counterculture movement crested in the mid-1960s, Mr. Anger moved to San Francisco, where his associates included Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, and Bobby Beausoleil, a musician who became a member of the so-called Manson family.Mr. Anger spent much of this period developing and shooting a project called “Lucifer Rising,” which envisioned Lucifer not as the devil but as a god of light and “the patron saint of movies,” as Mr. Anger put it. A disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, Mr. Anger referred to cinema as an “evil force.” He had the name Lucifer tattooed on his chest.Much of the original footage of “Lucifer Rising” was said to be lost — Mr. Anger accused Mr. Beausoleil, who played Lucifer, of stealing it — but some salvaged material made its way into the orgiastic “Invocation of My Demon Brother” (1969), which features a synthesizer score by Mick Jagger.Completed in 1972 and revised several times, “Lucifer Rising,” with its theme of rebirth, stands in contrast to Mr. Anger’s death-obsessed work of the previous decade. Mr. Beausoleil, by then serving a life sentence for murder, wrote the score from prison.The film concluded the Magick Lantern Cycle, and afterward Mr. Anger withdrew almost entirely from filmmaking for about 20 years. He published “Hollywood Babylon II” in 1984, but this was otherwise a period of relative inactivity for Mr. Anger, though it coincided with the arrival of the music video and the rise of quick-fire editing in mainstream cinema, and he came to be recognized for his influence on both.Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: Mr. Anger’s volatility is the stuff of many an anecdote. Friendships and collaborations were known to end with Mr. Anger threatening to put a curse on the offending party, as happened with Mr. Beausoleil and the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who was originally hired to produce the “Lucifer Rising” score.Mr. Anger in 2006. Many would agree that his pseudonym was aptly chosen: his volatility is the stuff of many an anecdote. Stuart Wilson/Getty ImagesMr. Anger returned to filmmaking in 2000, producing a flurry of short films, including “Mouse Heaven” (2004), about the cult of Mickey Mouse; “Elliott’s Suicide” (2007), an elegy to the singer Elliott Smith; and “Ich Will!” (2008), a short assembled from archival footage of the Hitler Youth movement. The critical response to the new work was generally lukewarm, and the focus remained on his earlier movies. The Magick Lantern works have been issued on DVD in restored versions and installed in gallery exhibitions in New York and London.Mr. Anger left no immediate survivors. Before moving to the assisted living facility, he lived in Los Angeles.In an essay for a 2007 DVD release, Martin Scorsese extolled the poetic rhythms of Mr. Anger’s films and what he called their “inevitable” logic.“The structure, the form, the feel of these films,” Mr. Scorsese wrote, “appears to be less invented than received from a source hidden from the rest of us.”Alex Traub More

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      HBO Says “The Idol” Is Sleazy. You Be the Judge.

