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      ‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey

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      Adam McKay wants you to know that it’s the end of the world and you should absolutely, unequivocally not feel fine. (But do laugh.)Movies love to menace Earth. It’s human nature. In some of the most plausible doomsday flicks — “Meteor,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” — a big space rock threatens annihilation. Usually, if not always happily, someone finally comes to the rescue, though that isn’t the case in the 1951 film “When Worlds Collide.” Before it makes good on its title, this shocker rockets survivalists on an ark to colonize another planet, which is more or less what Elon Musk has talked about with Space X.The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.Maybe bring hankies, though don’t look for speeches about climate change and global warming. Rather than directly confronting the existential horror of our environmental catastrophe, McKay has taken an allegorical approach in “Don’t Look Up” with a world-destroying comet. Oh sure, on its website, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (yes, it’s real) isn’t worried about near-Earth objects, as they’re called: “No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years.” Whew. But no matter. The planet is on fire, and so is McKay, who’s embraced his inner Roland Emmerich (“2012”) with a fury by lobbing a great big joke at us.That joke is definitely on us or soon will be in “Don’t Look Up,” which follows a studiously curated ragtag collection of scientists, politicians, military types, journalists and miscellaneous others who face — or don’t — the threat of a rapidly approaching comet. “I heard there’s an asteroid or a comet or something that you don’t like the looks of,” a visibly bored president of the United States (Meryl Streep) says to some anxious scientists who have been granted an imperial audience. The scientists really don’t like what they’ve seen but the president has other things on her mind, including upcoming elections and the friendly perv she’s trying to get placed on the Supreme Court.Packed with big names, many locations and ambitiously staged set pieces (and a lot of giddily terrible hairdos), the movie is a busy, boisterous mixed bag, and whether you laugh or not you may still grit your teeth. The story opens in an observatory where Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a grad student, Kate Dibiasky, first spots the comet. Kate’s giddiness over her discovery soon turns to fear when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a terrific Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches some numbers and realizes the worst. Together, they pass along the bad news. Enter NASA (Rob Morgan), the military (Paul Guilfoyle) and the White House, which is where the movie’s breeziness takes a turn for the ominous.Also for the frantic, strident and obvious. McKay’s touch here is considerably blunter and less productive than it has been in a while. In his two previous movies — “The Big Short” and “Vice” — he blended comedic and dramatic modes to fascinating effect. He experimented with tone and pitch, and played up and down different scales, from the deadly serious to the outrageously silly. It didn’t always work. It proved easier to get into McKay’s groove when you laughed at, say, Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages while she’s taking a bubble bath in “The Big Short” than when you watched Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney discussing another American war in “Vice.”The stakes are higher still in “Don’t Look Up,” which grows progressively more frenetic and wobbly as the inevitability of the catastrophe is finally grasped by even the most ridiculous of the movie’s buffoon-rich cast of characters. One problem is that some of McKay’s biggest targets here — specifically in politics and infotainment — have already reached maximum self-parody or tragedy (or both). What is left to satirically skewer when facts are derided as opinion, flat Earthers attend annual conferences and conspiracy theory movements like QAnon have become powerful political forces?Even so, McKay keeps swinging hard and fast, and from the start, establishes a sense of visceral urgency with loose, agitated camerawork and brisk editing that fits the ticking-bomb story. He slings zingers and stages bits of comic business, making fine use of funny faces, jumping eyebrows, slow burns and double takes. Part ethnographer, part sociologist, he is especially good at mining the funny-ha-ha, funny-weird spaces in between people. But he’s not always in control of his material, including some cheap shots that slide into witless sexism. Presidential vanity is always a fair target, but too many of the digs directed at Streep’s character play into gender stereotypes.Streep is a great deal of fun to watch when she’s not unintentionally making you cringe, and Lawrence gives the movie a steady emotional pulse even at its most frantic. McKay’s work with DiCaprio is particularly memorable, partly because Dr. Mindy’s trajectory — from honest, concerned scientist to glib, showboating celebrity — strengthens the movie’s heartbreaking, unspeakable truth: Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.Don’t Look UpRated R for violence, language and the apocalypse. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘A Journal for Jordan’ Review: Reflections on Love Built and Lost

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      The actors Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams bring a compelling chemistry to the screen as opposites who fall for each other.Jordan Canedy is a wide-eyed baby with excellent lungs at the start of “A Journal for Jordan.” At the movie’s end, he’s becoming a young man, one with traits that his soldier father, Charles Monroe King, had hoped for when he began writing a yet-to-be-born Jordan advice in a notebook while stationed in Iraq.In 2006, while on patrol in Baghdad, First Sgt. King was killed by a roadside bomb. Dana Canedy, King’s fiancé and the mother of their infant son, was then a senior editor at The New York Times. Her 2007 article “From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By,” led to her to write the elegant book about love, loss and legacy upon which this movie is based, and with which it shares its title.So don’t be fooled by that touching title: The journal, in which Canedy added her own stories to King’s writing, is as much the work of a grieving mother driven to make sure her son knows the love story that brought him into the world as it is a devoted father’s guide to decency and manhood.Denzel Washington directs this adaptation (the screenplay is by Virgil Williams) with care, respect and a deep-seated knowledge of the Black love stories that don’t make it to the big screen nearly enough. The actors Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams are similarly