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      Taylor Tomlinson: A Comic With the Confidence of a Star

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      On her new Netflix special, “Look at You,” she demonstrates tight joke writing, carefully honed act-outs and a ruthless appetite for laughs.The moment I knew that the stand-up comic Taylor Tomlinson was going to be a star was not after she made the precociously funny debut special, “Quarter-Life Crisis,” at the age of 25. Or her assured follow-up, “Look at You,” which premiered on Netflix this week. Or even after the news that she’s writing and starring in a movie about her own life (directed by Paul Weitz).It was the minute after the comic Whitney Cummings insulted her bangs.This took place on Cummings’s podcast, one of two freewheeling episodes that Tomlinson, now 28, appeared on during the pandemic that were also filmed and released on YouTube. For most of their chummy conversations, Tomlinson appeared polite, deferential, even in awe of her friend and mentor, a more seasoned stand-up, writer and television star. But when Cummings offhandedly suggested her protégé might need help from a stylist with her new haircut, the temperature in the room plummeted.“Are you serious?” Tomlinson asked, shooting a look that jarred the voluble Cummings into juddering paralysis. Tomlinson diagnosed the insult as a disingenuous play for content and calmly told Cummings to stop. Then came the counterpunch. Shifting from her friend to the camera, she told a story of pitching a television show with Cummings that described her, brutally, as an underminer. Tomlinson wrapped up this entertaining story with a compliment, saying she learned how to stand up to Cummings from Cummings. Along with teaching a lesson that it’s always best to tread carefully when commenting on a new hairstyle, Tomlinson displayed steel, poise, showmanship and a willingness to get tensely uncomfortable, which can help turn a good joke into a great one. More than anything, she showed a commanding ability to quickly pivot without fluster. Small talk can reveal big things.The bangs were gone by the time Tomlinson shot “Look at You,” but it did not escape my notice that after an arty opening shot of her all alone in the audience, she began her set with jokes about them. “It’s been a rough couple years,” she said, setting up expectations of talk about the pandemic. “I got bangs at one point.”This new hour has the confidence to start slowly but build, anchored by three or four superb extended bits. Tomlinson has emerged as one of the youngest comics with multiple Netflix hours because of tight joke writing, carefully honed act-outs and a ruthless appetite for laughs. With a quick smile and wide, alert eyes, her comic persona leans into a wholesome, cheerful affect, a Christian upbringing and impeccably basic cultural references (Harry Potter, Taylor Swift). This provides a solid backdrop for incongruously dark swivels, sometimes accompanied by the kind of shimmies Steph Curry does after hitting a shot near half court.Her gift is making weighty subjects come off as breezy. There’s no way a special that covers night terrors, panic attacks, bipolar disorder, a dead mother and a disturbingly blunt father, along with suicidal thoughts, should seem this delightful. That requires skill and savvy. Take her six-minute chunk on her mother dying young. These jokes are carefully massaged, contextualized and accented to work for any crowd, and among her strategies to lighten the mood is arguing that it’s OK to laugh because the death of her mother helped her career.“Do you think I’d be this successful at my age if I had a live mom?” she asks, flashing the kind of condescending disappointment given to someone ordering lobster at a diner. “She’s in heaven. I’m on Netflix. It all worked out.”Tomlinson has a people pleaser’s ability to ingratiate. In her new special, she says she looks like someone who would be better at meeting your mother than at sex. “I’ll meet your mom all night long,” she boasts. But to get a laugh, she’s just as happy to play the jerk. “Lot of my friends are settling down,” she says. “Some are just settling.”Tomlinson taped her first special after a breakup with her fiancé. Since then, she has clearly spent many hours with a therapist, which makes its way into many jokes. Ever since Maria Bamford dug into the subject of mental health, it has been explored thoroughly in stand-up, particularly in the last year or two, and we may be reaching the point of exhaustion. And Tomlinson occasionally risks veering into a kind of comedy that doesn’t fully digest and transform therapy into jokes.And yet, the strength of her best bits is the specificity and depth of her analysis of her own psychology. There are few jokes with the classical structure breaking down the difference between men and women, but more investigation into her own eccentric personality. She attributes her tendency to rush into relationships as a reaction to her mother’s dying so early in her life, and builds many jokes out of her trust issues, including a wonderfully performed series of punch lines about how she interprets any kindness from a boyfriend as a tactic. “Oh, is this your move?” is her refrain, about everything from opening the car door to staying together for six decades.Her first special was a portrait of a young fogy, but this new one zeros in on her self-protective cynicism and exaggerates it until it’s an absurd cartoon. The funniest parts of these jokes are in the subtext, how Tomlinson performs knowingness in a way that can be truly clueless. But unlike many comics who find laughs in saying the wrong thing, her act never comes off as character comedy. It’s a testament to her acting ability that even when you know she’s presenting a deluded version of herself, you buy it.For a comic her age, Tomlinson is remarkably nimble, able to pivot from light to dark, innocent to dirty, chummy to aggressive. Whatever gets the laugh. If there is something missing from her comic tool kit, it might be a certain vulnerability. She can push right past that, and understandably so. She’s dealing with grave issues, like a parent’s death or a wounding comment, and her emotional armor needs to be thick. Notably, she allows it to get a little thinner when it comes to more modest concerns like, well, her bangs. It’s in that bit that she sits in insecurity.“Having bangs is exactly like being on mushrooms,” she says. “The whole time you’re like: Do I look weird?” More

