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Season 5 of ‘The Crown’ Depicts a Low Point for the Monarchy
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‘Enola Holmes 2’ Review: A Clever Force of Nature
Millie Bobby Brown delivers an understated, playful performance in this young-adult mystery sequel.Enola Holmes is back, and she’s ready for both her first official case as a detective and, work schedule permitting, some romance. Millie Bobby Brown delivers an understated, playful performance in the follow up to the Netflix young-adult mystery “Enola Holmes.” This time around, the director Harry Bradbeer and the screenwriter Jack Thorne forgo prolonged dialogue when Enola breaks the fourth wall, making more room for Brown’s intense looks and physical gestures to resonate.Working in the shadow of her famous brother, Sherlock (Henry Cavill), Enola realizes that independent, professional women are treated more like suspects than like trusted investigators in Victorian England. So it makes sense that her first case comes from a fellow young woman, Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss), who needs to track down a missing co-worker at a matchstick factory where women workers are mysteriously dying of typhus. (This plot point was inspired by the women who orchestrated the 1888 Match Girls Strike in London.)Sherlock himself is working on a case of stolen government funds, and the siblings eventually discover their cases are in fact linked. As Enola finds she can hold her own, both alongside and without her brother, a sheltered girl gives way to a young woman who embraces the literal and figurative fighter in her, finding solidarity with working-class women in the fight for women’s rights in the process. As Edith, a suffragist leader and jiu-jitsu master played by a steadying Susan Wokoma, proclaims in the film: “You can’t control Enola. She’s a force of nature.”Speaking of the movie’s well-choreographed fight scenes, when Enola’s mother, Eudoria (a delightful Helena Bonham Carter), and Edith band together to beat the heck out of grown-men assailants, one can’t help but cheer on this Y.A. feminist tale as a welcome addition to the Sherlock Holmes universe.Enola Holmes 2Rated PG-13 for moderate violence. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
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People Love to Hate-Watch Tech Villains. That Won’t Hurt Spotify.
“The Playlist” resembles other TV dramas that follow founders to their eventual comeuppance — except Spotify isn’t facing any messy implosion.Daniel Ek, a founder of Spotify and its current chief executive, sits in front of a U.S. Senate committee hearing. Or rather: A Swedish actor playing Ek sits in front of a Senate hearing, as imagined by a Swedish production designer. A fictitious senator named Landy is grilling him, hard. “Your business model just doesn’t work for musicians, does it?” she asks. Her tone makes it obvious that she already knows the answer Ek would give if he were willing to tell the truth. As she peppers him with facts and figures about Spotify’s market share and artists’ measly cut of its revenue, Ek tries to fight back, insisting that his streaming service, whatever its shortcomings, is still the best path forward for musicians hoping to make a living from their art. But the more Landy presses, the more shaken Ek looks, as though he didn’t expect the questioning to be so tough. There is a moment in which it seems he might be considering the possibility that her criticisms have merit: Maybe, despite all of his company’s rhetoric about freedom for artists, he really is just a new breed of music-industry monopolist.After Ek, the committee calls Bobbi T, a fictional musician and, coincidentally, a childhood friend of Ek’s. She is appearing as a representative of Scratch the Record, a musicians’ advocacy group calling on Spotify to distribute more of its revenue to the artists whose work constitutes the core of its platform. Her own songs are streamed 200,000 times each month, yet she struggles to get by. She understands, she says, that “in every generation there are winners and losers.” But lawmakers, she insists, should be able to tell “the difference between change and exploitation.” Ek, sitting in the audience, looks as if he would rather be somewhere, anywhere, else.These scenes appear in the sixth and final episode of “The Playlist,” a new Netflix series that chronicles Spotify’s journey from Ek’s brainstorm in Stockholm to a worldwide streaming behemoth. The first five episodes, inspired by a book by two Swedish journalists, have the same narrative shape as basically every show or movie that fictionalizes the real story of a tech start-up. Socially alienated coders with a bold vision? Check. An open-plan office with a foosball table? Check. Stodgy industry executives who just don’t understand the coming sea change (until they’re forced to)? Fund-raising woes? Just-in-time software breakthroughs? Check, check, check.This final episode, though, abandons the source material completely, zooming forward into a fictional near-future: Ek’s big Senate hearing takes place in the year 2025. This future may look a lot like the present, but it is in many ways as fanciful as anything on “Star Trek” or “The Jetsons.” This is a world in which people are moved by the opinions of musicians who aren’t megastars, and there’s some threat of legislative action that could plausibly help bands replace the lost revenue stream of physical albums. It’s a future in which Spotify is bigger than ever — but battle lines are being drawn, and they’re making Daniel Ek sweat.We love stories about underdogs who, armed only with the strength of their vision and perseverance, hit it big and change society. The world of business used to be a little too slow-moving, complex and impersonal for that kind of narrative. But tech start-ups — with their meteoric overnight successes, unconventional young founders and industry-upending products — changed that, creating a new well of David-beats-Goliath stories.Of course, we now know that many of tech’s Davids ended up becoming Goliaths of their own, creating at least as many problems as they ever fixed. Others, we’ve learned, were merely hucksters, plying their trade at the intersection of fad-oriented venture capital and loose regulatory structures. None of this has dimmed our appetite for tech-underdog tales. We still want the fun of seeing David outwit slow, out-of-touch Goliath; it’s just that we also want to congratulate ourselves, along the way, for seeing through David’s every move. So we get stories like “The Dropout,” which shows us Elizabeth Holmes turning an undergraduate hunch into the company Theranos (before being exposed as a fraud), or “WeCrashed,” which lets us tag along as Adam Neumann makes WeWork into an international office-space empire (then gets pushed out as the company becomes a financial mess), or “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” which traces the company’s dramatic transformation of urban transit (while stressing, at every turn, the amoral ruthlessness of one of its founders, Travis Kalanick). We watch these companies dupe and manipulate the world while, sitting at home on our couches, we enjoy the experience of knowing better.More people than ever, I suspect, harbor a vague sense that what Spotify offers must, in the end, be screwing someone over. But the company hasn’t had anything close to a significant moment of public reckoning, let alone been revealed as some scam or house of cards. (If anything, the industry has reveled in the money Spotify brought pouring back to major record labels; it’s musicians who often end up empty-handed.) This is why “The Playlist,” notionally a behind-the-scenes imagining of the past, is forced to lurch into a wholly fictional future. Only there can it give Spotify the comeuppance that the genre has conditioned us to expect, but reality has completely failed to deliver.It’s striking that even after loosing itself from the shackles of the present, the show can’t find its way to giving Spotify more than a slap on the wrist. Bobbi T, the struggling musician, pleads for Congress to pass a law guaranteeing a fixed payment to artists every time one of their songs is streamed. “The Playlist” gives no sign, though, that this will happen, and it has no particular vision of how artists could accumulate the leverage to force the issue. Nor does it suggest that normal people will start paying for albums again. It doesn’t depict the live-music industry reversing the trends making it less and less viable as an income stream, and it certainly doesn’t show masses of people quitting Spotify or other streaming platforms (like, um, Netflix) in protest. All it gives us is the pageantry of a Senate hearing and a few pointed questions, something executives endure all the time without much changing. The show seems to know this: In the end, the fictional future Ek cares what Bobbi T has to say mostly because they went to high school together.Unlike, say, Theranos, Spotify’s product works — just not for most musicians. That’s one reason it hasn’t imploded. Another is the service’s successful colonization of our imaginations. More than once in “The Playlist,” die-hard skeptics are won over by opening Spotify and experiencing the thrill of a seeming infinity of options, all at their fingertips. The app itself tells a visceral story about what’s possible — inevitable, even. Users have largely accepted this story. Anyone looking to challenge it will have to tell a story of their own, and it won’t be enough for this story to be obviously correct or morally right. It will have to somehow feel as powerful and exciting as Spotify itself: the type of thing you could imagine making a whole TV series about.Above: Jonas Alarik/Netflix.Peter C. Baker is a freelance writer in Evanston, Ill., and the author of the novel “Planes,” published by Knopf this year. More
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Stream These 7 Movies and Shows Before They Leave Netflix This Month