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      At Cannes, the sex-filled show is drawing plenty of controversy. That just means “we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer,” Sam Levinson says.In March, Rolling Stone published an article detailing the trouble-plagued production of “The Idol,” a new HBO drama from the “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson. According to the magazine, nearly 80 percent of the show, about a pop singer (Lily-Rose Depp) who falls under the spell of a Svengali figure (the Weeknd), had been filmed with the director Amy Seimetz before Levinson stepped in to rewrite and reshoot the entire thing. As a result, said one crew member, it had transformed from a music-industry satire into a “rape fantasy” in which Depp’s character must endure a series of demeaning sex acts.At the Cannes Film Festival, where two episodes premiered this week, Levinson was asked what he made of the report.“When my wife read me the article,” Levinson said, “I looked at her and said, ‘I think we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer.’”When it comes to controversy, Levinson and his collaborators have clearly decided to lean in: Even HBO’s marketing for “The Idol” calls it the “sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood.” At times, the show seems reverse-engineered to generate think-pieces and indignant tweet-storms; if attention is oxygen, Levinson seems to have calculated that “The Idol” will burn brighter as long as people keep talking about it. Reviews from Cannes have been poor, but as long as they mention the outrageous scenarios and envelope-pushing sex scenes, won’t you be tempted to tune in?Is “The Idol” really as sleazy as has been promised/warned? Let me try to summarize the first two episodes, and you be the judge.The show begins with Depp’s pop star, Jocelyn, posing for a photo shoot, naked but for a barely cinched robe and a hospital wristband. The latter is a wink at rumors that Jocelyn experienced a nervous breakdown after her mother’s death, but it’s also meant to be a come-on, explains Nikki (Jane Adams), a cynical record executive: If men think Jocelyn is a little crazy, they might imagine they have the chance to bed her.Almost immediately, Jocelyn’s team is hit with twin crises. The first seems tailor-made to get the internet’s goat: Jocelyn’s robe keeps falling away to reveal her nipples, and a buzzkill intimacy coordinator keeps trying to halt the session, no matter how often Jocelyn and her team explain they’re fine with it. Eventually, Jocelyn’s manager, Chaim (Hank Azaria), locks the intimacy coordinator in a bathroom.As all of that is going on, a photo is leaked online that shows Jocelyn with sexual fluids on her face. But she seems utterly unbothered. Is this because she is so sexually self-possessed that she can’t be shamed? Given that she takes sensual showers while wearing false eyelashes and full makeup, it may owe more to Levinson’s depiction of the character as an always-on male fantasy.That night, freewheeling Jocelyn heads to a nightclub, where she meets Tedros, the establishment’s mysterious owner, played by the Weeknd (the series co-creator, born Abel Tesfaye, who is so flatteringly lit that he often looks more like an A.I. rendering). There is an instant connection between the two for reasons not depicted onscreen, and it isn’t long before they get together in a stairwell, an encounter she later thinks of at home while engaging in a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation.Jocelyn’s assistant (Rachel Sennott) is not a fan of this blossoming union: “He’s so rapey,” she tells Jocelyn. “I kind of like it,” replies the star, who invites Tedros to her mansion to hear her next single. He expertly negs Jocelyn, telling her the song isn’t sung with any sexual authority, but he has a plan for that: After running a tumbler of ice down Jocelyn’s frequently bare sternum, he pulls her robe over her head, chokes her with its belt, uses a switchblade to cut a mouth-hole in the material (the things this poor robe has been through in only one episode!) and orders Jocelyn to sing.In the second episode, Jocelyn proudly presents this orgasmic remix to her horrified team. Told it’s too late to make changes, Jocelyn is dismayed but still manages to add a cold tumbler to her usual afternoon solo sex session. A girl has needs, after all.But when Jocelyn shows up for a video shoot, makeup artists have to cover the cuts and bruises on her inner thighs that remain from that session. This makes her late to set, where she eventually dissolves into a crying mess. This also means that she’s particularly vulnerable to the machinations of Tedros, who kindly leaves a shock-collar orgy to move his entourage into Jocelyn’s mansion and engage in more kinky sex with her. There’s a lot of dirty talk so grossly delivered by the Weeknd that you may need to mute and switch to closed captioning when the show premieres on June 4.Is it all a little too much? Of course, and that’s the point. At the news conference for “The Idol,” Levinson was asked how he calibrated the sex scenes and near-constant nudity without going too far. For a second, he looked confused.“Sometimes, things that might be revolutionary are taken too far,” Levinson replied. More

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      Halle Bailey Makes a Splash in ‘The Little Mermaid’

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      Emotions wash over Halle Bailey in waves.When a little girl embraced her at Disney World in March, Bailey, who has the plum role of Ariel in the live-action film of “The Little Mermaid,” fought hard to keep her composure. But when a box of sequined Little Mermaid dolls with auburn locs and cinnamon skin arrived on her doorstep, she couldn’t hold it in.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

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      Ray Stevenson, Actor in ‘Thor’ and Other Films, Dies at 58

