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      Book Review: ‘Reckoning,’ by V (formerly Eve Ensler)

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      Writing now as V, the creator of “The Vagina Monologues” tackles racism, colonialism and sexual violence in a raw and free-associative collection.RECKONING, by V (formerly Eve Ensler)Way before #MeToo — not that it’s a contest — there was Eve Ensler, shouting all the way up into the cheap seats. Her breakthrough 1996 play, “The Vagina Monologues,” eventually performed by a rotating cast of celebrities, amplified stories of rape and abuse and helped de-taboo the female anatomy. Two years after that success she founded V-Day, which has raised piles of money to fight violence against women and girls around the world: Galentine, with gravitas.The writer identifies so strongly with the letter “V” that she has taken it as her new name, she announces in a characteristically raw and free-associative memoir, “Reckoning.” This is a gesture that seems — like most of what she has done in a long career — both performative and potent. “V” stands for “vagina,” “V” stands for “victory,” “V” stands for “peace” (we’ll forget about the canned vegetable drink and the old NBC series about aliens wearing human masks), and for Generation Y on social media, a “V” hand signal has become as popular as the thumbs up was for boomers, the former Ensler’s generation. “I am older now,” she laments. “Irrelevant in the cult/ure of youth, followers and TikTok.”“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,” the English poet Jenny Joseph wrote (to her eventual consternation), and on the back cover of “Reckoning” its rechristened author stands in a fuchsia caftan, raising arms in a V-shape to a rainbowed, sunsetted sky. A little cornball maybe, like a motivational desk calendar in a mall gift shop, but having survived incest, alcoholism, uterine cancer and the occasional mixed review, V, who will turn 70 in May, just Does. Not. Care. She has plenty of fuchsia left to give.For those familiar with Ensler’s work, much of “Reckoning” will feel like a jagged replay of her core stories; amply represented are transcripts of speeches she’s delivered at the conferences and forums where she’s become an honored guest, or pieces previously published in places like The Guardian. She processed her experience fighting cancer in a previous, more humorous memoir, “In the Body of the World” (2013), which was also made into a stage show, and the post-9/11 world in “Insecure at Last” (2006).Now she is examining a term that has become ubiquitous to the point of cliché in American discourse since the murder of George Floyd. For V, as before, the political is intensely personal.Her father’s horrific molestations, which began when she was 5, are further detailed; in what is perhaps the consummate therapy exercise, she expands on the apology she wrote on his behalf in another book. She reveals more of her mother’s complicity by indifference — “I needed her milky breasts. I got cigarette smoke instead” — and her posthumous bequeathal of a musty brown envelope (“Does pain have a smell?” V wonders) with a picture inside of the author as a baby, mysteriously bruised and bloodied. “I spent an entire childhood ducking, fists permanently raised like a boxer, quick but never fast enough, darting, panicked, frenetic, unbearably anxious,” she remembers. “My body was never my body.”In apparent refutation of the patriarchy V wants passionately to upend, “Reckoning” obeys no conventional chronology or form. It’s collaged together with concepts — the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, for example, is linked to birds falling from the skies in 2020 — and exhibits a woman drawn inexorably, as if in repetition compulsion, to sites of even worse suffering than her youth. It’s a kind of Choose Your Own Abomination, from Covid to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt to Congo, where the author has done humanitarian work and tells of murdered infants and children, repeated rape and even forced cannibalism.“How do I convey these stories of atrocities without your shutting down, quickly turning the page or feeling too disturbed?” she wonders in an essay that was originally written for Glamour. Contemplating the ISIS sex market, she imagines “crates of AK-47s, falling from the skies” and “breasted warriors rising in armies for life.”I think V underestimates herself; the jump-cut style she’s refined for decades is actually perfectly suited to people who get their news from TikTok, and her rhythmic singling out of particular words — which she calls “trains traveling through a lush countryside”— presaged hashtag activism.Along the long highway of her argument here, that readers should wake the heck up to injustice and suffering, poems pop up, like little rest stops. “Think of your luxuries, your cell phones/as corpses,” she writes of the mass rapes that occur near coltan mines, which are tapped to manufacture electronic devices. In a section that graphically recalls how AIDS ravaged friends and colleagues, she promises Richard Royal, a collaborator on a magazine called Central Park, that she will not write a poem about the budding trees; he hated pathetic fallacy and echoed Adorno that there is no poetry since Auschwitz. So after his death, in winking homage, she versifies instead his medical woes.“One is always failing at writing,” V acknowledges, in a sentiment any writer understands. And indeed “Reckoning” is, if not a failure, kind of a bloody mess, but defiantly, provocatively, maybe intentionally so. It exhorts readers to confront the worst and ugliest, pleads for progress and peace, and provokes admiration for its resilient, activist author. V shall overcome, someday.RECKONING | By V (formerly Eve Ensler) | Illustrated | 272 pp. | Bloomsbury | $28 More

