Nekrasova, Dasha

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    How Dasha Nekrasova Is Calling the Shots

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    The “Succession” star and co-host of the podcast Red Scare has directed her first feature, “The Scary of Sixty-First,” about a house once owned by Jeffrey Epstein.You know how some people are always talking about wanting to direct a movie and co-host a popular podcast and be on the most popular show on television? Somebody has done all of those things: Dasha Nekrasova.Nekrasova, 30, is a self-styled provocateur and artistic polymath whom fans of the recently completed season of “Succession” will recognize as Comfrey, the crisis public-relations rep put through hell by Kendall Roy. Before that, she was best known for Red Scare, an irreverent cultural-critique podcast she co-hosts with her friend Anna Khachiyan.She first came to public attention via a “woman on the street” interview with InfoWars that went viral, and her interest in conspiracy theories can be unnerving to some fans even as friends defend her. But it’s that interest that underpins “The Scary of Sixty-First,” her feature directing debut, which she also stars in and wrote, with Madeline Quinn.The film (now in theaters and opening Dec. 24 on digital platforms) is a louche, scrappy horror movie about young roommates, played by Betsey Brown and Nekrasova’s collaborator, Quinn, who move into an apartment on the Upper East Side.But not just any apartment: it was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who killed himself in jail after his arrest on sex trafficking charges in 2019.Nekrasova said she decided to make a horror movie centered on Epstein because she was “obsessed” with his death. “It broke my brain, in a way,” she said in a phone interview. Nekrasova believes, as does her character in the film, that Epstein — “based on my research,” she said — didn’t die by suicide but was killed.“My interest in filmmaking and in Jeffrey Epstein dovetailed in genre,” she said. “Besides me already being preoccupied with it, it was a good way to tell the story. It was so scary. It was so monstrous.”In the film, Nekrasova plays a young woman whose obsession with Epstein’s death, and the many conspiracy theories surrounding it, grows while a demonic force turns the characters into mini-cauldrons of paranoia, sexual mania and butchery. Shot on 16 millimeter, the film looks like a low-fi Sundance breakout circa 1991, and brings to mind the gritty thrillers of the renegade filmmaker Abel Ferrara, whom Nekrasova cites as an inspiration.“The Scary of Sixty-First” is getting a mix of critical responses. Its co-star, Brown, said that as dark as the film is, it’s “a romp to watch” with an audience, especially those drawn to horror, because “it says we can take the absurdity of this disgusting man and laugh” out of discomfort.“Dasha is doing something cathartic,” she said.Betsey Brown in “The Scary of Sixty-First.”UtopiaIn conversation, Nekrasova comes across as definitional Gen X even though she’s a Millennial — a disaffected and misleadingly unambitious slacker with a whatever ethos who’s also intensely interested in understanding people she disagrees with.Nekrasova was born in Minsk, Belarus, and moved a few times with her parents, including to Las Vegas, where she attended a performing arts high school. She said she started to love horror after she watched a trailer for “The Exorcist” and saw Linda Blair descend stairs in a backbend.“That really implanted itself in my consciousness,” she said.Nekrasova went viral in 2018 for a video in which an Infowars correspondent corners her at South by Southwest for an interview about socialism. Nekrasova handled the gotcha exchange with poise but also a “girl, please” detachment. In the video, she wears a fitted sailor top, as if she’s on break from a rehearsal for “Anything Goes” leading social media to call her Sailor Socialism.“It happened around the time that I started my podcast, and it contributed to the audience we’ve been able to amass,” she said. “I’m happy people are still enjoying it.”Three years later, the video doesn’t come across as an act of sabotage against Infowars as much as it does a meet-cute: In November, Nekrasova posted a photo on Instagram of her and Khachiyan playfully flanking Alex Jones, the Infowars host who spread bogus stories about the deadly 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and was sued for defamation by families of 10 victims, all of which he lost. Nekrasova and Khachiyan also released an interview with Jones and Alex Lee Moyer, the director of a documentary about the far-right broadcaster.On the subsequent episode, Nekrasova called Jones “an incredible entertainer” and wondered if his beliefs about the Sandy Hook shootings may have been a psychotic episode set off by childhood traumas of his own.She stands by her take even as some of her social media followers blanched. (“Ooooof that’s not a good look,” one commenter said.)Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Scary of Sixty-First’ Review: Resident Evil