The losses for U.S. subscribers aren’t that heavy in November, but a few bona fide greats and quirky favorites are among them.Fans of made-for-cable sci-fi, quirky stand-up comedy and romantic comedies will want to jump on the titles leaving Netflix in the United States in November. And if you’re looking for a superhero sendup or one of Spielberg’s first cracks at serious drama, a few of those are leaving soon as well. Move them to the top of you “to watch” list while there’s time. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Suffragette’ (Nov. 15)The director Sarah Gavron assembled a high-caliber cast — including Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Ben Whishaw and (in a brief but memorable role) Meryl Streep — for this stirring account of the women’s equality movement in London, circa 1912. Mulligan stars as a laundry worker who is swept up into the suffragette protests, which the screenwriter Abi Morgan is careful to frame as a continuing concern. “Suffragette” asks compelling questions that continue to resonate, about the responsibility of the vote, the impenetrable structure of power and the place of violent resistance in the politics of protest.Stream it here.‘Donald Glover: Weirdo’ (Nov. 18)Donald Glover wasn’t particularly famous yet when he released this stand-up special in 2012; he was still best known as a supporting player on “Community,” and he makes a side reference here to the recent release of his first EP. His primary focus, at that time, was still this stage act, a fast-paced set filled with pop-culture references, social commentary and semi-surrealist observations. Some of the references have dated, as one would expect from an of-the-moment special released 10 years ago. But the funniest and smartest material, covering relationships, sex and (especially) racism, is timeless.Stream it here.‘Bridget Jones’s Baby’ (Nov. 30)Twelve years after the underwhelming sequel “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” Renée Zellweger returned to the cozy cardigans of Helen Fielding’s heroine for one more go-round. The third film in the series has Bridget finally at peace with her weight but still struggling for satisfaction with her career and love life — and the latter concern becomes especially keen when she gets pregnant. She’s unsure of the father; it could be new beau Jack (Patrick Dempsey) or her old flame Mark Darcy (a returning Colin Firth). Zellweger’s delightful characterization creates a breezy mood, and if this installment is featherweight even by rom-com standards, our affection for the characters holds it aloft.Stream it here.‘Clueless’ (Nov. 30)This 1995 comedy from Amy Heckerling catapulted a slew of careers (including those of Alicia Silverstone, Donald Faison, Brittany Murphy and Paul Rudd), as well as an entire ’90s glut of teen comedy adaptations of classic literature (including “10 Things I Hate About You,” “She’s All That” and “Cruel Intentions”). But the first remains the best. The writer-director Heckerling, who directed “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” continued to display an impeccable ear and eye for the dialogue and behavior of her teen protagonists, and she managed the miraculous feat of writing a script that satires their vapidness and privilege without condescending them.Stream it here.‘The Color Purple’ (Nov. 30)Whoopi Goldberg made her film debut in Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alice Walker’s — a stunning bit of trivia, considering how confident and assured her work is here. (She was nominated for an Oscar for best actress.) She stars as Celie, a young Black woman in the midcentury rural South who must cope with racism, cruelty, sexism and worse, yet manages to find her true self, and the joy within. It was Spielberg’s first attempt at serious, prestige drama, and while those growing pains are occasionally apparent, the picture is nevertheless directed with sensitivity and grace. Co-stars Margaret Avery and Oprah Winfrey (also making her film debut) were deservedly nominated for Oscars as well, while Danny Glover and Adolph Caesar are memorably monstrous in the key male roles.Stream it here.‘Hancock’ (Nov. 30)The current (and seemingly endless) superhero vogue was barely underway back in 2008 — the summer of “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” — when the director Peter Berg released this clever subversion of comic book conventions. Co-written by the “Breaking Bad” mastermind Vince Gilligan, it stars Will Smith as a burned-out, alcoholic superhero whose careless escapades are more likely to cause serious property damage than save any lives. But when he rescues an opportunistic public relations man (Jason Bateman, at his smarmiest), his attempts at media rehabilitation just cause more problems. (Charlize Theron co-stars as the P.R. man’s wife, who turns out to be much more than a homemaker.) Some viewers resisted “Hancock” because it cast Smith against type as an unlikable antihero … maybe the timing is better now?Stream it here.‘Stargate SG-1’: Seasons 1-10 (Nov. 30)The phrase “cult favorite” gets thrown around for just about anything with an identifiable fan base these days, diminishing its true meaning as a badge of honor and admission among certain subsets of antisocial weirdos. But unless you’re really, really into low-rent turn-of-the-millennium sci-fi, you may not even know that the hit 1994 film “Stargate” was turned into a television series — much less one that ran for a staggering 200+ episodes. Richard Dean Anderson, of “MacGyver,” takes over for Kurt Russell as the Air Force Colonel who discovers the Stargate, an alien pathway to other worlds and times. The mythology is elaborate and the scripts are occasionally silly, but it offers engaging characters, go-for-broke performances and hours of low-calorie entertainment.Stream it here. More