attuned, bringing a compelling chemistry as opposites who fall for each other.In the movie, Dana meets Charles on a visit to her parents’ home near Fort Knox, Ky. Charles is chiseled, polite and oh-so good looking. He sends a gentle helping of “ma’ams” her way. She appraises him. He’s a 10-and-2 kind of driver. She reaches from the passenger side to blare the horn. Though different, their attraction is palpable. It also helps that they are both single (sort of). He’s going through a divorce, and she recently ended a relationship.Michael B. Jordan embraces Charles’s rigorous ethos as well as his tenderness. Charles might drop for morning push-ups, but he’ll also bow his head for grace at a restaurant. He travels with push-up bars but also a sketch pad. If Dana sees a flaw, it may be Charles’s single-minded devotion to his soldiers. She has her own doubts about being a military wife.Canedy acknowledged her edges (and curves) in her book, and Adams embodies them in her portrayal. When she begins writing her son, Jordan, her anecdotes can be frank, or frisky. She even shares a doozy of an argument, the kind that either breaks up a couple or makes them stronger.While the movie makes it clear that Dana and Charles are successful, it doesn’t always get at the labor necessary to get them there, both as a couple and as individuals. While it’s easy to rely on the shorthand of countless wartime movies to signal Charles’s ascendancy, Dana’s own story deserves a few more beats.A Journal for JordanRated PG-13 for a loving and passionate congress, salty language and brief marijuana use. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Almodóvar’s Brutal, Beautiful World

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      The Spanish director finally confronts the legacy of his country’s political violence in his new film, starring Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit.“World-building” usually refers to how the makers of science fiction and fantasy construct their domains, populating them with imaginary creatures and allegorical meanings. But among living filmmakers, the most prodigious world builder might be Pedro Almodóvar. Plenty of directors have a style. Almodóvar conjures a cosmos — a domain of bright colors, piercing music (often by Alberto Iglesias) and swirling melodrama. If you’ve visited in the past, you will be eager to return.This isn’t to say that Almodóvaria, as I sometimes think of it, is a realm entirely apart from the drab planet where most of us live. It’s a version of Spain (most of the time), informed by that country’s aesthetic and literary traditions, a legacy that encompasses the perverse whimsy of Surrealism and the openhearted pathos of flamenco. “Parallel Mothers,” Almodóvar’s new feature, adds an element that he had previously avoided: the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the nearly 40 years of dictatorship that followed.At first, the war seems like an unlikely, poignant entry point into a uniquely Almodóvarian swirl of present-day romantic complication and domestic anguish. Janis (Penélope Cruz, never better) is a photographer shooting a very handsome forensic anthropologist for a magazine spread. His name is Arturo (Israel Elejalde), and his grim specialty is examining the remains of Franco’s victims, many of whom were buried in unmarked mass graves. One of those graves is in Janis’s hometown. Her great-grandfather was part of a group of men taken from their homes early in the war and never seen again. She asks Arturo if he can help in the investigation.He offers to do what he can, and then he and Janis sleep together. She gets pregnant — he is married — and decides to raise their child on her own. All of this happens quickly, and seems like a complicated narrative mechanism designed to introduce Janis to Ana (Milena Smit), a teenager she meets in the maternity ward. Almost simultaneously, they give birth to girls and promise to keep in touch.Their relationship will pass through friendship, love, devastating loss, deceit and despair. The central plot of “Parallel Mothers” is vintage Almodóvar: a skein of reversals, revelations, surprises and coincidences unraveled with style, wit and feeling. The contrasts of background and temperament between Janis and Ana provide the dominant tones. Janis, the child of a hippie mother (who named her after Janis Joplin), was raised by her grandmother. She has grown up to be a practical, independent Madrileña, warmhearted but unsentimental. Her best friend is an elegant magazine editor played by Rossy de Palma, a statuesque avatar of Almodóvarismo in its purest essence.Ana is the child of an (unseen) father, who lives in Granada, and a mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), caught up in her acting career. In spite of Ana’s unhappy circumstances (her pregnancy is the result of rape), an aura of privilege clings to her family. Teresa, the kind of woman who might have been the heroine of an earlier Almodóvar picture — he is often drawn to theater, and to the toughness and vulnerability of actresses — is something of a villain here, an entitled narcissist who can’t fully acknowledge the reality of her daughter’s experiences.Janis doesn’t exactly replace Teresa in Ana’s life. She has her own problems to confront, some of which resemble Ana’s, some of which put them in conflict with each other. “Parallel Mothers,” in effect, critiques its own title. The two characters mirror each other in some ways, but nobody’s story moves in a straight line. Entanglement is unavoidable. Almodóvarian geometry is hyperbolic, non-Euclidean, kinked and convoluted.But Almodóvar’s art is also characterized by emotional precision and moral clarity. What happens to Ana and Janis isn’t just a matter of accident or narrative artifice; there is a political dimension to their relationship that is the key to the film’s structure.When Arturo comes back into the picture, he brings a reminder of unfinished historical business. If, at first, the horror of the past had seemed like the scaffolding for a modern story, the final sections of “Parallel Mothers” suggest the opposite. Injustice festers across generations. The failure to confront it casts a persistent, ugly shadow.That shadow is a new element in Almodóvar’s imagined universe, and it challenges some of his artistic assumptions. A reality as stark, as brutal, as unresolved as the fascist terror that dominated Spain in the middle decades of the 20th century doesn’t fit comfortably within his elegant frames and melodramatic conceits. That may be the point of “Parallel Mothers,” and the rawness of its final scenes is a measure of its accomplishment. We build new worlds to understand the one we’re in.Parallel MothersRated R. Sex, violence, tragedy. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Underdog’ Review: A Football Fairy Tale