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      in Theater

      5 Broadway Veterans on Race and Representation in Theater Design

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      “Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism.” Set designers, lighting designers and a sound designer talk about skin tones, aesthetics and more.Design for live performance can cast a surreptitious spell, shaping an audience’s perceptions with stimuli we might not even notice consciously: a change of light, a snatch of sound, a detail of costume or décor. It’s encoded language, and we respond to it viscerally.To the lighting designer Jane Cox, the Broadway veteran who directs the theater program at Princeton University, that dynamic makes design ripe for interrogation in the context of antiracism. A course that she and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins taught, about race and lighting design, was one of the seeds of a multidisciplinary symposium, “Sound & Color — The Future of Race in Design,” taking place Saturday and Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory. Organized by Cox and Tavia Nyong’o, a curator at the Armory, it will include commissioned installations by young designers of color.Cox and four other Broadway designers participating in the symposium spoke recently by phone about race and culture in design. These interviews have been edited and condensed.Mimi Lien, Set DesignerMimi Lien won a Tony Award in 2017 for the set design of “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.”Emma PratteDesigners for live performance create and curate an experience, right, by juxtaposing visual, sonic, tactile, spatial elements within a time-based structure. All of these chosen elements carry so much cultural meaning and emotion. The job of designers is to handpick those elements and create a design vocabulary that communicates narrative or a particular emotion. With that comes so much responsibility, because our landscape is constructed with the goal of telling a particular story or reaching a particular audience with really calibrated visual and sensory cues.There is a lot of talk about representation right now. But for me, the real interest of this symposium is the aesthetic question. Like, why do people have certain associations with certain colors, and with darkness versus light? That is a huge cultural, media, anthropological question. And I’m really interested in how the two things intersect: What is the intersection between representation and aesthetics?Jane Cox, Lighting DesignerJane Cox was a Tony Award nominee in 2022 for her work on “Macbeth.”Evan AlexanderBranden says, “Racism is a visual ism.” And he’s right. Racism is perpetrated or understood through how we see other people. How we hear other people. And that happens through the way people are dressed, through the spaces they inhabit, through the way they move, through sounds. When they’re depicted in an image or on a stage or in a movie, design impacts enormously how you see people and how you feel about them. Who’s the center of focus, who’s not the center of focus. Theater traffics in unconscious symbolism, and so does racism.My great hope is to investigate more deeply the ways in which our imaginations are colonized by our specific cultures. Designers are people who believe in our senses. How does sensory input impact these questions of racism? The point of the weekend is to try to start to find a language to talk about these things.Justin Ellington, Sound DesignerJustin Ellington was a Tony nominee in 2020 for “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” and his work can be seen on Broadway in “Topdog/Underdog” and “Ohio State Murders.”Justin Ellington“Race.” [sighs] That word. The angle I’ll be coming from is more cultural than race. A lot of the work that we do, especially with the contemporary work, is very specific about certain communities. There are people that live in those communities, and then there are people that need to do research to understand what’s going on. Living in a place and then hearing about that place that you live in is often drastically different.I was part of a workshop recently and some of the dialogue that was given to the Black characters, I was like, “I don’t know those people, never heard of those people.” Definitely imagined Blackness. As a designer, we need to read scripts and not just say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Because you’ll find yourself in Act II like, “What?” It’s like, “That is a terrible misrepresentation of a people.” I’m a sound designer by title but I’m a storyteller first. Sometimes I feel like a cultural watchdog.Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, Lighting DesignerJeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s work can be seen on Broadway in “Kimberly Akimbo.”Hunter CanningThere’s no such thing as racially correct lighting. So in some ways I’m free of that burden. What I have as a burden is a conversation that always comes up, about skin tone — how to be able to represent performers in the best light. Lighting white skin is just as complicated as lighting other, nonwhite skin because everybody’s skin tone reflects a different kind of way. You do have to train your eye.Many years ago, I saw a show that had an Asian cast. There’s a certain idea of lighting design that we should always have a warm and a cool tone onstage. This lighting designer’s particular warm tone was very amber; amber gel has a lot of green in it. Literally the Asian people just looked like they had liver disease, warm and yellow because of the skin tone having more green in it.Adam Rigg, Set DesignerAdam Rigg was a Tony nominee in 2022 for “The Skin of Our Teeth.”Ian MaddoxWe’re taught rules. Especially in theater and opera, there are systems that we follow straight down to the architecture of the space. Which were mostly designed by white men. The future, for me, it’s not about wiping away that history. It’s about truly finding a way to find equity in the vocabulary.I don’t want to get myself in trouble, but I’ll just say it. “Ain’t No Mo’” was originally designed by a team of BIPOC designers [Black, Indigenous and people of color]. The work was shocking and exciting. Then it moved to Broadway with still some designers of color, but some white cis male designers incorporated into the team. You could feel the cleverness draining from it. It felt safer. If we’re really trying to broaden Broadway — which is what the end goal for most of us is, to able to make a living — that representation goes down to design as well. Who was in the room not saying, “Hey, ‘Ain’t No Mo’,’ it’s a really Black play.” Who was just like, “Let some white people design it”? More

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      in Music

      Terry Hall, a Face of Britain’s Ska Revival, Is Dead at 63

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      The son of Coventry factory workers, he overcame a traumatic childhood to find fame in the Thatcher years as the frontman of the Specials.Terry Hall, the frontman of the Specials, the British ska band that blended pub-fight energy with socially conscious lyrics that explored the political and racial tensions of Britain in the late 1970s and early ’80s, died on Dec. 18. He was 63.The cause was pancreatic cancer, his former bandmate Horace Panter announced on Facebook. The announcement did not say where he died.After enduring a traumatic childhood, Mr. Hall went on to enjoy a chart-topping music career.He forged his most lasting legacy as a face of the revival of ska — the pop genre that emerged in Jamaica in the 1960s, blending Caribbean styles like calypso with rhythm and blues — that shook the British music scene during the early, convulsive Margaret Thatcher years.The Specials were key figures in the movement, along with Madness, the Selecter, Bad Manners and the Beat (or the English Beat, as they were known in the United States to distinguish them from the American band of the same name).Clad in the fashions of Jamaica’s slickly attired rude boys — often with tapered suits, skinny ties and porkpie hats — the Specials sounded off about racial injustice, soaring unemployment and ultra-right-wing violence over a rave-up party sound that left sweaty audiences in a frenzy.Hollow-eyed and phlegmatic, Mr. Hall channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.The band released its debut album, produced by Elvis Costello, in 1979, two years before racial unrest rocked cities throughout Britain. With five white members and two Black ones, the Specials “were a celebration of how British culture was invigorated by Caribbean immigration,” Billy Bragg, the British singer-songwriter known for his leftist politics, wrote in a social media post after Mr. Hall’s death.“But the onstage demeanor of their lead singer was a reminder that they were in the serious business of challenging our perception of who we were in the late 1970s,” Mr. Bragg added.Mr. Hall performing with the Specials in London in 1980. He channeled outrage with a vocal style that often made it sound as if he were spitting weary invective as much as singing.David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesMr. Hall believed that England needed a band to vocalize the country’s unease at the time. “What I didn’t realize,” he said in a 2020 interview with the music writer Pete Paphides, “was that it might be us.”The Specials scored seven straight Top 10 singles on the British pop charts, starting in July 1979 with “Gangsters,” which reached No. 6, and concluding in June 1981 with the No. 1 hit “Ghost Town,” a mournful rumination about a lack of opportunity for British youth in a sinking economy against a backdrop of perceived government apathy. Their other hits included “A Message to You Rudy” (No. 10) and “Too Much Too Young” (No. 1).The Specials in Los Angeles in 1980. From left: Horace Panter, Mr. Hall, John Bradbury and Neville Staple.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesEven when topping the charts, Mr. Hall and the band showed little interest in becoming part of the London entertainment machine.Proudly based in Coventry, a rough-and-tumble industrial city in the West Midlands known for its automobile factories and its sizable West Indian population, the Specials scarcely paid lip service to the frothy trends bubbling up from the banks of the Thames.