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James Wan Prefers Peter Jackson’s Gory Horror Comedies
The director of 21st-century horror blockbusters (and “Aquaman”) on the movies, food and trading cards that get him through the Halloween season (and beyond).From “Saw” to “Insidious” and “The Conjuring,” James Wan has been a director, creator and producer on some of the biggest horror franchises of the last two decades. Even when he’s gearing up for films outside his genre (Wan’s “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” drops next year), he’s never far from the horror conversation. The trailer for the Wan-produced possessed doll film, “M3GAN,” lit up the internet when it was released earlier this month. So, it’s not surprising that Wan takes the Halloween season seriously. To start, there’s the annual pilgrimage to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood.“I get to take a break from work and indulge my horror craving,” he said in a recent video interview. “But I’m not watching it, I’m walking through it and experiencing it in a more tactile way. I like to be scared. But, ultimately, it’s fun. You know the guy chasing you with an ax isn’t actually going to ax you.”And then, of course, there are the films. Wan rotates through some of his favorite horror films in October, like “Chopping Mall” and “Night of the Creeps” — or “The Frighteners,” which he says is full of the director Peter Jackson’s unique sense of humor.“Sadly, most people today know him from his ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, but for hardcore fans we all grew up with ‘Dead Alive,’ ‘Bad Taste,’ and ‘Meet The Feebles,’” he says. “In his gory horror comedies, his horror set pieces are so over the top — blood spraying everywhere — it’s just hilarious. And that’s what I see in ‘The Frighteners,’ a little bit of that cheekiness peppered throughout.”Here, Wan talks about the places, movies and food that he enjoys throughout the year. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Last of Us Part II” During the pandemic, I played “The Last of Us Part II,” like, five times. It feels like I’m actually playing a movie. These games are so in-depth, you spend hours and days and even weeks with the characters and the story, and you get caught up with them emotionally. And that’s what “The Last of Us Part II” did so well: It was exciting, it was scary, but it was ultimately driven by emotion.2. “Mars Attacks” Trading Cards I grew up collecting toys, comic books and trading cards. During the pandemic, I got back into collectibles. I went on eBay and tried to collect all of the “Mars Attacks” cards. Unfortunately, the originals are almost impossible to find, so I had to buy some reissues. I collected a lot of sports cards in my high school days, so now it’s kind of fun to collect non-sports ones, like “Mars Attacks.”3. Home Theater When I was renovating the home that I’m in now, one of the things I really wanted was a really good home theater. I’ve got nice recliners, a big screen, high-end projectors, a great sound system and the room is fully soundproofed. The first full movie I watched in there was “Tenant.” It’s my pride and joy of the house.4. 1978 Rolex “Pepsi” Another thing I like collecting are vintage watches. They don’t have to be big and fancy. I enjoy the idea of so much artistry and engineering going into something that’s so small. The older the watch is, the cooler it is to me. One of my favorites is my red and blue 1978 Rolex GMT-Master 1675 “Pepsi.” I thought it was fun to get a watch that was, basically, as old as me.5. Netherworld Haunted House One of my favorite haunted houses that I’ve been to is called Netherworld, near Atlanta. A group of us went when we were shooting “Furious 7” around Halloween. There are a lot of cinematic ideas that they put into it. It’s really cool to see them pull off a lot of the gags with cool animatronics, great lighting, fog, and other old-school film tricks, which is the stuff I like about old-school horror films.6. My Mother’s Laksa I grew up on a spicy Malaysian noodle dish called Laksa. It’s not an easy dish to get in America and usually when they do make it, it’s not quite like the one I grew up with. Where I was born in East Malaysia, they make Laksa with spicy shrimp paste, while the rest of the world seems to make it with curry paste. And it just has a different flavor. It takes a lot of work and patience to make — which I don’t really have the time for — so, I just wait until my mother visits me from Australia. She brings all the ingredients and she cooks it for me.7. My Courtyard Garden When you see Rob Zombie and then you see his crib, you kind of go, Oh yeah, that makes sense. When people come to my place, they notice that it’s very different from the kind of movies I make. I need a space that’s calm, light filled, and peaceful. I love my courtyard. It’s a peaceful place for me to go out in the middle of the night, pace back and forth and just think.8. “The Cuphead Show!” Late at night, just before bed, my wife and I have been watching “The Cuphead Show!” on Netflix. It’s a cartoon based on a video