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      His wide-ranging roles included fantasy characters, a knight, a Roman soldier and a Punisher.Ray Stevenson, who in a 30-year career played a wide range of roles in television and films, among them a talkative soldier in the HBO historical drama “Rome,” the pirate Blackbeard in the Starz series “Black Sails” and the Asgardian warrior Volstagg in the “Thor” fantasy movies, died on Sunday. He was 58.His publicist, Nicki Fioravante, confirmed his death but provided no further details. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica said Mr. Stevenson died on the Italian island of Ischia, where he had been filming a movie.Mr. Stevenson was born on May 25, 1964, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, according to the Internet Movie Database. He had begun a career in interior design when, in his mid-20s, he decided to try acting. Seeing John Malkovich in the Lanford Wilson play “Burn This” in London’s West End in the early 1990s was the catalyst.“I was dumbstruck by John’s performance,” he told the California newspaper The Fresno Bee in 2008. “Everybody else disappeared. I knew at that moment there was something very valid about being an actor.”He studied at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England, where in 1993 he played the title role in a production of “Macbeth.” Before the year was over he had landed a recurring role in a British mini-series, “The Dwelling Place.” He had worked more or less steadily ever since.In the 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Stevenson appeared on various British TV series, including the crime drama “Band of Gold.” He landed his first significant film role in 2004, playing the knight Dagonet in “King Arthur,” with Clive Owen in the title role.Then came “Rome,” a breakthrough role in a big-budget HBO series about ancient Rome that was the network’s attempt to create the next buzz-generating series after “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.”Mr. Stevenson’s character, Titus Pullo, was, as Alessandra Stanley put it in a 2005 review in The New York Times, “a drunken, womanizing lout — a soccer hooligan in sandals.” Titus Pullo’s friendship with another Roman soldier, played by James Purefoy, was among the show’s most appealing subplots, and Mr. Stevenson, a large man at 6-foot-4, seemed on the verge of something big.“He’s kind of George Clooney on steroids,” Chase Squires of The St. Petersburg Times of Florida wrote in 2005. “By the time ‘Rome’ completes its run, the Irish-born English actor will probably be a star, and a very real candidate to replace Russell Crowe when Hollywood gets tired of that actor’s notoriously bad behavior.”But “Rome” flamed out after two seasons, and Mr. Stevenson never quite achieved Clooneyesque stature. He did, however, land a number of meaty roles in lavish projects, including three movies from the Marvel Comics universe: “Thor” (2011), “Thor: The Dark World” (2013) and “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017). All three were box-office smashes.He often referred to the “Thor” stories as “Vikings in space,” and in 2020 he got a taste of the earthbound version of that life when he joined the cast of the long-running History channel series “Vikings.” He appeared throughout its sixth season.His other roles included a gangster in the 2011 movie “Kill the Irishman” and a British colonial official in the Indian film “RRR” (2022). He also played the vigilante Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, another character based on a comic book. He took on that role in 2008 in “Punisher: War Zone,” after Dolph Lundgren had played Castle in a 1989 movie and Thomas Jane had taken his turn in 2004.The 2008 movie was an orgy of violence, as A.O. Scott noted in his review in The Times.“Guys get their heads blown off, or severed, or pierced with chair legs, or pulverized with fists,” he wrote, “because that’s what they have coming and that’s what the fan base will pay money to see.”His character, Mr. Stevenson told The Oklahoman, was supposed to be not a hero but an antihero.“He really is on a one-way path and in his own hell,” he said. “You don’t want to be Frank Castle.”Mr. Stevenson’s marriage to the actress Ruth Gemmell ended in divorce. He and his partner, Elisabetta Caraccia, had three children. More

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      Leon Ichaso, Whose Films Explored Latino Identity, Dies at 74