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      Zachary Levi plays the N.F.L. star Kurt Warner in this biopic. It’s a wan parable about love and hard work.The biopic “American Underdog” centers on the quarterback Kurt Warner, a football player from Iowa who had an unconventional rise to becoming a National Football League champion. Warner’s story is inspirational but intricate, and this wan film struggles to balance simple storytelling with the complexities of the sport.Unlike many football stars, Warner (Zachary Levi) wasn’t drafted into the N.F.L. after graduating from college. For years following his graduation from the University of Northern Iowa in 1993, Warner worked at a grocery store, building highlight reels to send to sports agents on his time off. The film begins in this fallow period, dramatizing how Warner met Brenda (Anna Paquin), the woman who would become his wife. The couple shared common faiths in Christianity and each other. With Brenda by his side, Warner was eventually given a place on an arena football team. The opportunity enabled Warner to prove himself at a professional level, if not yet on an N.F.L. scale — that would come afterward, in 1997, with an offer from the St. Louis Rams (now the Los Angeles Rams). The rest, to football fans, is history.Romance was an important part of Warner’s story, and the performances from Levi and Paquin are convincing — a feat, given their characters’ inexplicably helmet-headed hairstyles. But the film has minimal insight into how Warner navigated the institution of professional football. The movie’s directors, the brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin (“Woodlawn,” “I Still Believe”), glaze over the details that depict how teams seek talent. Warner’s triumphs seem to rest more on his noble character than on gameplay specifics — a dubious notion given the N.F.L.’s competitive standards.The Erwins’ film presents a parable of how love and hard work can lead a hero down a prosperous, predetermined path. It’s a pleasant narrative, but it feels like the picture-book version of a more complicated story.American UnderdogRated PG for suggested sexual situations. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Memoria’ Review: In Search of Lost Time

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      Tilda Swinton stars in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive and enchanting new film, set in Colombia.In the middle of the night, Jessica hears a noise — loud and slightly metallic, somewhere between a bang and thud. Later, talking with a young sound engineer named Hernán, she will describe it as large ball of concrete slamming into a metal wall surrounded by seawater, a remarkably vivid image that Hernán patiently attempts to synthesize.Jessica, a British expatriate living in Colombia and played by Tilda Swinton, refers to what she heard as “my sound” — “mi sonido” in Spanish — and it seems to exist for her ears alone. Or rather for her and the audience watching “Memoria,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic and enchanting new film.The sound startles Jessica at dinner with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and follows her from Bogotá to a small town in the mountains. The possibility that it’s an auditory hallucination is raised at one point, and there are other moments when the reliability of Jessica’s perception seems to be in question. Is Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) a figment of her imagination? If so, how could he have offered to buy her a refrigerator for the orchids she is raising on her farm in Medellín?Even though Jessica visits a rural doctor, asking for Xanax to help her sleep — the doctor offers Jesus as a safer, more effective treatment — her psychological state isn’t really what “Memoria” is about. Saying exactly what it is about poses a quandary that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.Whenever you think you have a handle on where the story might be going, the ground shifts. Jessica is baffled by the sound and other, vaguely similar phenomena, but she doesn’t seem to be delusional, or even unduly troubled. She is curious, gently questioning people she meets — notably an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) and a second, older Hernán (Elkin Díaz) — about their work and its potential relevance to her situation. The film operates in a similar spirit, following an invisible map toward a surprising destination.Along the way, Weerasethakul pauses to contemplate the remnants of ancient civilizations and the chaos of a modern life, as flickerings of supernaturalism, disrupted chronology, science fiction and the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate Jessica’s journey.The director, most of whose previous films take place in Thailand, has a longstanding interest in the visual, social and metaphysical contrasts between city and countryside. His urban spaces, like the university where the first Hernán works and the hospital where Jessica’s sister is a patient, tend to be sleek and institutional, governed less by commerce or political authority than by science and technology. The Southeast Asian jungles in his “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” — and the lush Andean mountainside where the second Hernán makes his home — are zones of magic, where the modern distinction between myth and fact does not apply.This doesn’t quite make Weerasethakul a magical realist, though the South American setting of “Memoria” might make that description especially tempting. His imagination is philosophical and speculative, and in style he is more a poet than a fabulist, at home in the gaps between our various ways of making sense of the world.His refusal to explain can be a challenge, and “Memoria” demands patience and attention. I found it an emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience, but not one I can easily summarize or classify, partly because the feeling of radical uncertainty — Jessica’s feeling, but also mine — was a little too real. Her gradual unmooring from any stable sense of reality, and her perseverance in spite of that dislocation, strike me as utterly familiar, even as the causes of her alienation remains elusive. I am haunted by the plight of the second Hernán, a man blessed and cursed with a prodigious memory that connects him to a universe of suffering even as it condemns him to a state of isolation.Swinton and Díaz are subtle, charismatic performers, and their scenes together, which make up most of the film’s last section, bring it to a new level of intensity. What passes between Jessica and Hernán, and the sequence of images that follows, represent a quietly mind-blowing moment of cinema, something as wild and argument-provoking now as the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was in 1968.You have to see it to believe it, and to see it you’ll have to go to a movie theater. “Memoria” is opening in New York this week and then making its way across the country, one cinema at a time. It’s worth the wait, and the trip.MemoriaRated PG. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      TikTok Made Them Famous. Figuring Out What’s Next Is Tough.