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      ‘Lupin,’ Netflix’s French Heist Drama, Is the Victim of a Theft

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      Equipment valued at more than $300,000 was stolen from the set of the hit series during filming in a Paris suburb last week.“Lupin,” the hit French heist drama, was itself at the center of a heist last week when about 20 young men wearing balaclavas stole equipment valued at more than $300,000 from the set during filming in a Paris suburb, a Netflix spokeswoman said.The theft, which was reported by the international news service Agence France-Presse and the French newspaper Le Parisien, came just over a week after more than 200 antique props valued at more than $200,000 were stolen from vehicles during the filming of the fifth season of “The Crown” in England, according to the South Yorkshire Police and Netflix.Netflix said in a statement on Thursday that there was an “incident” during the filming of the third season of “Lupin” on Feb. 25.“Our cast and crew are safe and there were no injuries,” the statement said. “We have now resumed filming.”A Netflix spokeswoman said that equipment and other items worth about 300,000 euros, or $332,000, were stolen by men who showed up on the set and “attacked” with fireworks. Filming was paused for an afternoon, and the local police were investigating, she said.“Lupin” became a global phenomenon upon its release in January 2021 and is among Netflix’s most streamed non-English-language original shows. Omar Sy plays Assane Diop, a debonair Parisian and the son of a Senegalese immigrant who idolizes Arsène Lupin, the “gentleman thief” and main character in a collection of stories by the French writer Maurice Leblanc starting in 1905.A spokesman for the police in Nanterre, the suburb outside Paris where the filming was taking place, said he could not comment on the case.In an earlier statement about the theft from “The Crown,” Netflix said that it hoped the items stolen from the set in Doncaster, in northern England, would be found and returned. The stolen items included a replica of a Fabergé egg, several sets of silver and gold candelabra, the face of a William IV grandfather clock, a 10-piece silver dressing-table set and crystal glassware, according to a report in the Antiques Trade Gazette.“The items stolen are not necessarily in the best condition and therefore of limited value for resale,” Alison Harvey, the set decorator for the fifth season of “The Crown,” told the Antiques Trade Gazette. “However, they are valuable as pieces to the U.K. film industry.”The South Yorkshire police said they had received a report of a theft in the late afternoon on Feb. 16. Three vehicles containing props had been “broken into” and “a number of items” were taken, they said. “Officers investigated the incident but all existing lines of inquiry have now been exhausted,” the police said in a brief statement.Matt Stevens More

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      Watch These 13 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in March

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      It’s awards season, and a bunch of great Oscar-winning and -nominated films are leaving this month. Check them out while you can.The Academy Awards arrive at the end of March, and the titles leaving Netflix in the United States this month are steeped in Oscar glory, including multiple nominees and winners for best picture, actor, actress and more. They also include hit comedies, erotic thrillers and family favorites. Queue up these 13 movies before they’re gone. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Howards End’ (March 15)This 1992 adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, and is a quintessential example of the “Merchant-Ivory film”: a period literary adaptation of impeccable design and intelligent craft. But Merchant-Ivory productions were too often inaccurately dismissed as airless, stuffy, overly intellectual affairs; “Howards End” is a robust, energetic picture, rife with familial betrayal, long-simmering attractions and class resentment. Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave and Helena Bonham-Carter are all excellent, but the standout is Emma Thompson, who won her first Oscar for her searing work as the protagonist Margaret Schlegel.Stream it here.‘Philomena’ (March 21)The British comic actor Steve Coogan — best known for his long-running turns as Alan Partridge and as a fictionalized version of himself in the “Trip” movies and BBC series — did a surprising shift to the serious when he co-wrote and co-starred in Stephen Frears’s adaptation of the nonfiction book “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee.” Judi Dench received an Oscar nomination for best actress for her heart-wrenching performance as the title character, an Irishwoman who sought out the son she was forced to give up for adoption a half-century earlier. Coogan (nominated for best screenplay) is the journalist who assists her and uncovers a horrifying story of religious hypocrisy.Stream it here.‘Lawless’ (March 27)The director John Hillcoat and the musician and screenwriter Nick Cave, who first collaborated on the unforgettable outback Western “The Proposition,” re-teamed for this story of bootlegging brothers in Depression Era Virginia. The cast is jaw-dropping: Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Noah Taylor and Mia Wasikowska all get a chance to shine, and if nothing else, “Lawless” is a priceless opportunity to watch some of our finest thespians rub elbows. But it’s thoughtful and entertaining besides; its Australian auteurs might seem an odd fit for such an inherently American tale, but their outsider perspective keeps them from overly romanticizing this criminal family’s “entrepreneurial” exploits.Stream it here.