game, Cuphead. It’s about a pair of cups who are brothers. I love the old-timey cartoon aesthetic. It’s a nice palate cleanser.9. Antique Music Boxes I have a handful of antique music boxes. I love the way they cram such smart engineering into tiny little boxes. I have one on my coffee table that’s about the size of a child’s coffin. I also have an old gramophone that I like to play every now and then. It freaks my wife out because it sounds like something that’s straight out of one of my horror films — you know, that crackly record player that’s playing some old-timey music.10. The Uffizi Gallery I’m a big fan of Italian art and culture, from artists during the Renaissance to Italian horror directors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. When we went to Florence a few years ago, I said we had to visit Uffizi Gallery. The place is filled with the most incredible artwork from artists like Rembrandt and Caravaggio. It was amazing. To see the works of artists I grew up admiring was one of my favorite life experiences. More
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Guillermo del Toro Opens His ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’
For the first season of his horror anthology for Netflix, the filmmaker handpicked eight directors to tell a series of strange and macabre tales.When Guillermo del Toro was a child in Guadalajara, Mexico, he used to stay up late watching TV with his older brother. One night they happened upon an episode of the 1960s science fiction anthology series “The Outer Limits” called “The Mutant.” In it, Warren Oates plays an astronaut who gets caught in radioactive rain on another planet.“There’s a moment where he removes his goggles and his eyes are as big as the goggles,” del Toro recalled in a recent video interview. “And I started screaming. My brother put me to bed. You could say the rest of my life has been a counterphobic reaction to the fear I felt seeing that episode.”Today, del Toro, 58, elicits screams from others, with movies like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and TV series like “The Strain.” And now he has his own anthology series, “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.” The first season, which debuts Tuesday on Netflix, is a collection of eight hourlong horror tales, each from a different director. Del Toro handpicked the eight directors featured in the first season: some of the world’s brightest horror minds, including Ana Lily Amirpour (“The Bad Batch”), Panos Cosmatos (“Mandy”) and Jennifer Kent (“The Babadook”).Two episodes are based on original stories written by del Toro, who created the series. Another two are based on classic tales from the macabre master H.P. Lovecraft. All have sky-high production value.“I got to spend all that Netflix money,” Amirpour said in a recent video interview; her wickedly funny chapter, “The Outside,” tells the story of a woman (Kate Micucci) who develops an unhealthy relationship with a new beauty product.“With Guillermo, when you work with someone who has that level of power, you can really thrive and make something cool,” she added.Del Toro entered the project as a curator and a fan, with the goal of highlighting stories, storytellers and filmmakers he loves.“I was hoping to select some stories that I like, that have not been adapted, or have not been adapted with a very protected production environment,” he said. “And I wanted to find directors that I was curious about. I wanted to almost collect and curate a group of directors and stories and then give them all the support and freedom, final cut, the chance to feel that the resources were there.”Kate Micucci’s character develops an unhealthy relationship with a beauty product in “The Outside.”Ken Woroner/NetflixPeter Weller (“Robocop”) plays an eccentric wealthy recluse in “The Viewing.”Ken Woroner/Netflix There were major challenges. In practical terms, the “Cabinet” really contains eight one-hour films, with settings including rustic 1909 Massachusetts (“Pickman’s Model,” directed by Keith Thomas) and a late-1970s version of future shock (“The Viewing,” Cosmatos). The directors were essentially their own showrunners.“This really does feel like a movie of mine,” Amirpour said. “It was a whole and total creation, from having my hand on the script to completion. It felt so completely and totally mine.”Multiple cinematographers and editors worked on the series, but there was only one industrious production designer, the del Toro regular Tamara Deverell (“Nightmare Alley,” “The Strain”), who embraced the task of designing everything, such as a giant animatronic rat (for “The Graveyard Rats,” Vincenzo Natali) and a sketchy storage facility (for “Lot 36,” Guillermo Navarro).In a video interview, Deverell recalled that “Cabinet” had reused a set from del Toro’s 2021 film “Nightmare Alley” for both “Lot 36” and “Graveyard Rats.” She also noted the complexities of carrying out the vision of eight different filmmakers. But she’s not complaining. She sees del Toro as the perfect collaborator, an artist who knows that storytelling is visual as well as verbal.