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      Before Charli D’Amelio became the most popular creator on TikTok — she currently has 132 million followers — she danced on the competitive contemporary-dance circuit in the Northeast, the sorts of theatrical styles you might know from “So You Think You Can Dance?” Once she began posting to TikTok in 2019, and especially after her videos began taking off and her family moved to Los Angeles to support the viral dreams of her and her older sister, Dixie (56 million followers), that sort of dance became an afterthought, a relic of an old life.The D’Amelios made a leap from the phone screen to the small screen this year with the Hulu docuseries “The D’Amelio Show,” which captures, in sometimes excruciating detail, the thrills and the wages of TikTok success. Its most curious subplot is about Charli’s side quest to return, at least temporarily, to her precapitalist self, squeezing in time to work with a coach to relearn what those old dances require of her body, and pushing herself to remaster them.For Charli, TikTok stardom is a rocket ship, and potentially a ceiling, too. The past year or so has been a kind of testing ground for what the app’s biggest creators — the D’Amelio sisters, Noah Beck (32 million followers), Chase Hudson (32 million followers), Addison Rae (86 million followers) and others — might do next, either voluntarily and enthusiastically, or simply to satisfy the insatiable maw of demand that their sheer existence occasions.It’s been a mixed bag, a chaotic blend of behind-the-scenes vulnerability, eager-to-please willingness, bro impudence and performed resistance. Navigating the chasm between the instinctual charisma that fuels the app and the long(er) form seriousness and vision that might make for a stable, sustainable career in entertainment has been playing out across reality television, pop music, film, books, other social media platforms — and even TikTok itself.What’s become clear is that the skill set that led to big-tent triumph on the app in 2019 and 2020 is, by and large, sized to the medium. Given more room to breathe in other formats, most of TikTok’s superstars are still figuring out how to create beyond the phone.Throughout many of these projects, what you sense is the offscreen number-crunchers hoping to hang potential franchises on the heads and necks of these young people, who are less fully formed creative thinkers than fan-aggregation platforms in desperate need of content.“Noah Beck Tries Things,” which appears on AwesomenessTV’s YouTube channel, is the ne plus ultra of this phenomenon — an entire series, two seasons deep, wholly devoted to figuring out what to do with this uncooked meal of a man.Beck, 20, is a deeply affable former soccer player who, of all of the current crop of TikTok crossover stars, appears most baffled about how to amplify it. “Noah Beck Tries Things” is a slapdash trifle of consequence-free content production. It simply winds Beck up, places him in unlikely scenarios — cooking a steak, dancing the tango, recording a dis track — and watches him gulp for air. In one episode, when someone shows him how to do a handstand on a hoverboard, his awe is genuine — not the practiced “gosh!” of someone used to being filmed for reactions, but more like the off-the-cuff “derp” of someone who understands he has landed somewhere near the deep end and has no idea how to swim.On his show, he’s mostly hapless, apart from the occasional athletic task. But what’s emerging as his calling card is his almost raging commitment to goodnaturedness. The only times Beck’s brow ever genuinely furrows are in scenes in the D’Amelios’ Hulu show when Dixie, his girlfriend — she refers to him as a “golden retriever,” a familiar TikTok good-boy archetype — can’t quite muster the optics of a reciprocative relationship. In those moments, he looks frazzled, as if an Apple IIc is being updated with this year’s operating system.Beck is genial and gentle — in short bursts on the app, he’s a palliative. But he never seems truly hungry. In stark contrast to that approach stands Addison Rae, or rather, revs Addison Rae. Of this generation of TikTok stars, she is the most intentional, the most iron-willed, the most determined. Off camera, she has been loosely adopted into the Kourtney Kardashian orbit. Her parents have been game TikTokers. (The D’Amelios play along, too, but much less so.) Even when Rae, 21, was focused more intently on her social media presentation — she’s now often comically late to trends on the app — she always appeared to have her eyes somewhere beyond the phone.Unsurprisingly, Rae’s star turn in “He’s All That,” the updating of the 1999 teen rom-com “She’s All That” (itself an update of “Pygmalion”/“My Fair Lady”) is the most vivid post-TikTok performance of the year. That’s because Rae understands viral stardom not just as a job, but as an archetype.Like “The D’Amelio Show,” “He’s All That” is a metacommentary about the falsity of viral fame, albeit fictionalized. Rae plays Padgett (pronounced, more or less, “pageant”), a social media influencer falsifying her bona fides. After a fall from grace, she sets about remaking a surly outcast classmate (who wears a G.G. Allin T-shirt) as her new hottie. High jinks ensue, followed by love.Beauty and popularity are inventions, and have been long before TikTok came along. “He’s All That” plays those constructions for chuckles and awws. And the end of the film savvily mimics the turn away from polished inaccessibility toward Emma Chamberlain-type relatability. Padgett returns to social media, but posting more naturalistic photos, taken by her new paramour: She found herself an Instagram boyfriend after all.“He’s All That” still valorizes and reinforces Big Algorithm, even converting the punk skeptic. But the some of the young men who thrived on the app in 2020 decided to pivot in the opposite direction: refusenik. Most notably, this has been the direction taken by two stars trying to transition into music careers — Chase Hudson, 19, who records music as Lilhuddy, and Jaden Hossler, 20, who records music as jxdn.Unlike Rae, who this year released a peppy club pop single, “Obsessed,” a perfectly textureless workout anthem, Hudson and Hossler (nine million followers) swerved hard into dissident territory, embracing pop-punk and, in places, the grittier textures that emerged from SoundCloud in the late 2010s. They’re heavily tattooed, wear haute mall-goth clothing and paint their fingernails — their pushback against TikTok’s centrism is highly aestheticized (as opposed to, say, Bryce Hall, he of the Covid-era partying, drug arrest and boxing match, whose post-TikTok direction seems inspired by Jake Paul).For creators determined to make it clear they are not bound