‘Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom’ (March 28)The “Wire” star Idris Elba is in top form in this handsome biopic of Nelson Mandela, tracking his journey from childhood in Apartheid-era South Africa through his protest, imprisonment, release and triumphant election as the nation’s first democratically elected president. The film is plagued by the issues of brevity so common to the biopic form, but the electrifying performances of Elba and Naomie Harris as Mandela’s wife, Winnie, give the picture its forward momentum and a sense of urgency.Stream it here.‘Blood Diamond’ (March 31)Leonardo DiCaprio snagged his third Academy Award nomination for his quicksilver turn as Danny Archer, a morally slippery smuggler and mercenary. Archer will do just about anything for a payday, so his initial presence in Sierra Leone circa 1999 is purely financial, but the more he learns about the struggles of civilians and the barbarism of loyalists, the less he can shrug off what he sees as the price of doing business. The director Edward Zwick is particularly proficient at personalizing stories of political and historical conflict (his earlier films include “Glory,” “The Siege” and “The Last Samurai”), and he is, as ever, a fine actor’s director, stewarding solid work from not only DiCaprio but also his co-star Djimon Hounsou, an Oscar nominee for best supporting actor.Stream it here.‘Bright Star’ (March 31)Jane Campion is heavily favored to win this year’s Oscar for best director for her stunning navigation of “The Power of the Dog.” Her masterful direction is rendered even more impressive by her long absence from the big screen; “Dog” was her first feature film since this fact-based romance, released in 2009. She tells the story of the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his late-in-life romance with his muse, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Other filmmakers might have focused on Keats and viewed Brawne as a mere passing fancy. But as she has throughout her career, Campion is fascinated by the emotional push-pull of romantic entanglements and the unexpected ways women find their power in these encounters.Stream it here.‘Gremlins’ (March 31)The rules have become part of pop culture consciousness: Don’t give them water; keep them way from bright light; and whatever you do, never, ever feed them after midnight. Of course, rules are made to be broken, and one of the purest pleasures of Joe Dante’s giddily entertaining 1984 smash is his winking acknowledgment that we’re waiting for all hell to break loose. Dante’s gift for barely-controlled chaos gives just enough discipline to Chris Columbus’s witty screenplay, while its cheerful disemboweling of twinkly, small-town values feels particularly subversive for a Reagan-era movie.Stream it here.‘I Love You, Man’ (March 31)The best Judd Apatow comedy that Apatow had nothing to do with, this shaggily charming 2009 comedy finds newly engaged (and likably uptight) Paul Rudd seeking out an adult male pal for the first time, and finding himself pulled into the orbit of goofy man-child Jason Segel. The writer and director John Hamburg (“Along Came Polly”) never quite builds up much in the way of stakes, but it’s such a pleasure to watch his stars play — as well as such welcome supporting players as Rashida Jones, Andy Samberg, J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtin – that you likely won’t mind.Stream it here.‘Interview With the Vampire’ (March 31)Anne Rice’s best-selling, long-running “Vampire Chronicles” finally made it to the silver screen in 1994, with Tom Cruise in the leading role of the vampire Lestat, a role whose sexual fluidity and camp theatricality seemed to many (including Rice herself) out of the actor’s reach. Yet Cruise acquits himself nicely, conveying the character’s charisma and menace, while Brad Pitt captures the hopelessness of the narrator, Louis. But the show stealer is Kirsten Dunst in a haunting performance as Claudia, a vampire who is “turned” as a child and remains locked at that age. The director Neil Jordan beautifully mixes the story’s Gothic horror and dark comedy elements, ladling on the Bayou atmosphere for extra spice.Stream it here.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘The Crown’ Jewels, and Other Props, Reported Stolen Amid Filming

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      More than 200 props valued at roughly $200,000, including antiques, a replica of a Fabergé egg, silver and gold candelabra and part of a grandfather clock, were reportedly stolen.It was not quite a royal heist.More than 200 antique props used during the filming of the fifth season of “The Crown” were stolen from vehicles last week in Doncaster, in northern England, according to the South Yorkshire Police and Netflix.The props are collectively valued at roughly $200,000, and include a replica of a Fabergé egg, several sets of silver and gold candelabra, a clock face of a William IV grandfather clock, a 10-piece silver dressing table set and crystal glassware and decanters, according to a report in the Antiques Trade Gazette.“The items stolen are not necessarily in the best condition and therefore of limited value for resale,” Alison Harvey, the series set decorator for the fifth season of “The Crown,” told the publication. “However, they are valuable as pieces to the U.K. film industry.”In a statement, Netflix, which streams the hit drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, confirmed that the antiques had been stolen and expressed hope that they would be found and returned.“Replacements will be sourced,” the company said, adding that “there is no expectation that filming will be held up.”The South Yorkshire Police said that they had received a report of a theft in the late afternoon on Feb. 16. Three vehicles containing props had been “broken into” and “a number of items” were taken, the authorities said.“Officers investigated the incident but all existing lines of inquiry have now been exhausted,” the police said in a brief statement.“The Crown” completed its fourth season in the fall of 2020 and won the prize for best drama at the 73rd Emmy Awards in 2021. Netflix has said the show will run a total of six seasons. It regularly recasts the roles of the central royals, and Netflix has said Imelda Staunton will play Queen Elizabeth II, Jonathan Pryce will play Prince Philip and Lesley Manville will play Princess Margaret in the coming seasons. More