“We’ve got everything we want here,” Mr. Hall said in a television interview in 1980, when he was at the peak of his fame but still living with his parents. “There’s a studio here, there’s a train station, that’s all we need.”As for London, he said: “There’s nothing for me, or for any of us; there’s no point in hanging around trendy London clubs until 4 in the morning. I’d rather stay in and watch telly.”In addition to his star turn with the Specials, Mr. Hall scored four Top 10 hits in Britain with Fun Boy Three, a deadpan and oddly experimental new wave group he formed in 1981 with the Specials’ other vocalists, Lynval Golding and Neville Staple. In 1983, the band hit No. 7 with its cover of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” a 1981 hit for the Go-Go’s that Mr. Hall wrote with that band’s Jane Wiedlin, whom he briefly dated.Terence Edward Hall was born in Coventry on March 19, 1959. His father, Terry Hall, Sr., worked at a Rolls-Royce aeronautics plant, and his mother, Joan, worked at a Chrysler factory.Growing up, Mr. Hall was a standout student and soccer player, but he spent his youth fighting inner demons. In 2019, he revealed a childhood trauma that he said sent him into a spiral of depression and substance abuse that lasted years.In an interview with the British magazine The Spectator, Mr. Hall said that “Well Fancy That!” — a 1983 song by Fun Boy Three about a harrowing sexual encounter — was about the time he was kidnapped and abused by a teacher.“It was about an episode where I was abducted, taken to France and sexually abused for four days,” he said. “And then punched in the face and left on the roadside. At 12, that’s life-changing. I still have that illness today and I will still have it in 10 years’ time, and it’s important for me to talk about that.”Prescribed Valium to deal with the emotional fallout, he soon became addicted. “Which meant I didn’t go to school, I didn’t do anything,” he recalled. “I just sat on my bed rocking for eight months.”Music was an escape. In the late 1970s, Mr. Hall joined a Coventry punk band called Squad, which brought him to the attention of Jerry Dammers, a songwriter and keyboardist who was in a band called the Automatics. That band would evolve into the Specials, with Mr. Hall taking lead vocals.“We didn’t even know who was going to play what,” he later said. “We passed around all the instruments until we found what we were comfortable with. I wasn’t comfortable with any of them, so I became the singer.”The Specials, an unstable collection of members with different backgrounds and agendas, unraveled after “Ghost Town.” The remaining members regrouped without Mr. Hall as the Special AKA and scored a Top 10 hit in 1984 with the up-tempo protest song “Nelson Mandela.”But Mr. Hall’s career was far from over. After Fun Boy Three disbanded, he helped form Colourfield, a pop band based in Manchester, in 1984. The Colourfield’s sunny love song “Thinking of You” hit No. 12 in Britain the next year.In 1990 he formed another band, Terry, Blair & Anouchka, which released one album, “Ultra Modern Nursery Rhymes.” He later formed a band called Vegas, with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, and also collaborated with the Lightning Seeds, Gorillaz and other acts.Mr. Hall eventually drifted back to his roots with a new incarnation of the Specials, including Mr. Golding and Mr. Panter, that released an album, “Encore,” in 2019, that dealt with contemporary racial issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement. The pandemic interrupted plans for a reggae follow-up in 2020.In 2021, the band detoured from its ska roots with an album of covers called “Protest Songs: 1924-2012,” which included a honky-tonk cover of the Staple Singers’ 1965 civil rights ode “Freedom Highway” and a country-inflected version of Malvina Reynolds’s “I Don’t Mind Failing in This World.”By that year, the band was set to proceed with its delayed reggae album. But in October, The Guardian reported, Steve Blackwell, the band’s manager, disclosed that Mr. Hall had pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver. Treatment failed to stem the disease.Mr. Hall is survived by his second wife, Lindy Heymann; their son, Orson; and two sons, Theo and Felix, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.By the end of his life Mr. Hall had not entirely escaped his demons, but he had made a certain peace with himself, and with his role as half-willing pop star.When asked by The Spectator if he derived any pleasure from performing, he responded: “Absolutely none. That’s why I do it.”He quickly amended that. “I actually do enjoy that thing onstage where I turn round and I’ve got Horace and Lynval, who I’ve known most of my life, and we’re sharing something. That’s my night out. Don’t get out much.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Loudmouth’ Review: Portrait of Al Sharpton as a Young Man

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      A stirring new biographical documentary about the Rev. Al Sharpton revisits a racially divided New York City and offers a critique of the news media then and now.In the sympathetic documentary “Loudmouth,” the Rev. Al Sharpton recounts the time Coretta Scott King admonished him for his rhetorical excesses. The film’s writer-director, Josh Alexander, cuts between the Sharpton of now — svelte, measured — and, using archival footage, the young man he was in the 1980s: rotund, passionate and plying his skills as a preacher to harness the anger and grief of those African Americans gathered at churches, rallies and marches in a time of heightened racial violence.“Loudmouth” is equal parts time capsule, media critique and authorized biography. Each of those examinations has its own flaws but also offers insights into the man, the moment (the current one but more pointedly New York City of the 1980s and ’90s) and the news media.Thirty years ago, Sharpton’s dramatic tactics earned him (along with the lawyers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, who was later disbarred) incendiary headlines and a warm seat on the daytime talk circuit. For Sharpton, who sees himself in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Scott King’s chiding invited a reconsideration of that lightning rod approach. Another epiphany came after he was stabbed in 1991 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, while preparing to protest the sentences in the case of Yusuf Hawkins, the Black 16-year-old who was and shot and killed by a white mob in the neighborhood two years earlier.One of the documentary’s most salient cautions might be that members of the news media were (and often remain) unwilling to cop to their biases. Sharpton has spent a lifetime calling the storytellers out for their slant — and schooling us to do the same. As straightforward as it appears, “Loudmouth” also invites an engaged but necessarily judicious scrutiny.LoudmouthNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      11 Ways I Escaped Reality This Year