“He understands space and things like ceiling heights and square footage and the shapes of things in a way that a lot of directors don’t,” Deverell said. “He makes it so easy. The set is of equal importance as the actors or the story. It’s part of the same world that he’s trying to create.”Describing an episode of “The Outer Limits” he watched as a child, del Toro said, “You could say the rest of my life has been a counterphobic reaction to the fear I felt.”Austin Hargrave/NetflixDel Toro is an avid collector of books and comics; as he spoke from his office in Santa Monica, Calif., stacks and stacks of volumes loomed in the background. He’s a particular fan of anthologies, those that come between two covers — the first book he ever bought with his own money was a horror anthology edited by the science fiction writer Forrest J. Ackerman — and onscreen. When he wasn’t screaming at “The Outer Limits,” he was watching “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” “One Step Beyond,” “Night Gallery” and “Ghost Story,” among others.“They were my favorite things to watch,” he said. “It’s the same way I loved reading short stories, more than any other form. I just find them immersive and self-contained and incredibly attractive. If you come to the library of my horror wing, most of what I collect is anthologies.”He worships the material and its history, a fact that isn’t lost on the actor Tim Blake Nelson. Nelson, also featured in del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” and the coming “Pinocchio” movie, is the star of “Lot 36,” the story of a racist scavenger who swoops in on delinquent customers’ storage containers and sells their belongings. Yes, he receives a ghoulish — and many tentacled — comeuppance.To Nelson, del Toro’s passion for the macabre pushes his work beyond the realm of genre.“I believe that Guillermo’s reverence for horror is so deep that it’s no longer horror,” he said in a video interview. “You’re dealing with someone who’s able to see the macabre as reality, not fear-driven fantasy. You no longer think of it as occult or genre; you think of it as reality, and that makes it all the more terrifying.”Tim Blake Nelson (left, with Sebastian Roché) plays a racist scavenger in “Lot 36.”Ken Woroner/Netflix“Pickman’s Model,” starring Ben Barnes, is set in 1909 Massachusetts.Ken Woroner/NetflixDel Toro was originally supposed to direct an episode, but the pandemic delayed production of both “Nightmare Alley” and “Pinocchio.” So, instead, he offered to host. At the beginning of each installment, he saunters out of the darkness up to what appears to be an elaborate model mansion with drawers.He pulls out a miniature ivory figurine of each director and offers an introduction. (Originally, cabinets of curiosities contained anatomical specimens, talismans and the like, all reflecting the curator’s tastes and instinct for showmanship.) These introductions play like the classic openings of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”But if “Cabinet of Curiosities” has a spiritual forbear, it is someone more sinister. The writer H.P. Lovecraft, who lived from 1890 to 1937, has inspired memorable movies (“Re-Animator”) and television (“Lovecraft Country”). The episodes of “Cabinet” his stories inspired are “Dreams in the Witch House,” directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and “Pickman’s Model,” about a painter (Crispin Glover) with dark and devilish muses. (“Pickman’s Model” was also the basis of a 1971 “Night Gallery” episode that gave this reporter childhood nightmares.)Known for what del Toro called “overwrought prose and arcane adjectives,” Lovecraft is also terrifying in his dark view of humanity.“He was cosmically misanthropic,” del Toro said. “He was the outsider of the outsiders. It’s very hard to imagine anyone overtaken by more fear. His idea was that the cosmos is malevolent by the mere notion of how large it is. You cannot encompass it, and that alone is madness. That resonates through the ages.”Del Toro, by all accounts, is no Lovecraft. He is a jovial guy and supportive colleague who is nonetheless drawn to the darkness. He is on the side of the artists, and the monsters. He’s the happy frightener.“He’s never imposing his will on anybody,” Amirpour said. “He’s just trying to help you find the best way to do what you’re trying to do. What truly sets him apart is his generosity of spirit. I’m ruined now. It’s like having courtside seats and then having to go sit somewhere else.” More
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Netflix Adds 2.4 Million Subscribers, Reversing a Decline
Netflix, which has about 223 million subscribers worldwide, will soon introduce a lower-priced service with ads in a bid to attract more customers.Netflix said Tuesday that it added more than 2.4 million subscribers in the third quarter — mainly from outside the United States — snapping a streak of customer losses this year that spurred unease among investors and questions about how much more the streaming business could grow.The streaming giant said it now has 223 million subscribers worldwide, after beating its earlier forecast of about one million additions for the quarter. Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter, and nearly one million in the second.