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      Kanye West Always Wanted You to Watch

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      The three-part Netflix documentary “Jeen-yuhs” shows the superstar in his earliest days, then time warps to the present, with disorienting results.No one could quite understand why the young producer was being followed by a cameraman. Almost everywhere Kanye West went beginning in the early 2000s — before “Through the Wire,” before “The College Dropout,” before anything, really — he was trailed by Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, a comedian and public-access TV host from Chicago who had decided to document West’s attempts to become a successful musician.In “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” the three-part Netflix documentary that draws heavily on that footage, the camera serves two functions: It captures West at a vulnerable moment in his nascent career, when the future was anything but guaranteed. And it is also a kind of marker of success on its own. The camera’s presence forces the people West encounters to treat him just a tad more seriously, or at least to wonder if they should. In almost every encounter captured, there is a slight hiccup at the beginning, in which the other person wonders, what exactly are we doing here?West, one of the defining figures of the last 20 years, has been a consistent innovator in music and style. But he has also long had a preternatural grasp of the mechanisms of celebrity, how success is only truly impactful if it is imprinted onto others. West believed in himself, but wouldn’t stop until he’d convinced those around him, too.“Jeen-yuhs” is something like the demo tape of that phenomenon. It is both fascinating and obvious, eerie in the way that it foretells who West eventually would become by showing who he always has been.West, as we understand him now, is in early bloom during the first two of the docuseries’s three parts. Driving down lower Broadway in Manhattan, he tells a journalist sitting in the back seat how he feels when others tell him he’s thriving: “I might be living your American dream but I’m nowhere near where my dream is, dog. I got aspirations.” At one point, he says, “I’m trying to get to the point where I can drop the last name off my name.” (Indeed, he is now known solely as Ye.)Granting Simmons access was a combination of marketing savvy and also deep ego — “A little narcissistic or whatever,” West says. Nowadays, most pop superstars (and nowhere-near stars) are documented constantly for social media, but West understood the value of that labor early.The result is a prehistory of one of the most transfixing and agonizing celebrities of the 21st century. The footage could explain to aliens what creativity on Earth looks like. We see West recovering from his 2002 car crash, going through several dental procedures, and then getting back to work and emerging with “Through the Wire,” his debut single, which would finally catapult him toward the stratosphere. The camera captures a vivid, undimmable mind at constant, stubborn work.He asks to save the wires that held his jaw together, still bloody, for his mother, Donda. She appears throughout the film, often as a corrective force; even as West becomes more famous, he is never something other than his mother’s son. She doesn’t flinch from the lens, perhaps because the camera’s eye and that of a loving, knowing parent aren’t all that different.West also encourages the new people he meets to live out their relationship to him on camera. When he plays Pharrell Williams “Through the Wire,” Williams becomes a willing actor, walking out of the room and down the hall, overcome with thrill. After a recording session with Jay-Z in which West talks his way onto a song, Simmons prompts Jay-Z for a quote, asking him to literalize his co-sign of West for the camera.Not everyone plays along with West’s schemes. It’s odd to watch Scarface, one of rap music’s great philosophers, effectively pass on “Jesus Walks,” maybe the most meaningful and popular spiritual hip-hop song of all time. He also chides West for leaving his orthodontic retainers out on the countertop, a light spank from elder to child. (The retainers appear on several occasions, a symbolic embodiment of West’s still unformed persona.)There is, perhaps surprisingly, ample footage like this — this was an era in which West was almost always the less successful person in any interaction. Note the hangdog way in which he skulks out of the Roc-A-Fella Records office after going door to door and playing music for various executives, who seem to regard him as a lovable nuisance. Given how West moves through the world now, it’s disorienting to see him, time and again, as a supplicant.This is footage that most hagiographers would omit, but Simmons and his directing partner Chike Ozah — professionally, they’re known as Coodie & Chike — understand their subject differently. Simmons was inspired, he says in the film, by the Chicago basketball documentary “Hoop Dreams,” a film that cuts its melancholy with bolts of hope.And much about West in the early 2000s, before Roc-A-Fella Records relented and signed him as a recording artist (rather than just a producer), is lightly tragic. When West is at an industry event with far more famous people, in search of a little validation, Simmons films him from a distance, emphasizing his relative smallness. But even this footage doesn’t feel directed so much as captured, tiny moments that in the rear view appear huge.Cameras are not neutral — they change their subject. But while everyone lies for the camera, some people live in the camera. Throughout the film, West often appears most mindful of how history might regard him, driven by a sense that in a room full of people, the most important connection he could make was with Simmons’s lens. (See the scene in which he and Mos Def rap “Two Words,” and West appears to be staring