by TikTok’s cutesy videos and algorithm, it is a purposeful choice. Hossler’s debut album, “Tell Me About Tomorrow,” traverses anxiety and addiction. He has a reedy voice, and when he’s singing self-lacerating lines like “I don’t like taking pills, but I took ’em anyway,” he still sounds like an accessible teddy bear, albeit one whose stuffing is coming undone.By contrast, Hudson comes off as if he’s spoiling for a fight on his debut album, “Teenage Heartbreak.” He’s a sneerer: “I’m not sorry that I crashed your party.” In “Downfalls High,” the surprisingly puckish long-form music video-film that accompanies Machine Gun Kelly’s latest album “Tickets to My Downfall,” Hudson plays Fenix, a ghoulish loner with punk charisma — basically, the kind of guy Padgett tries to clean up in “He’s All That.” When his girlfriend, who is popular and rich and slumming it, asks him what he wants to be when he grows up, he replies sullenly but not terribly convincingly, “Dead.” It all feels like one long elaborate Halloween performance. (Hudson is also one of several TikTokers featured in the long-simmering reality show “Hype House,” which will have its premiere on Netflix next month.)Hudson’s and Hossler’s albums kill two urges with one groan: the need for these TikTokers to find a viable path forward in music, and the music industry’s need to amplify and reinforce the still-emergent revival of pop-punk, the music of white rebellion most readily available to new arrivals with little history or experience.Given the apparent craving for safe spaces, it’s notable how, on both “The D’Amelio Show” and in “He’s All That,” nonwhite characters are deployed as foils who are far more knowing and worldly than the white protagonists. Deliberately or not, they serve as reminders that the world beyond the app is far more diverse and complex. “Noah Beck Tries Things” undertakes a version of this as well with queer collaborators, striking given that one of the most frequent critiques of Beck during his rise has been of queerbaiting. (That said, the show’s first episode, where Beck learned how to apply makeup from James Charles, appears to have disappeared from the internet.)This year TikTok stars tried their hands at Hulu shows, streaming series and music careers.Simoul AlvaIt’s tough to know how purposeful these indictments about privilege are — they generally serve the narratives of the shows while reifying their stars, who are presented as being open to personal growth.“The D’Amelio Show,” however, often comes off as quietly ruthless toward its stars, whether in its array of more-experienced secondary characters, its lingering on the excruciating challenges of growing up in public on the internet, or even in the fish-out-of-water talking head shots juxtaposing the relentlessly normal family members against their relentlessly grand Southern California mansion.Ultimately, “The D’Amelio Show” is about the toxicity of viral fame and also about child labor. (Charli is 17 now, and was 15 and 16 when the show was taping. Dixie is 20.) It is presented as a moral victory, near the end of the season, when after a period of deep decompression by Charli, it is determined that she will only work three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.On TikTok, though, life itself is labor. You feel that burden perhaps most acutely in how Dixie navigates the fame that has arrived at her feet in the wake of Charli’s breakthrough. Dixie is older, a little more cynical and a lot less comfortable. For her next step, she chooses music, and the show captures, with discomfiting intimacy, just how challenging that decision is, artistically and emotionally. Her voice is rough, her confidence is low and she is besieged by online naysayers. (The persistent Greek chorus of negative online comments, represented on the show in on-screen pop-up graphics, is both effective and perverse.) Her worldview is encapsulated in the opening lines of her first single, “Be Happy”: “Sometimes I don’t want to be happy/Don’t hold it against me/If I’m down just leave me there, let me be sad.”Perhaps this heartbreaking transparency will be the ultimate legacy of this era of TikTok crossover. It’s there in Charli’s book “Essentially Charli: The Ultimate Guide to Keeping It Real,” which came out in late 2020, which juxtaposes workbook-esque pages about friendship and style with confessions about anxiety and therapy. (An even more involved discussion of this fundamental viral-stardom tension is in “Backstory: My Life So Far,” the memoir of the TikTok superstar Avani Gregg, 19, a close friend of Charli’s (38 million followers). Gregg’s book is striking for its matter-of fact-conversations about self-doubt and mental health.)Charli’s anxiety is a recurrent topic on “The D’Amelio Show,” which can often feel like crisis footage: Charli having a panic attack in the car when she spies paparazzi waiting for her, or Dixie breaking down after being bullied online.But Charli’s most revealing content may well be in the form of her secondary TikTok account, @user4350486101671, which she began in April, during a trip to Las Vegas for, of all things, a Jake Paul boxing match. It has a mere 15 million followers, and Charli treats it far more casually. The videos are in general looser than those on her main account, with a broader range of emotions, from exuberance to exasperation. The dancing is a little smoother, a little less performed.Sometimes the gap between the two accounts is as vast as the one between burden and freedom, and sometimes it’s just enough for her to zestily lean into lip-syncing a curse word that might not fly on her main account. She might owe the most commodified version of herself to TikTok, but here she’s trying on different selves, and in nearly every video, her smile is broad and relaxed. She looks like someone fully at home. More

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      in Movies

      Sally Ann Howes, Star of ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,’ Dies at 91