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      Our critic was haunted, in a good way, by the performances she saw in movies, theater and TV that offered glimpses into other worlds.In a year when so much, including our democracy, felt topsy-turvy, I was drawn to entertainment that took me out of our real world to another realm. Be it the supernatural, the surreal, the spirit world, or just a superb performance: Here’s my list of 11 otherworldly movies, TV series, actors and plays that brought me joy and centeredness amid the chaos.‘Macbeth’In Sam Gold’s take on “Macbeth,” I loved the lustful love story between Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, but is it weird to say that I also really dug the stew? When we entered the theater, the three witches, dressed in sweaters and jeans, were already onstage stirring their pot, and later they utter the lines that seal Macbeth’s fate. But at the end of the play, when everyone in the cast sits together and shares a bowl, this update, along with one of the witches (Bobbi MacKenzie) singing Gaelynn Lea’s ballad “Perfect,” enacted healing. It reminded me that despite the setbacks that befell the cast and our country, being alive and in the community of theater was something to celebrate. (Read our review of “Macbeth.”)‘The Woman King’With “The Old Guard,” the filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood proved she had the chops for a feminist superhero flick. But with the Viola Davis-led “Woman King,” she went epic in scale and story. She wove in the history of the Agojie, the all-female army in the West African kingdom of Dahomey; produced brilliant fight scenes with actors who performed their own stunts; and explored war, sexual assault and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, prophecy is protection, and though it is never named as such, the Dahomey religious practice of Vodun is a guide for Davis’s character, General Nanisca, as she prepares to take on enemies, foreign and domestic, and confront her own demons. (Read our review of “The Woman King.”)Viola Davis, center, stars in “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures‘P-Valley’Set at a strip club in Mississippi, the Starz series “P-Valley” is a “love letter to all women who are scrapping it out, but particularly for the Black women that I think a lot of people thumb their noses at, even Black folks,” according to its creator, Katori Hall. It is a sentiment channeled through the veteran dancer and aspiring gym owner Mercedes (Brandee Evans) and the up-and-coming Keyshawn (Shannon Thornton), who is trapped in her career and abusive marriage. But it is Hoodoo, the spiritual practice introduced to them by the club’s security guard Diamond (Tyler Lepley), that might save them. Based on the Season 2 cliffhanger, I’m hoping Diamond’s efforts worked or that he will be there to ward off evil spirits and people in the future. (Streaming on Starz.)‘Reservation Dogs’A coming-of-age tale told through four Indigenous teenagers — Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie Jack — in the fictional town of Okern, Okla., “Reservation Dogs” masterfully pokes fun at Hollywood stereotypes and acknowledges the nuances of Native culture. While William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth) is a bumbling spirit guide who gives Bear unsound advice, he is also the counterpoint to ancestral “spirits” such as Elora’s grandmother or Daniel, a friend of the four teens whose suicide prompts them to leave their reservation (or at least attempt to). In the wonderfully rich ninth episode, Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) seeks advice from her aunt and Daniel’s mother, Hokti, who is incarcerated. After Willie Jack makes an offering of Cheez-Its, Flaming Flamers chips and a Skux energy drink, Hokti (Lily Gladstone) reveals that the many spirits surrounding Willie Jack will help her in time. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘The Piano Lesson’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’Ghosts came in different forms this Broadway season. In her revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Piano Lesson,” LaTanya Richardson Jackson decided to literalize the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter. Though we never see him, his haunting of the Charles family becomes all too real, making the family’s battles over a piano a deeper allegory of race, property and American history. Equally compelling is Miranda Cromwell’s revival of “Death of a Salesman,” whose all-Black family includes Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as his wife, Linda. Willy’s older brother, Ben (André De Shields), is not just a ghost but a griot, too. Sporting a white cane, a white suit and bedazzled shoes, Ben plagues Willy with his success while his spirit beckons his younger brother to the other side. This infuses