through the camera’s aperture somewhere into the future.)Simmons offers largely space-filling voice-over throughout the film, not an unreliable narrator so much as an uncertain one. There is either far too much or not nearly enough of him, more likely the former: The segments where he links West’s story to his own feel particularly ill-placed, a distraction that doesn’t offer context on the main subject. And some narrative choices are contrived: Too much time is given over to West’s desire to be featured in an MTV News segment spotlighting new artists. (It so happens that MTV was where Simmons and Ozah met.)The success that Simmons had hoped to capture ended up being his termination notice — once West’s career was finally operating under its own steam, he left Simmons (and his footage) behind. That alone would have made for a compelling film. But the third segment, which is far more scattershot, consists largely of scraps that Simmons accrues over the next couple of decades, an era in which West becomes something unfamiliar to him: a world-building superstar.This episode is less narratively satisfying and coherent than the first two, but Simmons’s indiscriminate eye and his pre-existing comfort with West end up as assets. Where in the early 2000s, Simmons had an aspirant as his subject, now he has someone who exists between superhero and autocrat, a figure who isn’t performing simply for one camera but for a world of cameras and observers.There is a grim scene in which West is speaking with potential real estate partners, a gaggle of older white men, and tells them, “I took bipolar medication last night to have a normal conversation and turn alien to English.” He likens his treatment by the public to being drawn and quartered.Simmons lingers for a while — this is who his subject has become, and it is as important to see as any of the clips from when he was simply an up-and-comer. But real as it is, this isn’t the West that Simmons knows, or can stomach. There’s something itchy in the camerawork, and eventually Simmons does something that doesn’t seem to come naturally: He turns the camera off. More

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      Jean-Pierre Jeunet on “Amélie” and “Bigbug”

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      The French director is candid about his fights with Harvey Weinstein and his reasons for working with Netflix. And he can’t hide his joy about a rerelease of “Amélie.”The French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a conjurer of whimsical visions for the big screen, like his most beloved work, “Amélie.” But for his first movie in nearly a decade, “Bigbug,” out Friday, he chose to work with Netflix.This retro-futuristic comedy, which debuted Friday, is set in 2045, when artificial intelligence facilitates most quotidian tasks but also threatens mankind. Featuring Jeunet’s signature irreverence and colorful mise en scène, “Bigbug” follows an ensemble cast of offbeat characters and their domestic robots, confined to a technologically advanced home by the malevolent androids that now rule the world. Together they must find a way out.Jeunet considers it a cynical entry in an oeuvre that includes “Delicatessen” (1991), about a murderous landlord and his tenants in a postapocalyptic reality, and “The City of Lost Children” (1995), a steampunk fantasy centering on a mad scientist who steals children’s dreams.Speaking shortly before the recent Oscar nominations, the director, 68, said that two decades later it still pains him that “Amélie” didn’t win any of the five Academy Awards it was up for in 2002.He said he believed the academy shut out his film over the producer Harvey Weinstein’s awards campaign tactics. “It was a punishment, not for me but for him,” he said. “But this was our year! That is a trophy I would have liked to have.”Jeunet was speaking from his home in Paris. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Claude Perron in a scene from the retro-futuristic “BigBug.”NetflixWere you thinking about the dystopias of your earlier films, like “The City of Lost Children” and “Delicatessen,” when you were writing “Bigbug”?I used to say this was “Delicatessen 2.0.” No, the concept was to make a cheap movie, because all my films are very expensive and I was looking for something with a single set, like “Delicatessen.” It was a concept to write a story with people stuck in a room and it was created before Covid, which is funny. We wrote this story during the shooting of “The Young and Prodigious T. S. Spivet” [about a boy genius on a cross-country journey]. I’m sure you don’t know about it.I actually have seen it.Oh, you saw it! Cool, because Harvey Weinstein did everything he could to kill that movie. [Laughs] Have you seen it in 3-D?Yes, it played in a couple theaters in 3-D in 2015. I remember it took a long time to be released in the U.S.I know, because he didn’t care. I refused to modify the film. Of course he wanted to re-edit, but now it’s fun to imagine him in jail. [Laughs]Can you elaborate on what happened with Harvey Weinstein on that film?He told me, “We will do something better than with ‘Amélie.’ I promise.” But when after some test screenings he was like a gallery owner saying to the painter, “We’re going to modify the green because in U.S. we don’t like green. I will ask the framer to put some blue instead.” I refused. I said, “I won’t change one frame.” So he punished me like he punished everybody. He wanted to do that with “Amélie” as well, but he couldn’t because it was such a success. He never touched a thing.Your films often feature mechanical gadgets. “Bigbug” has a lot of robots that were physically built.I love to imagine these objects because I get to keep them. I don’t know if it’ll be possible with Netflix. I hope so. Two years ago, a beautiful exhibition of props from our movies in Paris and in Lyon had 180,000 admissions. I was waiting for money for “Bigbug” and nobody wanted to produce it. But yes, it was such a pleasure to imagine the robots, especially Einstein [a mechanical bust resembling the physicist]. He had 82 motors inside to move.Thinking of how “Bigbug” presents technology, are you afraid of the future or what