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      in Television

      ‘The Interview’: Nate Bargatze Doesn’t Mind if You Think He’s an Idiot

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      It’s often the case that when stand-up comedians seize the public’s attention, it’s because they exude a sense of danger. They say what others don’t have the nerve to say, about topics others won’t raise, in language others never use. There’s an aura of transgressive truth-telling around this type of comedy star, best exemplified by the likes of Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and Hannah Gadsby — people who met the moment fearlessly.In this moment, though, one so sorely in need of fearless truth-telling, Nate Bargatze has rocketed to stardom by doing pretty much the opposite. Low-key and G-rated, his comedy traffics in comfortably relatable stories about the foibles of family life, his confusion with modern living and being a bit of a dim bulb. He is hardly the first clean stand-up to achieve tremendous success (though stylistic antecedents like Jerry Seinfeld and Ray Romano were able to ride a bygone wave of smash network sitcoms), but he has done it with no hits to his comedic credibility. It’s instructive, I think, that both my mother-in-law, hardly an aficionado of stand-up, and my best friend, a snob when it comes to the form, were excited to learn I was interviewing Bargatze.The gentle and inclusive approach of Bargatze, a 46-year-old Tennessee native, helped make his tour last year the highest-grossing one by a comedian. Two widely praised turns hosting “Saturday Night Live” (you may have seen his viral sketch “Washington’s Dream”) raised his profile outside the world of stand-up. Just this week, CBS announced that he has been tapped to host the Emmy Awards in September. And he is also branching out with a book, the self-deprecatingly titled “Big Dumb Eyes: Stories From a Simpler Mind,” which will be published on May 6. Such self-deprecation is a Bargatze trademark, but, as I learned, it also conceals some bold ambitions.The stand-up comic discusses having a magician for a father, the challenge of mainstream comedy and his aspirations to build the next Disneyland.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppIt’s interesting to read articles about you since your career has really taken off. The writers always try to explain why you’ve gotten so big. What’s your hunch about that? Talking about relatable things and authenticity. Not that I’m going out for authenticity. But you’re in a world where you have the “Wicked”s and these “Avengers” movies — and that’s great, but there’s not a regular person on a screen anymore. Movies used to be like “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” and “Home Alone”: That’s a regular guy in this movie that you enjoy watching. It’s easier to take in. And you don’t always want to be thought-provoked. That’s something I’ve tried to stay clear of because I’m trying to sell you something. I need you to be able to come and trust that you’re going to get the entertainment that I am showing you that I am selling you.You said you’re selling something, which is an interesting thing to hear. That’s true for just about everyone in the entertainment business, but usually people aren’t explicit in saying it. Why do you think there’s hesitation on the part of some entertainers to say, “I’m selling something”? It’s got this weird self-importance: “I have a platform, so I need to say something.” I’m anti-platform. If I want to give you my opinion and tell you what I think, that’s about me. When I go onstage, I try to remind myself this night’s not about me. If it becomes about me, it’s too much. I can’t handle it. But if I can make it for other people, now I’m an employee and I’m working. It’s not about my self-importance. More

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      in Movies

      David Cronenberg Lost His Wife and the Will to Make Movies. Then Came ‘The Shrouds’

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      In 2017, during the funeral of his wife and longtime collaborator Carolyn Zeifman, the director David Cronenberg found himself struck by an unusual impulse: As the coffin holding her dead body was lowered into the ground, he wanted more than anything to get into that box with her.That reluctance to let go is taken to even more morbid extremes in Cronenberg’s new movie, “The Shrouds,” about a high-tech cemetery where the ongoing decomposition of a corpse can be viewed through a video livestream meant for the loved ones left behind. When those graves are mysteriously vandalized, it’s up to the cemetery owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to determine the culprits, who he suspects may have something to do with the death of his own wife (Diane Kruger).The 82-year-old Cronenberg has always been guided by a unique point of view as a filmmaker, and his classics like “Scanners,” “Videodrome” and “The Fly” helped establish the body-horror genre. Still, he admitted in an interview via Zoom this month that “The Shrouds” could be considered one of his most personal films: It’s not for nothing that Cassel is costumed to look like his director, donning dark suits and teasing his gray hair upward in a familiar manner.Cronenberg movie moments, from left: Stephen Lack in “Scanners”; Debbie Harry in “Videodrome” and Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly.”Canadian Film Development Corporation; Universal Pictures; Twentieth Century Fox, via Getty ImagesEven so, Cronenberg cautioned against drawing too many links between himself and his lead character.“As soon as you start to write a screenplay, you’re writing fiction, no matter what the impetus was in your own life,” Cronenberg said. “Suddenly, you’re creating characters that need to come to life. And when you start to write them, they start to push you around if they’re really alive.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Walton Goggins on the Song in His ‘White Lotus’ Character’s Head