“After a challenging first half, we believe we’re on a path to re-accelerate growth,” Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. “The key is pleasing members.”Netflix is preparing to introduce advertising on its service on Nov. 3, part of a bid to attract more customers with a lower-cost subscription. The advertising-supported tier, priced at $6.99 a month in the United States, will show subscribers four to five minutes of ads per hour of content they watch.Netflix generated about $7.9 billion in revenue in the third quarter, a nearly 6 percent increase from the same period last year. The company generated about $1.4 billion in profit, a 3 percent decrease from a year earlier.The Race to Rule Streaming TVNetflix Ads: The streaming company said it will soon offer a cheaper ad-supported subscription, which will show people four to five minutes of ads per hour of content they watch.Late-Night Talk Shows: TV executives are mulling the future of the genre, which is struggling to make the leap to the streaming world.Apple’s Will Smith Movie: After a long discussion, Apple said it will release the film “Emancipation” — the actor’s first since his infamous slap at the Oscars — in December.Cable Cowboy: The media mogul John Malone opened up about the streaming wars, the fast-changing news business and his own future.Netflix shares were up more than 10 percent in after-hours trading.Netflix said in its letter to shareholders that it expected to add 4.5 million subscribers in the fourth quarter, a 46 percent decrease from the 8.3 million subscribers it added during the same period last year. Netflix also said it would stop providing guidance to investors on its projected subscriber count beginning next quarter.Rich Greenfield, an analyst for Lightshed Partners, said the results indicated that Netflix would flourish as competitors continue to lag behind.“I think the reports of streaming’s death or maturity have been greatly exaggerated,” Mr. Greenfield said.The decision to introduce an advertising option on Netflix was an about-face for the company, which for years had highlighted its ad-free experience as a selling point for customers. But this year, after announcing subscriber losses on the company’s first-quarter earnings call, the co-chief executive Reed Hastings reversed course, saying that an advertising-supported plan would allow customers to choose their experience.Streaming has become an increasingly competitive industry in recent years. Disney, for instance, reported in August that it had about 221 million subscriptions across its bundle of services. It will start offering a lower-priced advertising tier for Disney+ in December.Mr. Hastings expressed relief about the company’s financial results during a video interview conducted by an analyst that was posted by Netflix on Tuesday evening.“Well, thank God we’re done with shrinking quarters,” Mr. Hastings said, laughing.Netflix is breaking with convention in other ways this fall. The company plans to release “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” in 600 theaters across the United States for one week beginning on Nov. 23 ahead of its streaming debut, the first time the company has struck a deal with the nation’s largest theater chains at once. The movie, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is the anticipated follow-up to the 2019 hit starring Daniel Craig as the Delphic detective Benoit Blanc.Netflix told employees this year that it was also planning to crack down on password sharing, which allows users to watch content without paying for a subscription. The research firm MoffettNathanson estimates that 16 percent of Netflix users share passwords, more than any other major U.S. streaming service. Netflix said in April that passwords were being shared with an additional 100 million households, according to its estimate.The company has also cracked down on costs. In May, Netflix laid off about 150 workers across the company, primarily in the United States, or about 2 percent of its total work force. Netflix said in a statement that the cuts had been spurred by the company’s slower revenue growth.Despite the changes, Netflix hasn’t yet been able to reverse a precipitous decline in its share price. The company’s stock has tumbled more than 60 percent over the last year amid a broader market slump, as investors and analysts grapple with the economics of streaming video.During the third quarter, Netflix released a mix of films and TV shows, including “The Gray Man,” a big-budget action film starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the sibling filmmakers behind “Avengers: Infinity War.” Other popular titles included the serial killer show “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”; the romantic drama “Purple Hearts”; and “Stranger Things,” which released the second half of Season 4 near the end of last quarter. More
- in Television
For ‘The Great British Baking Show,’ ‘Mexican Week’ Was Not an Accident