the future may hold for humanity?I am just curious, because I am not young and I would like to live to see what will be the next gadget, the next iPhone, the next GPS. Maybe there will be more drama, maybe nothing. Maybe the earth will disappear like in “Don’t Look Up.” I’m curious more than afraid. If I had kids, maybe I would be more scared about the future.What do you believe it says about the future of our flawed species?I hate messages. But if there is a message in “Bigbug” it is that artificial intelligence will never kill human beings because they will stay stupid. They don’t have a soul. They try to have a sense of humor, but they don’t understand anything. [Laughs]Jeunet working with François Levantal during production of “BigBug.”Bruno Calvo/NetflixWhy do you think it was difficult to find the funds to produce “Bigbug”?Because in France, when you have something original you’re [expletive]. It was the case with “Delicatessen.” The same for “Amélie.” It was too weird, too quirky, as you say in English. With Netflix it was kind of a dream. They wrote me and said, “Do you have something?” And I said, “Yes, I have a film, but in France nobody likes it. You won’t like it.” [Laughs] They told me, “Send it.” Twenty-four hours later it was greenlighted!Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      The Kanye West Documentary 'Jeen-yuhs' Finally Hits Netflix

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      The new three-part film “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy” has been in the works since the early 2000s. In an interview, the directing duo Coodie & Chike discuss its long journey to Netflix.“Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” Netflix’s three-part documentary about the rise of Kanye West, does not dwell, or seek to correct the record, on the most well-known of the rapper’s celebrity blowups. George W. Bush, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian hardly factor. There has never been a shortage of West analyzing his own travails, after all.Instead, relying on casual footage chronicling the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of West’s 2004 debut album, “The College Dropout,” the four-hour-plus film lingers on quieter, pre-fame moments: chats with his mother, Donda, about the difference between confidence and arrogance; the desperation of trying to play his demo CD for disinterested peers; a more respected artist being disgusted by West’s orthodontics retainer.Behind the camera throughout was Clarence Simmons, a stand-up comedian-turned-director known as Coodie, who along with his creative partner, Chike Ozah, has been compiling video of West for more than 20 years. But that wasn’t always the plan.Originally conceived as a “Hoop Dreams”-style feature, the documentary was supposed to end in the early 2000s, with West — who is now legally known by his old nickname, Ye — winning his first Grammy Award. But as West developed from a nerdy Chicago beatmaker for Jay-Z to a polarizing, era-defining artist across music, fashion and more, he grew apart from Coodie, an old neighborhood friend, and changed his mind about the project, leaving hundreds of hours of tape in limbo.Following some false starts and brief reconciliations, the directing duo Coodie & Chike, as they are credited, finally found traction — and more time with West — in recent years, amid another uptick in controversy. West’s mental health struggles, disastrous 2020 presidential run and recent album named for his late mother all get some airtime in the third episode.Yet the core of “Jeen-Yuhs” remains the vérité depiction of West’s chrysalis years, with Coodie filling in the gaps in time by telling his own story of personal metamorphosis and creative ambition. “This is not the definitive story of Kanye West, this is the story told through the most unique perspective,” said Ian Orefice, the president of Time Studios, which co-produced the project.Ahead of its first-episode premiere on Wednesday, Coodie and Chike discussed the long-gestating documentary, the ups and downs of living alongside mega-fame and West’s last-minute demands for final cut of the film. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Chike Ozah, left, and Clarence Simmons, known as Coodie, collected early footage of West’s rise — and then had to wait.Rafael Rios for The New York TimesThe film begins with the premise that you always knew Kanye would make it big. What first convinced you that he was going to be a star?COODIE It started with his production. But then I would just keep running into Kanye, and I remember he was performing with his group, the Go Getters. He just commanded the stage. I was like, “This is the dude! The producer — he’s the one.” Then I saw how he loved the camera. He was loving the camera. He wanted to rap for anybody, and it was just like he was performing for a thousand people, but it’s just one person and he’s rapping to them.What was Kanye’s original reason for not putting a film out back then? In the footage, he’s so excited to tell people you’re making a documentary.COODIE He said, “Man, I don’t want nobody to see my real self.” He said, “I’m acting right now.” It was too intimate. But I feel like the reason why he was loving me filming him at the beginning was just because I was that dude, really. I was popular in Chicago — cool, funny.CHIKE You brought value to his brand in Chicago instantly, just by deciding to have him on Channel Zero [Coodie’s original hip-hop show on public access television].COODIE The greatest ambition was for him to win a Grammy, and I wanted to follow him to see it. But it’s definitely, definitely a blessing that it didn’t come out, because I didn’t know what I was doing at all.What was it like to watch the rest of his rise from more of a distance?COODIE I was so proud ​​to see him accomplishing all the things he was accomplishing. But then I felt left out, too. Like when he went to Oprah, I’m like, “I want to meet Oprah!”CHIKE It’s not all peachy and clean. I think that’s the case with anybody that’s on the rise to stardom like this. Coodie and I definitely felt what it’s like when outsiders come in and start jockeying for position. We had that