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      The English-born actress captivated children in the 1968 film, which became a holiday favorite. It was one of around 140 productions she appeared in during a six-decade career.Sally Ann Howes, an English-born grande dame of American and British musical comedy who captivated children as Truly Scrumptious in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” the 1968 film featuring a magic jalopy that floats and flies into fantasy adventures, died on Sunday in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. She was 91.Her son, Andrew Hart Adler, confirmed the death, in a hospital. Ms. Howes had homes in West Palm Beach and London.Born into show business, the daughter of a popular London comedian and his singer-actress wife, Ms. Howes was cast in her first movie at 12 and had a stage, screen and television career that spanned six decades. She starred in some 140 productions — musicals and plays in New York and London, Hollywood movies and television mini-series.She toured Britain and America in musicals; sang at the White House for Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; was a frequent guest on television game and talk shows; became a Barbie doll; sang operettas; and later in life lectured, made documentaries and raised funds for AIDS research and other charities.Ms. Howes had starred in a dozen British films and several American musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “What Makes Sammy Run?” and “Brigadoon,” when, toward the end of 1968 — a tumultuous year of assassinations, a divisive war in Vietnam and widespread political protests — a madcap movie opened in Britain and the United States as a zany antidote for a troubled world.Based loosely on a children’s book by Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond spy tales, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” a British production, starred Dick Van Dyke as a nutty widowed inventor and Ms. Howes as the love interest, Truly Scrumptious. Together, with his two children and his marvelous flying-boat car, they journey to the land of Vulgaria to battle the nasty tyrant Baron Bomburst.Ms. Howes in a London hotel in 1968. She was in the city to attend the premiere of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”Leonard Burt/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesCritics were mixed about the film, directed by Ken Hughes with a script by Mr. Hughes and Roald Dahl, but children were ecstatic. Its popularity spawned mass-marketing phenomena on both sides of the Atlantic, with Truly Scrumptious Barbie dolls, lunchboxes and toys, and a revival of Edwardian fashions, which the cast wore.The critic Roger Ebert called “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” “about the best two-hour children’s movie you could hope for.” Renata Adler, in The New York Times, said: “There is nothing coy, or stodgy or too frightening about the film. And this year, when it has seemed highly doubtful that children ought to go to the movies at all, ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ sees to it that none of the audiences’ terrific eagerness to have a good time is betrayed or lost.”While it lost money initially, the film became a perennial children’s favorite and made Ms. Howes an international film star, her fame renewed every Christmas on video and DVD. It was nominated (though not chosen) in 2006 for the American Film Institute’s list of the 25 Greatest Movie Musicals.Ms. Howes moved to New York in 1958 when she married the composer and lyricist Richard Adler and made her Broadway debut in Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady.” She replaced the original star, Julie Andrews, in the role of Eliza Doolittle, the smudged Cockney flower girl who is transformed into a radiant lady by the demanding speech lessons of Professor Henry Higgins.Audiences and most critics adored her as George Bernard Shaw’s gamine. “Sally Ann Howes, the current Eliza, is a strikingly beautiful young lady with a rapturous voice that sounds like Julie Andrews,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times. “Radiating intelligence and guile,” he went on, “she is an alert and versatile actress.”Ms. Howes returned to Broadway in 1961 for “Kwamina,” a musical written for her by Mr. Adler. An interracial love story set in Africa with an almost entirely Black cast, it was apparently too controversial in the turbulent early civil rights era, closing after 32 performances.Ms. Howes and the British actor Peter Wyngarde publicizing a production of “The King and I” on a barge on the River Thames in 1973.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesIn 1962, Ms. Howes starred in a limited-run City Center revival of “Brigadoon,” Lerner and Loewe’s fantasy about two American boys who stumble upon a Scottish village that comes to life only one day every century.“Sally Ann Howes has grown accustomed to Lerner and Loewe songs,” Milton Esterow said in a review for The Times. “She has grace, beauty and a lovely voice.” Since “Brigadoon” was soon to vanish, Mr. Esterow suggested, “Broadway should hurry and find a new show for Miss Howes. Otherwise some smart gentlemen in Scotland might decide to nominate her for public office.”In 1964, Ms. Howes joined Robert Alda and Steve Lawrence in “What Makes Sammy Run?” a Broadway musical written by Budd Schulberg and based on his novel about a ruthless young man who betrays friends and lovers to scheme his way to the top of a Hollywood studio. The show ran for 540 performances, although Ms. Howes, pressed by other engagements, left after a year.Throughout the 1960s she turned increasingly to television, appearing on the Perry Como, Dinah Shore, Jack Paar and Ed Sullivan shows, and on “The Bell Telephone Hour,” “Kraft Music Hall” and “The United States Steel Hour.” She also had roles in “Mission: Impossible,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and “Bracken’s World.”Ms. Howes toured Britain in 1973 in “The King and I,” and the United States in 1978 in “The Sound of Music.” In the 1970s and ’80s she sang operettas like “Blossom Time” and “The Merry Widow” in American regional theaters. In 1990, she joined a New York City Opera staging of Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” in the role of the theater actress Desiree Armfeldt; the production was shown on public television’s “Live From Lincoln Center.” And a half-century after her triumph as Eliza Doolittle, she toured the United States in “My Fair Lady” in 2007, playing Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Henry Higgins. It was her 64th year in show business.Sally Ann Howes was born in London on July 20, 1930, to the comedian Bobby Howes and the actress Patricia Malone. Her maternal grandfather, Capt. J.A.E. Malone, directed stage musicals; an uncle, Pat Malone, was an actor.Sally Ann and her older brother, Peter, a musician, grew up in a prosperous household with nannies and visits by her parents’ theatrical peers. During World War II, the family moved to its country estate in Essendon, 20 miles north of London, for the duration.Ms. Howes at a reception at the New York Public Library in 2012. The film historian Robert Osborne was at right.John Lamparski/WireImageMs. Howes’s acting in school plays and her family connections attracted an agent, and in 1943 she appeared with Stewart Granger in her first movie, “Thursday’s Child.” It launched her career. She played children’s roles in “Dead of Night” (1945), with Michael Redgrave, and “Anna Karenina” (1948), with Vivien Leigh. At 18, she appeared with John Mills in “The History of Mr. Polly” (1949).Ms. Howes began taking stage roles in the 1950s. With singing lessons to lower her high-pitched voice, she performed in West End musicals, including “Paint Your Wagon,” with her father, and in the stage drama “A Hatful of Rain.” Ms. Howes’s marriage in 1950 to Maxwell Coker ended in divorce in 1953. She divorced Mr. Adler in 1966. Her marriage in 1969 to A. Morgan Maree III, a financier, also ended in divorce. In the 1970s, she married the literary agent Douglas W. Rae, who died this year. In addition to her son, she is survived by two grandchildren. In 2012, Ms. Howes joined 1,500 film fans on a Turner Classic Movies cruise that featured “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and she discussed her life as an entertainer.