After 12 years, the show’s long, inexorable journey from comfort to cringe is complete.Remember Custardgate? Deborah and Howard each cooked a custard and put it in the fridge to chill. But then! When Deborah was layering her trifle, she grabbed Howard’s custard by mistake. Well! This left Howard no choice but to use Deborah’s custard in his trifle. I couldn’t forget the whole frivolous affair if I wanted to — and I don’t.In its early days, the pleasure of “The Great British Baking Show” was in the reassuring fantasy it built under a high-pitched country tent — an endless source of cheeky innuendo, serious amateur baking and absolutely nothing else. The worst thing imaginable was that someone’s Battenberg cake would come out a bit asymmetrical, or that one baker might accidentally use another baker’s custard.Sue Perkins, then a host, described Custardgate as either a mistake, or “the most incredible case of baking espionage,” not because of actual drama or suspicion, but because problems on the show tended toward the truly wholesome and amusing. Taking them too seriously was a sport.From the start, “The Great British Bake Off” — as it’s known in Britain — seemed completely unlike the chef-driven, adrenaline-fueled, corporate-branded American competition shows that dominated at the time, where contestants casually announced their intention to win — not to make friends! It promised to disrupt the genre.But over its 12 years on the air, the worst thing imaginable on Bake Off has gotten worse, again and again. Last week, the hosts, Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas, strolled up a grassy slope dressed in fringed serapes and straw sombreros to introduce “Mexican Week” with tired puns, saying they shouldn’t make “Mexican jokes” but proceeding to do just that. The show had hit rock bottom, revealing what it had managed to obscure in the past with a bit of charm.To British audiences, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Fielding appearing in a casually racist bit might not have come as a surprise, but American audiences aren’t as familiar with their previous work. In part, that’s because “The Mighty Boosh” and “Little Britain,” their shows which aired in the early 2000s in Britain, were both pulled by Netflix a few years ago over their performances in blackface, brownface and yellowface.The current group of “Great British Baking Show” contestants.Love Productions/NetflixThe “Bake Off” clips were shared incredulously and angrily on Twitter, days before the episode even aired. The phrase “Mexican Week” quickly became shorthand for profound culinary blunder, presented with a sense of naïve triumph. An image of a cursed avocado, lopped away with a knife, became the episode’s unofficial mascot, as if a home cook unfamiliar with peeling an avocado should feel humiliated.To me, it felt more like the episode had betrayed its own contestants, as well as its audience, with a lack of expertise among judges, and a lack of curiosity among hosts. Paul Hollywood explaining steak tacos with pico de gallo and refried beans to Prue Leith would be howlingly funny, if he weren’t positioned as an expert.It was even worse than the clips implied — an hour of incompetent exposition, farcical bumbling and maracas-shaking. A distraction for an increasingly insular, self-referential show that’s run out of energy and expertise, and refuses to find it elsewhere.The show has slowly moved away from regional specialties and technique-centered challenges, from focusing on, say, the beauty of lamination, hot-water crusts and steamed puddings. It has grown to fit the exact, most clichéd limits of its form — countries as themes, cuisines as costumes, identities as performances.Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc, the show’s original hosts, excelled at double entendres, while playing up their lack of baking expertise. But they glowed with curiosity and enthusiasm for baking, and short documentary segments they hosted often featured experts, and cultural context, for many foods on the show. But in more recent seasons, several challenges have presented foods as if encountering them for the first time. A recent, and almost equally chaotic “Japanese Week” introduced a challenge of Chinese steamed buns.As the show found a wider audience in the United States, and moved from the BBC to Channel 4, it lost Ms. Perkins, Ms. Giedroyc and Mary Berry, a judge who was replaced by Ms. Leith. And while it’s tempting to say the show hasn’t been the same since, you might also say its worst tendencies have simply flourished. Viewers have been pointing them out for years. In an old episode, Mr. Hollywood repeatedly and inexplicably referred to challah, a traditional Jewish bread, as “plaited bread,” which prompted the Forward headline, “‘Great British Bake Off’ Has Zero Jewish Friends.’”And in 2019, Sana Noor Haq wrote about the tension between the show’s image as a bastion of modern, multicultural Britain and the judges’ clear sense of discomfort — or smirking amusement — when contestants like Michael Chakraverty infused the flavors of coconut and chile into his Keralan star bread.Contestants were expected to perform their biographies, neatly and concisely, for the judges. To make the flavors and designs of their foods add up to a pleasant and consumable identity. Never mind that some bakers managed to have fun with it, or be really good at it.It was always an impossible task: If they failed, they failed. If they succeeded, they were exotic. And either way, two comedians in serapes and sombreros would come ambling up the hill behind them, insisting they weren’t going to make any jokes.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More