the play with a new sense of ambiguity, never justifying Willy’s final decision but adding a layer of empathy and compassion. (Read our reviews of “The Piano Lesson” and “Death of a Salesman.”)Wendell Pierce, left, as Willy Loman and Andre De Shields as Ben Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRegina HallRegina Hall showed her versatility this year with two wildly different performances. In Mariama Diallo’s horror movie “Master,” she plays Gail Bishop, who, as the first Black dean of a residence hall at the elite Ancaster College, must constantly contend with racism and its impact on her and on Black students. In Adamma Ebo’s comedy “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” she is Trinitie Childs, the wife of a disgraced Southern Baptist pastor (Sterling K. Brown) and a woman obsessed with climbing back to her former state of church glory. The way she evokes Trinitie’s pity, pettiness, petulance and pride gives this film its most memorable and haunting moments. (Read our reviews of “Master” and “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”)‘Nope’The cinephile in me was pleasantly surprised that Jordan Peele’s “Nope” was a movie about movies. Peele not only pays homage to early film and photography technologies, and the suspense and terror brought on by Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Jaws,” but he also does so while remembering those African Americans whose early contributions to the motion picture industry have been forgotten or ignored. Thanks to Peele’s clever writing, creative directing and smart casting of his frequent collaborator Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) as well as the magnanimous Keke Palmer, this movie about gentrification, U.F.O.s and racial discrimination ended up being just an old-fashioned, feel-good movie, the kind we still desperately need. (Read our review of “Nope.”)‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’It was a bold move to follow up on a sci-fi classic starring David Bowie as an extraterrestrial. Rather than compete with such memorable casting, Showtime’s 10-episode series “The Man Who Fell to Earth” humanized its protagonist, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), by doubling his outsiderness: He arrives in the United States as both an alien and a Black man. In an electrifying sixth episode on jazz music, Faraday and other characters discover a sound of their shared humanity and a possible key to salvaging both of their planets. (Streaming on Showtime.)Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in the TV series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”Showtime‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I can’t stop raving about this movie — the costumes, the makeup, the editing (oh, the editing!). The fight scenes, the I.R.S. scenes. The marvelous Michelle Yeoh, playing the laundromat owner and cosmic warrior Evelyn Wang, and Stephanie Hsu, playing her disenchanted daughter, Joy. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work under the name Daniels, have said that this is mostly a film about the confusion that arises when its characters believe they are in different movie genres from one another. I also admire how this genre diversity (thriller, sci-fi, martial arts, domestic drama) perfectly captured expansive cultural identities (immigrant narratives, Asian American families, queer children) and the depth of our earliest love story (between mother and daughter) — all of which still seem to be unmined in Hollywood. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)Brian Tyree HenryThe surreal TV series “Atlanta” started off focused on the Princeton dropout (Donald Glover) who became his rapper cousin’s manager, but in its final season it was mainly about the rapper, Alfred a.k.a. Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and his journey to define himself beyond the trappings of fame, wealth or the music industry. His textured performance gave Alfred more emotional depth as his character confronted feral hogs, white privilege in hip-hop and his own mortality. Henry’s onscreen brilliance led Lila Neugebauer to rewrite and reshoot key scenes in her debut film, “Causeway,” now on Apple+, devoting more time to the friendship between his character and Jennifer Lawrence’s. The result is a moving portrait of grief and hope, in which Henry lights up the film. (Read our review of “Causeway.”) More

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      in Movies

      Alien Superstar

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      Listen and follow Still ProcessingApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWesley Morris and Elyssa Dudley, Hans Buetow and J Wortham and Wesley Morris are back, just in time for Scorpio season. Ever since they watched Jordan Peele’s latest film, “Nope,” together over the summer, they haven’t been able to stop talking about it. The film stars Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings whose family horse ranch is threatened by an otherworldly creature. But instead of escaping or destroying the monster, they are determined to take a picture of it. Why is proof so important? And why do they assume no one will believe their lived experience?Today: The unresolved questions of “Nope” (some of them, anyway) and what the film says about the grimmer aspects of living in America. (Beware: Spoilers ahead!)From left, Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Brandon Perea in “Nope,” the third feature film from the director Jordan Peele.Universal PicturesA new season of ‘Still Processing’Hosts Wesley Morris and J Wortham are reuniting for a mini-season before 2022 comes to a close. Join them for deep chats and incisive takes on the cultural landscape — from the revival of disco to the return to office life. Plus an episode on the gift that keeps on giving: Beyoncé.New episodes drop Tuesdays. Follow the show on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.Hosted by: Wesley Morris and J WorthamProduced by: Elyssa Dudley, Hans Buetow and Christina DjossaEdited by: Sara Sarasohn and Sasha WeissEngineered by: Marion LozanoExecutive Producer, Shows: Wendy DorrSpecial thanks: Paula Szuchman, Sam Dolnick, Mahima Chablani, Jeffrey Miranda, Eslah Attar and Julia Moburg. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      After Hollywood’s #MeToo Reckoning, a Fear It Was Only Short-Lived