“The moment you hit 45 — now it’s 55 — your career changes,” she said. “You have to rethink everything, and you have to adjust. I was always aware of it because of the people I was brought up with. We saw careers go up and down and be killed off.“I’ve never prepared for anything,” she continued. “I’ve always jumped into the next thing, and therefore it’s been a strange career. I enjoyed experimenting.”Alex Marshall and Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      in Television

      Peter Dinklage on ‘Cyrano’ and Life After ‘Game of Thrones’

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      Peter Dinklage doesn’t consider himself much of a singer, and swordfighting is outside his usual area of expertise. But the opportunity to master those skills is precisely what appealed to him about the new movie musical “Cyrano,” which Dinklage leads as a crooning, jousting poet.“I’ve got to be intimidated by it,” he said. “Anything that scares me gets my interest.”The 52-year-old actor first tackled the material in a stage musical written and directed by Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, with songs written by members of the band the National. After an Off Broadway premiere in late 2019, Schmidt’s “Cyrano” has now been made into a lavish film directed by Joe Wright (“Atonement”), which finds the title character covertly courting his true love, Roxanne (Haley Bennett), in the form of letters sent by the besotted soldier Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.).Of course, that begs a very contemporary question: Did Cyrano de Bergerac invent catfishing? Though the new film retains the period setting of the 1897 Edmond Rostand play it was based on, Dinklage detects many modern-day parallels. “It’s exactly what we’re doing today with online dating, where you’re putting up a profile of yourself out there that is not necessarily true to who you are,” he said. “We all pretend to be other people to varying degrees.”Dinklage with Haley Bennett in the new movie musical “Cyrano.”Peter Mountain/MGMBut few pretend better than Dinklage, a four-time Emmy winner who played the sly and short-statured Tyrion Lannister for eight seasons of “Game of Thrones,” culminating with its controversial finale in May 2019.“‘Game of Thrones’ wasn’t really a TV show — it was like my life,” Dinklage said. “My family was there in Ireland six months out of every year, for almost 10 years. You dig roots down there, my daughter was going to school there. She developed an Irish accent because she was with little Irish kids all day long.”Still, in a recent and wide-ranging conversation via video call, Dinklage told me that he has found life since “Game of Thrones” to be quite liberating: “You feel this void, but then you also go, ‘Oh, wow. I don’t have to do that, so what am I going to do next?’ That’s the exciting thing.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.It’s my understanding that your wife, Erica, was fairly far along in adapting “Cyrano” before you read it and decided to star in it. What convinced you?Yeah, she was commissioned to write an adaptation of “Cyrano,” and she had the great idea of stripping it down to its bare essentials, replacing the long monologues about love with love songs. Most importantly for me, I finally connected with it because she got rid of Cyrano’s most famous attribute, which is the obviously fake nose on the handsome actor’s face.I’m an actor, I’ve worn prosthetics before, but the pretense of that didn’t jive with me. I’d always thought, “What’s the big deal? You get to take that off at the end of the show.” And then Erica removed it and I thought I had to play this part because now it’s about a guy who doesn’t know what to do in the face of love, who has nothing to blame but himself.What do you mean by that?I think Cyrano is in love with love, and so many of us are, but we have no idea what it is. I always jump ahead and think, well, what if Cyrano really got what he wanted? Would he and Roxanne start to annoy each other? Because he keeps her on a pedestal, is that why he loves her? I think so many people do that. They don’t want to get too close. They want to know the good stuff without the bad.How did you feel about love when you were in your 20s? Were you in love with the idea of love?Yeah, I think so. I think there’s a “Wuthering Heights” quality to all love when you’re younger, you know? “Romeo and Juliet” wasn’t written for 40-year-olds. I was guilty of always falling for someone where it wasn’t reciprocated, because keeping it at a distance is more romantic than bringing it up close. You fall for people you know aren’t going to return that, so it’s even more tormented, and you’re not interested in the people interested in you. That’s how my brain worked because I was a self-saboteur when I was young.When it comes to love, Dinklage said, “I was a self-saboteur when I was young.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesHow do you grapple with that?You get a bit older and you realize that has nothing to do with anything. But it’s OK, because in your 20s, everybody should be a mess. I meet so many ambitious, professional young people in their 20s and they have everything together, and it seems like they haven’t made any of those really important mistakes, as opposed to when me and my friends were in New York in our early 20s and we’d go out drinking all night and smoke cigarettes and howl at the moon. We were all just fools, and it was fun.Do you remember the first time you met Erica?Of course. It was about 18 years ago now. We were all at a friend’s house and someone said, “They’re walking the elephants through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.” The circus was in town and it was snowing, and they were walking the elephants through Manhattan, a long line of them. It was like something out of a beautiful, fantastical, end-of-the-world, crazy, romantic movie. See? I always think