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      The actor, also seen in “The Righteous Gemstones” and the new movie “The Uninvited,” on dirt biking, his father’s clothing advice and the music that makes him think of Rick Hatchett.These days it seems as if Walton Goggins is everywhere.He’s Rick Hatchett, consumed with avenging his father’s murder, in “The White Lotus.” Baby Billy Freeman, shilling in the name of God, in “The Righteous Gemstones.” The nose-less bounty hunter, known as the Ghoul, in “Fallout.”But Goggins didn’t initially make the cut for “The Uninvited,” a film written and directed by his wife, Nadia Conners, about an older woman who shows up at the home of an actress and her agent husband just as their big Hollywood party has started.Conners originally envisioned “The Uninvited” as a play and staged readings in Los Angeles, New York and London. “I wasn’t invited to be Sammy in any of them,” Goggins said of the husband character.Then Conners turned her script into a screenplay. “I texted her from the plane when I finished it — crying emojis, crying emojis, crying emojis,” Goggins recalled. “And I said, you’ve really cracked this for yourself.” The role was his.In a video call from Los Angeles, Goggins — who lives in New York in the Hudson Valley — talked about shaking off the work day, never washing raw denim and joyriding with his son, Augustus. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Drinking Wine by the FireplaceThis fireplace is a hundred years old and the centerpiece of this living room that has hosted Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Disney, Babe Ruth and even members of the House of Windsor. I end every night in the same spot, sitting on the same stool, with a bottle of wine created by Arianna Occhipinti that we found when we were vacationing in Sicily.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      There’s a Feeling We’re Not in Hollywood Anymore

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      Movies and TV productions are rapidly leaving California to film outside the United States, where labor costs are lower and tax incentives greater. Industry workers are exasperated.It would have been simple to shoot the game show “The Floor” in Los Angeles. The city has many idle studios that could have easily accommodated its large display screen and the midnight-blue tiles that light up beneath contestants.But Fox flies the show’s host, Rob Lowe, and 100 American contestants thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to answer trivia questions about dogs, divas and Disney characters at a studio in Dublin. It makes more financial sense than filming in California.In the past few years, as labor costs have grown after two strikes, producers of reality shows, scrappy indie movies and blockbuster films have increasingly turned away from Los Angeles to filming locations overseas.Those business decisions have considerable consequences for the industry’s thousands of middle-class workers: the camera operators, set decorators and lighting technicians who make movies and television happen. Frustration has reached a boiling point, according to more than two dozen people who make their living in the entertainment industry. They say that nothing short of Hollywood, as we know it, is at stake.“This is an existential crisis — it’s an extinction event,” said Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like “San Andreas,” which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. “These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I’m in the drama field.”Productions have been filmed outside the United States for decades, but rarely has Hollywood work been so bustling overseas at a time when work in Hollywood itself has been so scant. Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      5 Free Movies to Stream on Tubi, Plex and PlutoTV

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      In films like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” you’ll find new beginnings in time for spring. Here’s a rundown of what’s currently on Tubi, Plex and PlutoTV.Spring, with its blooms and many unfurlings, is a time of awakening. Yet birth and renewal also means being confronted with the cold light of day.The early seconds of Josephine Decker’s 2018 film “Madeline’s Madeline” opens on a theater exercise that doubles as a kind of transformation for its teenage protagonist. “What you are experiencing is just a metaphor,” she’s assured. But what it represents will prove to be confusing and brutal; growing into the world often is.Spring, of course, also welcomes the budding of new romance. In the films from this month, you’ll recognize the sudden possibilities of love, in its wonder and its terror, along with the prickly realities of coming of age. For these (mostly) young characters, it’s a season of change. Watching them, one can only hope they make it out the other end intact.‘Weekend’ (2011)Stream it on PlutoTV.The fleeting encounter is an age-old archetype kept alive by the most romantic, and perhaps idealized, corners of our imagination. But in this story of a two-night stand by Andrew Haigh (“All of Us Strangers”), a brief connection is rendered achingly deep and real.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      The ‘Pride & Prejudice’ Hand Flex: One Gesture and the Web Is Still Swooning

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      Say “hand flex” to a fan of the 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” and they will know exactly what you mean.The gesture comes early in the director Joe Wright’s sumptuous version of the story. Keira Knightley’s bold Elizabeth Bennet is leaving Netherfield Park after picking up her ill sister Jane (Rosamund Pike). The reserved Mr. Darcy, played by Matthew Macfadyen, helps Elizabeth into a carriage. She had previously overheard Darcy insult her, calling her “tolerable,” and the tension between them is palpable. But when he touches her, something happens. She looks down, her gaze lingering on his gesture. As he walks away, the camera captures Darcy’s hand. His fingers stretch outward like an impulsive, unconscious tic. Her touch is almost too intense for him to handle.In the nearly 20 years since the film came out, the hand flex has become perhaps the defining beat from Wright’s take on the novel. It’s the subject of countless social-media posts, critical essays and TikTok dissertations. Search “hand flex” on TikTok or X and you’ll find the term even being applied to scenes from other films and TV shows. “This is my equivalent of the hand flex” is shorthand for “this tiny gesture gives me butterflies.”The word I kept encountering when talking to people and reading about the hand flex is “yearning.” Darcy, in the early phases of the story, keeps up a mask around Elizabeth, but his subconscious actions reveal just how much he desires her. To many, it’s devastatingly hot. And now, for the anniversary rerelease of “Pride & Prejudice” on April 20, the hand flex is commemorated with official merchandise.