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      A Manhattan apartment turns into the rental from hell in this mindless mix of horror and true crime.There were moments during “The Scary of Sixty-First” when I was convinced I was watching a botched horror-comedy. But while this witless slurry of onanism and conspiracy theories is certainly laughable, it is never, for one second, even remotely funny.What, then, was its director and co-writer, Dasha Nekrasova, hoping to achieve beyond childish provocation? The dialogue is empty-headed, the visuals crudely exploitative and the plot — about two college friends who rent a swanky, suspiciously affordable apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — so ludicrous as to be well nigh incoherent. All of which inspires some measure of sympathy for Madeline Quinn (who co-wrote the screenplay) and Betsey Brown as the roommates Noelle and Addie, and whose passive-aggressive dynamic is further ruptured by the arrival of a shifty stranger (Nekrasova).Claiming that the apartment once belonged to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the visitor draws Noelle into the web of online conspiracies surrounding his death. Addie, meantime — seemingly possessed by one of Epstein’s underage victims — begins sucking her thumb and engaging in multiple bouts of increasingly frenzied masturbation. These are mostly an excuse for Hunter Zimny’s camera to zoom repeatedly between her legs as if her underwear were magnetized.Mashing pentagrams, Prince Andrew and autoerotic asphyxiation into a lubricious slop, “The Scary of Sixty-First” feels suffocating and flat. Nekrasova might have some insight into the mental vulnerabilities of the chronically screen-obsessed, but she has neither the artistry nor the filmmaking skills to deliver what the press notes suggest is a nod to Kubrick and Polanski. What we learn from both, however, is that giving offense should not appear to be your sole motivation.The Scary of Sixty-FirstNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A Dirty Winner at a Lonely Berlin Film Festival

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookA Dirty Winner at a Lonely Berlin Film FestivalThe Romanian director Radu Jude’s “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” took the top prize in an online-only edition that lacked the magic of in-person moviegoing.“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” won the Golden Bear, the Berlin International Film Festival’s top award, on Friday.Credit…Silviu Ghetie/Micro FilmMarch 5, 2021Updated 1:01 p.m. ETBERLIN — No one wants to read more on the things we miss about going to the movies. Too much has been written about that already — and I can practically hear the pipsqueak sighing of mini-Mr. Stradivarius, stressed out by the demand for his tiny violins. But with the Berlin International Film Festival divided this year into two events — a physical edition to take place in city theaters this summer, and an online press-and-industry portion that unfolded over the past five days — the so-near-yet-so-far contrast between theatrical and home viewing has never been more stark.I’ve never felt more removed from the real Berlinale, as the yearly festival is known, nor sensed more acutely the strange sterility of pandemic-era online movie watching.“Mr. Bachmann and His Class,” directed by Maria Speth, won the festival’s Jury Prize.Credit…Madonnen FilmA jury of directors whose films have won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top prize, announced the competition prizes without fanfare via a video livestream on Friday. Some were among my favorites from an outstanding lineup: the top awardee, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” by Radu Jude; the Best Screenplay winner, “Introduction,” by Hong Sang-soo; and Maria Speth’s Jury Prize recipient, “Mr. Bachmann and His Class.” Others, I have yet to catch. That is always the way — but this year’s online-only presentation meant few buzzy, last-minute discoveries, found out by word of mouth.Instead the stellar program played at my personal convenience, in my living room, sometimes scarcely 12 inches from the end of my nose, on a laptop screen. The stories were teleported in perfect resolution directly into my brain, with a frictionless purity. At some point, I realized: It’s no longer even the sociability of the theatrical experience that I long for; it’s simply the interference. I miss the dust in the projector beam. I miss the tiny tactile imperfections of being in a public place that remind you there’s a world outside the film and your own echo-box brain. Without them, everything is too clean.“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” is a satire about a schoolteacher whose sex tape is uploaded to the internet.Credit…Silviu Ghetie/Micro FilmSo it’s good that some of the best films were, frankly, dirty. Radu Jude’s Golden Bear-winner, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” begins with graphic sex acts, and ends with a woman in a superhero costume shoving an oversize sex toy into a priest’s mouth. So, maybe not one to have on when the kids are home-schooling. In between, however, it’s perhaps the most direct sampler of pandemic-era filmmaking we’ve yet seen, with virus restrictions shaping both the form and the content of a scrupulously untidy satire about a schoolteacher whose sex tape is uploaded to the internet.But its central section is a different beast: a compendium of bite-size segments, most just a few seconds long, into which Jude packs a hundred sometimes blistering, sometimes banal observations about life, sex and Romanian society. It’s almost like an exorcism of all of the ideas that