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      His first feature, “El Super,” was critically acclaimed. He continued to examine culture and exile in “Crossover Dreams,” “El Cantante” and “Piñero.”Leon Ichaso, a Cuban American filmmaker who in “El Super,” “Crossover Dreams,” “Piñero,” “El Cantante” and other movies examined themes of Latino assimilation and cultural identity, died on Sunday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 74.His sister, the journalist Mari Rodriguez Ichaso, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Ichaso, who came to the United States as a teenager, was writing advertising copy and making television commercials in New York in 1977 when he saw an Off Broadway play called “El Super,” written by Ivan Acosta, and decided to try a new career.“I remember he went to see it and said to me, ‘I’m going to make that movie,’” his sister said.He proceeded to do just that, on a shoestring budget.“I paid for the production car,” she added. “My father paid for the catering.”The movie, released in 1979 and directed by Mr. Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, is about a Cuban man (played by Raimundo Hidalgo-Gato) living in exile in New York who works as the superintendent of an Upper West Side tenement, resisting assimilation. Critics were impressed.“It’s a funny, even-tempered, unsentimental drama about people in particular transit,” Vincent Canby wrote in a review in The New York Times. Decades later, The Miami Herald, assessing Mr. Ichaso’s career, called “El Super” “the quintessential Cuban-exile film.”He followed “El Super” in 1985 with “Crossover Dreams,” about a salsa star on the rise who hopes to break out of Spanish Harlem and into the mainstream. The film, which Mr. Canby called “a sagely funny comedy, both heartfelt and sophisticated,” gave the singer Rubén Blades his breakout acting role.The singer Rubén Blades played a salsa star who hopes to break and into the mainstream in Mr. Ichaso’s “Crossover Dreams” (1985).Miramax, via Everett CollectionAfter “Crossover Dreams,” Mr. Ichaso moved away from Latino-themed films for a time and worked steadily directing television movies and episodes of “The Equalizer,” “Miami Vice” and other series. But he returned to that territory in 1996 with “Bitter Sugar,” a movie set in contemporary Cuba.“Bitter Sugar” went against the romanticized view of life in Havana that was popular in some artistic circles at the time, painting an ugly picture of the city that included drugs and prostitution. Its protagonist starts out pro-Communist but ends up so disillusioned that he tries to assassinate Fidel Castro.Mr. Ichaso resented that many festivals did not pick up the movie — a result, he said, not only of the film world’s leftist leanings but also of festival officials’ desire not to offend the organizers of the Havana Film Festival.“They don’t want to lose the Cuba account,” he told The New York Times in 1996. “Part of the film community very much flirts with a dictator and a country and says it’s cute to travel, have a daiquiri and ignore what’s going on just 50 yards outside the Hotel Nacional.”Mr. Ichaso’s next major project would become perhaps his most acclaimed film: “Piñero” (2001), about Miguel Piñero, a former prison inmate turned playwright whose “Short Eyes” made it to Broadway in 1974, but who died young in 1988.Benjamin Bratt, who was familiar to TV audiences from “Law & Order,” played Mr. Piñero, a Nuyorican, in what Stephen Holden, reviewing the movie in The Times, called “a career-defining performance.” Mr. Bratt attributed much of his success in the role to Mr. Ichaso.“His utter faith in my ability never faltered even when mine did,” Mr. Bratt said by email. “He loved his actors, understood our delicate temperament and nurtured a trust that would embolden you to walk out on a wire with no net. He was the net, and it was very easy to love him back for this.”Benjamin Bratt starred as the prison inmate turned playwright Miguel Piñero in Mr. Ichaso’s “Piñero” (2001). “His utter faith in my ability never faltered,” Mr. Bratt said of Mr. Ichaso, “even when mine did.” Abbot Genser/MiramaxIn “El Cantante” (2006), Mr. Ichaso told the story of the salsa singer Héctor Lavoe. The singer Marc Anthony, portrayed Mr. Lavoe with Jennifer Lopez (Mr. Anthony’s wife at the time) as Mr. Lavoe’s wife.In Mr. Ichaso’s movies, “you can almost smell the rooms the actors are in,” Mr. Anthony told The New York Times in 2007. “He knows how to create a period piece; he understands the streets, the humanity of it and the poetry of it all. He captures the essence of our people, our neighborhoods.”Although Mr. Ichaso continued to direct for television until recently, his last Latino-themed film was “Paraiso” in 2009. Considered the third film in his trilogy about the Cuban exile experience (following “El Super” and “Bitter Sugar”), it tells the story of a man who arrives in Miami by raft and proceeds to wreak his own brand of havoc. It was, Mr. Ichaso acknowledged in a 2009 interview with The Miami Herald, evidence of his ever-darkening view of Castro’s government.“I do think of the three films as a trilogy, and this one is the end,” he said, “exploring the new arrivals, these new little Cuban Frankensteins that Castro makes and sets loose on the world.”Leon Rodriguez Ichaso was born on Aug. 3, 1948, in Havana. His father, Justo Rodriguez Santos, was a poet and writer, and his mother, Antonia Ichaso, wrote for Cuban radio.When Leon was 14, he left Cuba for Miami with his mother and his sister; his father joined them there in 1968. By then, Mr. Ichaso had tried college briefly but dropped out. The family soon moved to New York, and there Mr. Ichaso learned about filmmaking by shooting commercials for Goya Foods and other clients.Mr. Ichaso’s marriages to Karen Willinger and Amanda Barber ended in divorce. His sister survives him.Though Mr. Ichaso’s films were generally well regarded, he never quite ascended to the directorial A list.“There are some directors who make a film, and they are set for life; that’s not my case,” Mr. Ichaso said in a 2007 interview with The Times. “Every time I make a film, I think, ‘This is the one.’ But then nothing happens.”Mr. Bratt, who met his wife, the actress Talisa Soto, while they were working on “Piñero,” said he admired Mr. Ichaso’s risk-taking.“There was a lively curiosity to him, a twinkle in the eye that hinted of mischief and knowing, a survivor’s wink that told you he had been to hell and back and probably enjoyed it,” Mr. Bratt said. “He had a deep passion for poetry and music, and his films — inspired by the work of his heroes, Miles, Monk and Coltrane — were pure jazz, respectful of compositional structure but most alive when he played outside the lines, riffing, daring you to follow along.” More