      @lassoedmoon My first enamel pin design dedicated to our true Roman Empire The Hand Flex™️ #prideandprejudice #enamelpins #ethicallymade #smallbusiness ♬ Marianelli: Dawn – From “Pride & Prejudice” Soundtrack – Jean-Yves Thibaudet

      @mimiharlowrobinson Reply to @yahaira.corona THE HAND FLEX 2! #EnvisionGreatness #OverShareInYourUnderwear #prideandprejudice #prideandprejudice2005 #mrdarcy #janeausten ♬ Once Upon a December by Alexander Joseph – Alexander Joseph We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      John Cena Confronts His Final WrestleMania

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      As his in-ring career draws to a close, the most popular star in W.W.E. is trying out a new role: the bad guy.John Cena knew his time was up.For more than 20 years, Cena was a symbol of excellence and inevitability in professional wrestling. Cast as the ultimate good-guy character in World Wrestling Entertainment, he was Superman in jorts — a 16-time world champion and perhaps the last of the monocultural, crossover stars, following the likes of Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and the Rock.But even in the world of sports entertainment, Superman doesn’t live forever. And Cena remembered a promise he had made to the audience: When I get a step slow, I’m out.“And I’m a step slow,” he said.The realization kicked in a couple of years ago. Cena was down 15 pounds from his ideal in-ring weight. He couldn’t lift as much. He no longer looked like Mark Wahlberg ate Mark Wahlberg. It was time.“It is not from lack of trying. I’m just [expletive] old,” said Cena, who turns 48 this month. “I’ve never been the best wrestler out there — I know who I am and my capabilities. So, when I can feel myself getting a little slower, it’s time to go.”Cena says this inside a trailer on a movie set one snowy Sunday morning in early April near Cierne, a small Slovakian village near the border of Poland and the Czech Republic. He is roughly 6,000 miles away from Las Vegas, where on Sunday he will face Cody Rhodes in the main event at WrestleMania, Cena’s 17th and final time participating in W.W.E.’s flagship spectacle. A victory would make him the most decorated champion in the history of professional wrestling. But a set like this has become Cena’s work space as much as the squared circle over the years. He’s here filming “Matchbox,” the latest toy-brand-comes-to-life franchise with blockbuster ambitions, and Cena is the top-billed star. He makes sense in that role because even for people who don’t know an Attitude Adjustment from a People’s Elbow, Cena has become a household name.He’s been in action franchises (as Vin Diesel’s brother in the “Fast and Furious” movies), sex comedies (a buff boyfriend who is awful at dirty talk in “Trainwreck”) and world-conquering blockbusters (Mermaid Ken in “Barbie”). He’s a top-selling rap artist (that’s him on the mic for his enduring entrance music) and has made memorable appearances on “Saturday Night Live.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Overlooked No More: Ethel Lina White, Master of Suspense Who Inspired Hitchcock

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      A powerhouse of the genre, she published around 100 short stories and 17 novels, one of which was adapted into the acclaimed film “The Lady Vanishes.”This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.Before Alfred Hitchcock made his name in Hollywood, he turned to the work of the British suspense novelist Ethel Lina White.White was a powerhouse of the genre in the 1930s, publishing more than 100 short stories and 17 novels, three of which were adapted into films, most notably Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (1938). That movie, filmed in England, was named one of the top 100 films of the 20th century by the British Film Institute. It won Hitchcock the best director award from the New York Film Critics Circle — one of the few awards he would ever win for his directing — and it was the last film he made in England before he moved to Los Angeles.Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Lady Vanishes” (1938), about a woman’s search for another woman she meets on a train ride across Europe, was based on White’s book “The Wheel Spins.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, via LMPC/Getty Images“The Lady Vanishes” was based on White’s book “The Wheel Spins” (1936), a masterwork of horror and suspense that follows Iris Carr, an Englishwoman on holiday, who suffers a head injury before embarking on a train ride across Europe, where she engages in conversation with another Englishwoman, Miss Froy. When Miss Froy disappears, everyone on the train disavows any knowledge of the woman’s existence. “The Wheel Spins” cleverly puts the screws to poor Iris, teetering between sanity and madness as her continued investigations threaten to reveal an overarching conspiracy.By the time “The Wheel Spins” was published in 1936, White had already made her name in the mystery genre. “She took a style in its infancy and added so many threads of classical literature to it,” one scholar wrote.Collins Crime ClubWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More