can ferment in a mind left alone too long with its thoughts — so it might feel familiar to anyone who has ever wildly overshared on a Zoom call because it’s their first social interaction in a week.Betsey Brown in “The Scary of Sixty-First,” about two young women who become obsessed with conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein.Credit…Stag PicturesBad taste is also the chief attribute of the actor-director Dasha Nekrasova’s hysterically schlocky “The Scary of Sixty-First.” In the film, two young women become obsessed (and possessed) by the sordid story of Jeffrey Epstein, as theorized on numerous conspiracy websites, after they discover he used to own their new apartment. It’s not directly about the pandemic, but the horror of the walls closing in and being Too Much Online are certainly elements many of us can relate to.Infinitely more wholesome, Natalie Morales’s “Language Lessons” is also a response to quarantine filmmaking restrictions. Told entirely via virtual-meeting app calls, it casts Morales as an online Spanish teacher who connects with a student (Mark Duplass) after the sudden death of his partner. It’s not often that films track platonic friendships as though they’re romances, and rarer still that the process happens exclusively in head-and-shoulder close-up. But the movie, while a little, well, “millennial” in its portrayal of the duo’s angsty interactions, is surprisingly easy to watch, despite the constraints of its format — a testament especially to Morales’s amiable screen presence.Mark Duplass, left, and Natalie Morales in “Language Lessons,” a movie told entirely via virutal-meeting app calls.Credit…Jeremy MackieIt would be a reach to claim any acute topical relevance in the quietly stunning Vietnamese title “Taste,” which took a Special Jury Prize in the festival program’s Encounters sidebar. But for those of us who have experienced lockdown as an infinitely repeating cycle of postures in the same few dimly lit interiors, there is a kind of kinship with its uncannily precise and minutely choreographed tableaux. The director Le Bao’s arresting debut is a largely wordless depiction of a Nigerian footballer who lives, cooks and occasionally couples with four Vietnamese women in an eerily stripped-back Saigon tenement.At the end of “Taste” a tiny rodent sticks its quivering nose out of a mouse hole, before retreating back within. Which leads me to those Berlin titles that are the opposite of brash, that beguiled me instead with their smallness — a quality flattered by the intimacy of online home viewing. And feature films don’t come much smaller than “Introduction,” the latest miniature by the South Korean auteur darling Hong Sang-soo. It is a 66-minute black-and-white scrap of a thing that still somehow manages to play as a deep breath of refreshingly cool, oxygenated air.It won’t convert anyone not already attuned to Hong’s low-key, rueful register, but for the initiated, its delicate story of a young couple navigating a fearful entree into the adult world with the well-meaning assistance of their mothers, has all of the familiar strangeness of the director’s best work.Joséphine Sanz and Gabrielle Sanz in Céline Sciamma’s “Petite Maman.”Credit…Lilies FilmsThere’s another small, exquisitely detailed portrayal of a mother-child relationship in “Petite Maman,” the latest film from the director of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” Céline Sciamma. “Portrait” was something of an art-house blockbuster when it came out last year, but in “Petite Maman,” Sciamma is back in the mode of earlier films like “Tomboy,” delivering a beautifully observed growing-pains drama that is also deeply respectful of the dignity and personhood of very young children. It has a magical central twist, but the film’s real magic is in its somehow healing evocation of the bone-deep loneliness of existence, summed up by a line spoken by its 8-year old star: “Secrets aren’t always things we try to hide. There’s just no one to tell them to.”Great films often feel like a secret you’ve been told, and that’s how it is with Alexandre Koberidze’s “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?,” a gorgeous modern fairy tale about ill-starred love, mysticism, soccer and street dogs, which is also perhaps the most bewitching love letter to a hometown that I’ve ever seen. Throughout, the filmmaker’s own wry baritone narrates, and sometimes contradicts or digresses from, the story, and the effect is almost a flirtation, as he invites you to amble with him through the ancient city of Kutaisi, Georgia, making briefly visible the invisible, supernatural forces that connect us all even though we don’t believe in them anymore.Ani Karseladze in Alexandre Koberidze’s “What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?”Credit…Faraz Fesharaki/DFFBFull disclosure: I got to see this one in a movie theater, at a socially distanced press screening before the festival began. (I’ve since watched it online, and its miraculousness was not lessened one iota.) So in addition to the transcendence offered by the scene in which a gang of local kids plays soccer in joyful slow motion while a gloriously cheesy song by the Italian singer Gianna Nannini plays, just this once, I also got the dust in the projector beam. It was like a glimpse of better, dirtier days to come.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More