Bryan Barber and Outkast vibe for a minute — like we’ll rise together and do all these music videos. But as he got bigger, more people started coming into the fold and you just get pushed out. Luckily, Coodie and I had a relationship and a bond together and we were able to find creativity elsewhere.At that point, did you believe the project to be dead or did you always assume you would return to it eventually?COODIE I felt like we would come back to it someday. I used to look at all the mini-DVs, and the bigger he got, I knew how much more valuable my footage would be: One day in God’s time, this is going to happen.He sat us at the table at Kris Jenner’s house, right before “Pablo” [the “Life of Pablo” album in 2016], he was like, “Man, you know, I get misunderstood a lot.” He asked us to be his voice. We thought it was time for the documentary to come out, for people to see the real Kanye. He was working with Scooter Braun at the time and we were at HBO with it. Then all of a sudden, they had other plans for Kanye. We were right there and it just went to nothing.It felt, to me, that Kanye was crying out for help at that moment. Right after, he went on the Saint Pablo tour and that’s when he had the breakdown — he calls it the “breakthrough.” I was really, really worried. I thought we were supposed to help him and we weren’t able to because of the powers around him. Not only did I feel worried, I was extremely mad about it.“I did ask Kanye, ‘Did you watch the film?’” Coodie said. “And he said that’s not his process.”NetflixOn a practical level, how did you keep all those tapes safe?COODIE I really didn’t even. You’d just see it in a duffle bag, shoe boxes.CHIKE But it’s like bricks of gold in there.COODIE It’s in storage now, though!When did you know that you finally had his full buy-in?COODIE When I showed him the sizzle. He called me out of nowhere and said he was working on an album about his mom and he wanted to use some of my footage. He asked for my blessing and I said, “Oh, for sure, but I need your blessing for something. I’ll fly wherever you’re at.” His security called me like, “Can you come to D.R. tomorrow morning?” When I finally showed him the sizzle, he was like, “We’ve got to put this out tomorrow.”There’s a moment in the footage from the Dominican Republic when he goes off on what some might call a classic Kanye rant and you cut the camera. Why?COODIE I felt like I needed to pay attention. I’ve never filmed him like that. When I film him, there’s a certain way that he is with me — he’s himself. At that moment, he was not himself. When you’re taking medication, you’re not supposed to have alcohol. I knew Kanye wasn’t supposed to drink. It just so happened he had a drink in his hand. I wasn’t going to interrupt this business meeting to say something, but I kind of wanted to. It seemed like right after that drink, something happened. I said, “Forget this camera — this is my brother right here.”Once the film was in motion, how involved did he want to be and how involved did you want him to be?COODIE He said, “Let’s me and you do it,” and I told him, “You have to trust me on this.” Meaning no creative control. I said, “It would not be authentic if you have it.” He got all of that. And that was it.Then you get to the 1-yard line, 20-plus years later, and he drops a bomb on Instagram about wanting final cut.COODIE I almost fainted [laughs]. It was on my birthday — Jan. 18. He didn’t post that then, but I’m getting text messages. I’m like, “What? We finished!”On his birthday [in June], I went to L.A. with the rough cuts of the film to show him. I said the only way you can watch this film is with everybody who was there at the beginning who loves you. So we was getting a house, I had everybody ready to go — we’re going to laugh, cry, embrace Ye. But he wound up going to the South of France and it didn’t happen. Then my birthday, I get that text — next thing I know, I look up and here comes everybody with the cake. “Happy birthday to you!”Did he ask again about getting into the editing room?COODIE Nah, his process is to have people look at it, so we showed them the film. I did ask Kanye, “Did you watch the film?” And he said that’s not his process.The movies that we’ve done, nobody had final cut. We did Martin Luther King — the family didn’t have final cut. We did Muhammad Ali — they didn’t. Stephon Marbury didn’t see his documentary until aired it at Tribeca. Our intent is pure and that’s really all that matters.Do you have favorite stuff from the cutting room floor that you just couldn’t squeeze in there, no matter how much you wanted to?CHIKE There’s a scene when Kanye goes back to Chicago to perform at a tribute to people who were lost in the E2 tragedy [a stampede at a Chicago nightclub]. When he gets there, he ends up having to settle up a beef with another rapper. He almost gets a bottle cracked over his head — it gets real ugly. It could’ve gone somewhere worse. And Kanye’s not even that type of artist! But he still can’t escape the street mentality. And it deals with a beat that Jay-Z ended up with that helped propel Kanye’s career.COODIE It was “Never Change” on “The Blueprint.” He sold Jay-Z the track that he sold to [the Chicago rapper] Payroll as well. Payroll wrote the hook — “out hustling, same clothes for days.” Kanye let Payroll know he was about to sell it, but he also did Payroll’s hook. Kanye took care of Payroll after that, but Payroll was like, hold on … He said, “Kanye you’ve got to give me more.” I’m telling them like, nah! But for them to crush the beef was good, too.Kanye is back in the tabloids these days because of his divorce. When you see this celebrity hurricane side of his life, do you worry for him?COODIE I used to worry, but I know that God has his back. He almost died in a car accident a couple of times — he had a car accident in Chicago even before he moved to New York, flipped his truck over. A couple other incidents that I’ve seen — God is really looking out for him, for whatever reason. When I see this now, I’m like, it’s going to pass like everything else did. More

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      Can Works Like 'Don't Look Up' Get Us Out of Our Heads?