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      Harvey Weinstein’s second sex crimes trial began Monday in Los Angeles. “She Said,” about the journalistic investigation that took him down and helped ignite the #MeToo movement, arrives in theaters on Nov. 18. “The Woman King” opened to strong ticket sales last month, with Viola Davis saying she thought about the man who sexually assaulted her to power her visceral performance as the leader of an all-female group of African warriors.The convergence is a reminder of just how earthshaking #MeToo was for Hollywood.It helped touch off a broader reckoning in the entertainment industry around diversity, equity and inclusion on both sides of the camera — who gets to make movies, who gets to be the subject of them. Activists say that studios and sets have been permanently changed for the better. Zero tolerance for workplace sexual harassment and discrimination is real.In recent months, however, Hollywood’s business culture has started to regress in subtle ways.New problems — widespread cost-cutting as the box office continues to struggle, coming union contract negotiations that producers worry will result in a filming shutdown — have become a higher priority. Fearing blowback, media companies that were vocal about #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have been quieter on more recent political debates over cultural issues.Diversity, equity and inclusion executives say they are exhausted by an old-boy network that is continuously trying to reconstitute itself: Women who were hired for big jobs and held up as triumphant examples of a new era have been pushed aside, while some of the men who were sidelined by misconduct accusations are working again.“The Woman King,” starring Viola Davis as the leader of an all-female group of African warriors, opened to strong ticket sales last month.Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesIf asked to speak on the record about their continued dedication to change, Hollywood executives refuse or scramble in terror toward the “we remain staunchly committed” talking points written by publicists. But what they say privately is a different story. Some revert to sexist and racist language. Certainly, much of the fervor is gone.This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen industry leaders — including top studio executives, agents, activists, marketers and producers — who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the current state of the entertainment business. They varied in age, race, ethnicity and gender.“For three years, we hired nothing but women and people of color,” said a senior film executive, who like many leaders in the industry is a white male. He added that he did not think some of them were able to do the jobs they got.In hushed conversations over lunch at Toscana Brentwood and cocktails at the San Vicente Inn, some powerful producers and agents have started to question the commercial viability of inclusion-minded films and shows.They point to terrible ticket sales for films like “Bros,” the first gay rom-com from a major studio, and “Easter Sunday,” a comedy positioned as a watershed moment for Filipino representation. “Ms. Marvel,” a critically adored Disney+ series about a teenage Muslim superhero, was lightly viewed, according to Nielsen’s measurements.“There was an overcorrection,” one studio head said.At another major studio, a top production executive pointed to the implosion of Time’s Up, the anti-harassment organization founded by influential Hollywood women, as a turning point. “For a while, we all lived in complete fear,” he said. “That fear remains, but it has lessened. There is more room for gray and more benefit of the doubt and a bit of cringing about the rush-to-judgment that went on at the height of #MeToo.”“Bros,” the first gay rom-com from a major studio, had disappointing box office results.Nicole Rivelli/Universal PicturesIs this a pendulum swing back to the bad old days?“Amazing progress has been made that is not going away, and that should not be discounted or overlooked,” said Amy Baer, a producer, former studio executive and the board president of Women in Film, an advocacy organization. “But there is fatigue. It is hard to maintain momentum.”Entertainment companies are not backing off the tough sexual harassment policies that have been introduced in recent years, in part because board members are worried they will face shareholder lawsuits. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently recommitted to its diversification campaign. Despite years of aggressive efforts to invite women and people of color to become members, the academy is currently 66 percent male and 81 percent white..