about movies. So that’s the night we met, the night the elephants walked through Manhattan.By that point, had you been able to move past your tendency to torment yourself about love?I don’t think you do that. I think other people do that to you. If anybody’s been lucky enough to experience love, it just grabs hold of you. You don’t control how you feel, but you can choose what to do with it.Which is part of the issue with Cyrano, who may feel unworthy of love.I was raised Irish Catholic, so I totally feel unworthy of everything. That’s what hopefully this movie is speaking to, that unworthiness we all go through. When you meet somebody you love, they’re suddenly so important and so powerful that of course your go-to is, “I’m not worthy of this, because why would I be? This is so much bigger than me.”Do you think Erica removed the fake nose and reconceived Cyrano because she had you in mind for the role?Subconsciously, perhaps, because we had worked together before and we’re partners in life. But I definitely think she wasn’t just replacing the nose with my size in terms of a physical difference of the character. She just wanted to unearth. It’s kind of what I do: Every time I approach a role, I’m not just approaching it as someone my size, I’m approaching it as a flesh-and-blood human being with many more complications to the character.It’s so funny, just talking about this movie, I’m asked, “How does it feel to play a leading man?” That’s still part of the conversation because we’re still inundated by clichés. The domain of romantic leads has been beautiful white people for a hundred years now. That’s just what we’ve been served up, like Burger King, and then if we eat it, they’re going to make more of it. But my favorite filmmakers have been the ones who take risks, like Hal Ashby. I just worship “Harold and Maude” because look at who the romantic characters are. It’s a brilliant movie.Dinklage opposite Jasmine Cephas Jones and Blake Jenner in the stage version of “Cyrano.”Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIn the ’90s, you gave an interview where you said, “What I really want is to play the romantic lead and get the girl.”I think I was speaking more to the idea that they get to thread the whole narrative, and that’s sort of a joy. I had been playing a number of fun parts, but they were supporting parts. Behind the curtain of filmmaking, so much of it is continuity of character: If you come in for one or two scenes, you can just lay some dynamite, have some fun, and then you’re out of there, but there’s no real arc to your storytelling.I think what’s fascinating about “Game of Thrones” and why a lot of actors are now drawn to television, is because they get to do that slow burn. For example, if you take the character of Tyrion’s brother Jaime, he pushes a little kid out the window at the end of the first episode, but two seasons later, he’s a hero to the audience. It’s like, did you forget he pushed a kid out the window? It’s crazy the way you can just surf this narrative and take it wherever you want to go. I got to do that with Tyrion and you get to do that in the movie if you’re the lead, though you have to condense it a little bit more.What was it like to be famous at the height of “Game of Thrones” mania?It’s myriad different reactions I get on a daily basis. People mean well, but when you’re walking down the street with your kid and people take your picture without asking … I start to talk this way and then I stop myself, because for an actor to complain about that reflects poorly on you. Everybody is like, “You have a great life. What’s wrong with me taking your picture? You’re a performer, that’s my right.”But it’s not about that. It’s more about just on a human level, I’m not a zoo animal. I’m a person. Let’s say I’m having a really bad day, or I just got off the phone and you’re right in my face. Am I supposed to smile for you? And why aren’t you actually communicating with me? More often than not, people take pictures without asking, and sometimes when I respond, even kindly, they don’t say anything because they’re almost surprised I’m talking to them. It’s really wild. If you’re a fan of what I do, why would you pay me back with that?Dinklage with Sophie Turner in “Game of Thrones.”Helen Sloan/HBOSo what’s your read on why they act that way?I think a lot of people are totally removed from each other. Camera phones have become like fingers, an extension of themselves, and they don’t even think about it because that’s how everybody’s living. Much more famous actors than me can walk down Broadway if they hide themselves correctly, but I’m unable to do that, so it can be hard. I moved to New York City to be anonymous: “Who cares? Nobody looks twice.” And now, because of the technology, everybody does.George R.R. Martin wanted “Game of Thrones” to go on for two more seasons. Do you think it should have, or was that the right time to end?It was the right time. No less, no more. You don’t want to wear out your welcome, although I’m not sure that show could have. But I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them. We were going off the air and they didn’t know what to do with their Sunday nights anymore. They wanted more, so they backlashed about that.We had to end when we did, because what the show was really good at was breaking preconceived notions: Villains became heroes, and heroes became villains. If you know your history, when you track the progress of tyrants, they don’t start off as tyrants. I’m talking about, spoiler alert, what happened at the end of “Game of Thrones” with that character change. It’s gradual, and I loved how power corrupted these people. What happens to your moral compass when you get a taste of power? Human beings are complicated characters, you know?I think some people really did want a happily-ever-after ending, even though “Game of Thrones” told us it was not that show from the very beginning.They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together. By the way, it’s fiction. There’s dragons in it. Move on. [Laughs] No, but the show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it. Yeah, it was called “Game of Thrones,” but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, “Who’s going to be on the throne?” I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that.One of my favorite moments was when the dragon burned the throne because it sort of just killed that whole conversation, which is really irreverent and kind of brilliant on behalf of the show’s creators: “Shut up, it’s not about that.” They constantly did that, where you thought one thing and they delivered another. Everybody had their own stories going on while watching that show, but nobody’s was as good as what the show delivered, I think. More