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      In the doomsday smash and Bo Burnham’s pandemic musical “Inside,” themes of climate change, digital distraction and inequality merge and hit home.An Everest-size comet is hurtling toward Earth, and in exactly six months and 14 days, the planet will be shattered to pieces, leaving every living creature to perish in a cataclysm of fire and flood. In “Don’t Look Up,” Netflix’s hit climate-apocalypse film, this news largely bounces off the American public like a rubber ball. And they return to their phones with a collective “meh” — opting to doomscroll instead of acknowledging certain doom IRL.With the hope of snapping the masses from their stupor, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, a young scientist with a Greta Thunberg-like disdain for the apathetic, screams into the camera during a live TV appearance: “You should stay up all night every night crying when we’re all, 100 percent, for sure, going to [expletive] die!” She’s swiftly dismissed as hysterical, and an image of her face is gleefully seized on for the full meme treatment. (More spoilers ahead.)What the internet has done to our minds and what our minds have done to our planet (or haven’t done to save it) are two dots that have been circling each other for some time. Now, onscreen at least, they’re colliding, resonating with audiences and tapping into a particular psyche of our moment.In “Don’t Look Up,” a satirical incision from Adam McKay with only humor as an anesthetic, these themes are lampooned in equal measure and in no uncertain terms. Though heavy with metaphors — most important, the comet signifying climate change — its message is clear and not open to interpretation: Wake up!That the movie amassed 152 million hours viewed in one week, according to Netflix, which reports its own figures, suggests a cultural trend taking shape. There’s a hunger for entertainment that favors unflinching articulation and externalization over implication and internalization — to have our greatest fears verbalized without restraint, even heavy-handedly, along with a good deal of style and wit.Learn More About ‘Don’t Look Up’In Netflix’s doomsday flick, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth.Review: It’s the end of the world, and you should not feel fine, writes the film critic Manohla Dargis.A Metaphor for Climate Change: With his apocalyptic satire, the director Adam McKay hopes to prompt the audience to action. Meryl Streep’s Presidential Turn: How the actor prepared to play a self-centered scoundrel at the helm of the United States.A Real-Life ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment: The film revives memories of a nail-biting night in the Times newsroom two decades ago.Look at “Inside,” Bo Burnham’s pandemic comedy-musical masterpiece from Netflix last year, in which he pools themes of climate disaster with Silicon Valley’s commodification of our thoughts and feelings, and its reliance on keeping us jonesing for distraction. (In the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” tech experts who had a hand in building these structures sounded an alarm over what they’d done.)Bo Burnham skewers the internet’s effects on humanity and the planet throughout his Netflix special “Inside.” NetflixIn his sobering song “That Funny Feeling” which has more than 6.7 million views on YouTube alone, Burnham sums it up in one lyric: “The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door.”“Twenty-thousand years of this,” he goes on, “seven more to go.” Most likely a nod to the Climate Clock, which displays messages like “the Earth has a deadline.”At the start of Jim Gaffigan’s new Netflix comedy special, “Comedy Monster,” he responds to opening applause by saying, “That almost makes me forget we’re all going to be dead in a week. I’m kidding. It’ll probably be a month” — seemingly referencing both the pandemic and general vibe.And “Squid Game,” a wildly violent, rich-eat-the-poor satire from South Korea that was a global smash for Netflix last year, while not about climate change, explored many of the same themes as “Don’t Look Up” — wealth inequality, greed, desensitization and voyeurism — flicking at the same anxieties and offering a similar catharsis.As with “Squid Game, ” some critics were lukewarm about “Don’t Look Up” — for being too obvious, shallow and shouty — but many climate scientists were moved and appreciative. In therapy, we’re often told that the best way to address our demons is to speak them out loud, using words that don’t skirt the issues or make excuses for them. Otherwise, they will never seem real, thus can never be dealt with. In “Don’t Look Up,” most people don’t snap out of their daze until the comet is finally in physical view. Do the popularity of shows and movies that don’t mince messages reveal a growing readiness to bring our common dread out of the deep space of our subconscious — to see it, to say it, to hear it?We’ve long been enveloped by a 24-hour news cycle that unfurls in tandem with social media feeds that give near equal weight to all events: Clarendon-tinged vacation photos, celebrity gossip, snappy memes and motivational quotes are delivered as bite-size information flotsam that sails alongside news of political turmoil, mass shootings, social injustice and apocalyptic revelations about our planet.“Squid Game,” a global streaming sensation last year, explores themes of wealth inequality, greed and desensitization.NetflixAs Burnham, personifying the internet in his song “Welcome to the Internet,” with more than 62 million YouTube views, asks: “Could I interest you in everything all of the time?”Next month, Hulu will premiere the mini-series “Pam & Tommy,” a fictionalized account of the release of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s personal sex tape, which was stolen from their home in 1995 and sold on what was then called the “World Wide Web.” The show presents the tape as helping the web become more mainstream by appealing to base human compulsions — an on-ramp to what would lie ahead.The pandemic has sent us further down this rabbit hole in pursuit of distraction, information, connection, all the while we try to shake that sense of impending doom.At one point in “Inside,” while curled up in the fetal position on the floor under a blanket surrounded by jumbles of cords — an image worthy of a pandemic-era time capsule — Burnham, his eyes closed, ruminates on the mess we’re in.I don’t know about you guys, but, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that, you know, maybe allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit — you know, maybe that was a bad call by us. Maybe the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley — maybe that as a way of life forever, maybe that’s not good.In “Don’t Look Up,” the chief “bug-eyed salamander,” a Steve Jobs-like character and the third richest man on the planet, is almost completely responsible for allowing the comet to collide with Earth; his 11th-hour attempt to plumb the rock for trillions of dollars worth of materials fails. In the end, he and a handful of haves escape on a spaceship, leaving the remaining billions of have-nots to die.Juxtaposed with Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men on Earth, launching into space on his own rocket last year — a trip back-dropped by pandemic devastation (and a passing blip on the cultural radar) — is beyond parody … almost.Near the end of “Don’t Look Up,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, an awkward astronomer turned media darling, delivers an emotional monologue. Staring into the camera, he implores: “What have we done to ourselves? How do we fix it?” Funny. We were just asking ourselves the same thing. More