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Studios remain focused on inclusive casting, most notably Disney, which has a live-action “Little Mermaid” movie on the way with a Black actress playing the title role, and a “Snow White” movie in production with a Latina lead.The moment is nonetheless unnerving, said Sarah Ann Masse, an actress who appears in “She Said” — which is based on a book by The New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey — and who serves on two sexual harassment prevention committees for SAG-AFTRA, the omnipotent actors union. In 2017, Ms. Masse accused Mr. Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in 2008. He has denied wrongdoing.“I’m not naïve enough to think that a system that is unequal and oftentimes oppressive — yes, still, very much so — is going to change overnight,” Ms. Masse said. “At the same time, I find it incredibly frustrating. People at the top of the food chain, in particular, seem to have gotten distracted by new concerns.”In August, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved “Batgirl,” a nearly finished movie starring a Latina actress, featuring a transgender actress in a supporting role, written by a woman, produced by women and directed by two Muslim men. Warner Bros. Discovery never publicly explained its decision, but signaled that it found “Batgirl” to be creatively lacking.Dan Lin, a producer whose credits include “Aladdin” (2019) and “The Lego Movie,” was among those who inferred something else.“It’s no longer about optics,” Mr. Lin said. “A recession is coming, budgets are tightening and I’m really worried that diversity is going to be the first thing that goes.”The producer Dan Lin recently started a nonprofit that aims to help budding minority filmmakers and writers.Todd Williamson/Invision, via APLast week, Warner Bros. Television, as part of wider cost cutting, shut down “new voices” programs for emerging writers and directors, prompting a fiery reaction from the Directors Guild of America. “The D.G.A. will not stand idly by while WB/Discovery seeks to roll back decades of advancement for women and directors of color,” the guild said in a statement.Within a day, Warner Bros. Discovery had scrambled to clarify that, while the “new voices” programs would indeed end, it had planned all along to expand talent pipeline programs in its diversity, equity and inclusion department.“The resolve is still there to have more women and people of color in writers’ rooms and directing and up on the screen” Mr. Lin said. “The problem is that there is so little training and support. Those things cost money.” To help, Mr. Lin recently started a nonprofit accelerator called Rideback Rise that focuses on budding minority filmmakers and writers.There is no longer across-the-board banishment for men who have been accused of misconduct. Johnny Depp is directing a film, having largely won a court case in which his former spouse, the actress Amber Heard, accused him of sexual and domestic violence. John Lasseter, the animation titan at Disney and Pixar, was toppled in 2018 by allegations about his behavior and unwanted hugging and apologized for “missteps” that made some staff members feel “disrespected or uncomfortable.” He is now making big-budget films for Apple TV+. James Franco’s acting career imploded in 2018 amid sexual misconduct allegations. Four years later, after a $2.2 million settlement in which he admitted no wrongdoing, he has at least three movies lined up.Johnny Depp largely won a court case in which his former spouse, the actress Amber Heard, accused him of sexual and domestic violence.Craig Hudson/Associated PressStudios have also started to take more risks with content — backing scripts, for instance, that would have been radioactive in 2018, at the height of #MeToo, or in 2020, when Black Lives Matter was at the forefront of the culture.Examples include “Blonde,” the Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe that has been derided by critics as exploitative and misogynistic. (It features an aborted fetus that talks.) Paramount Pictures is working on a live-action musical comedy about slave trade reparations; it comes from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the politically incorrect creative forces behind “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon.”Two ride-along reality shows that glorified the police, “Cops” and “Live PD,” and were canceled in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in police custody have both been reconstituted. “Cops” was picked up by Fox Nation, a streaming service from Fox News, and “On Patrol: Live,” a thinly disguised copy of “Live PD,” debuted over the summer on Reelz, a cable network.At the same time, some movies and shows that overtly showcase diversity and inclusion have either struggled in the marketplace or failed to get off the runway. The takeaway, at least to some agents and studio executives: We tried — these “woke” projects don’t work.Of course, most of what Hollywood makes struggles to get noticed, and almost never for a single reason; nobody looks at poor ticket sales for a Brad Pitt movie and concludes that no one wants to see older white men onscreen. But entertainment is a reactive business — chase whatever worked over the weekend — and there is a risk that “go woke, go broke” jokes could calcify into conventional Hollywood wisdom.“When the real question should be whether comedies generally can succeed at the box office, my concern is that the question is becoming ‘can a Filipino comedy work’ or ‘can a gay comedy work,’” said Mr. Lin, who produced “Easter Sunday,” which starred Jo Koy and collected $13 million in theaters before stalling out. “If you are a woman or a minority, you still do not get repeated chances.” More