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      ‘Minx’ and ‘Stiffed’: Dirty Pictures From a Revolution

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      Though “Minx” and “Stiffed” are set 50 years ago, the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.On a nightclub stage, a blond woman in a sensible skirt suit runs back and forth in T-strap heels, overwhelmed by her duties to her family, her boss, herself. She stumbles, then falls. “It’s so hard being a woman in 1973,” she pouts, still sprawled. “If only there was a way to make a change.” Then the shirtless men in breakaway pants appear behind her. Women can’t have it all, now or 50 years later. An eyeful of oiled torsos, however muscular, may not have been a perfect substitute for real social transformation.This playful scene, an imagined forerunner to a Chippendales-style revue, occurs in the second season of “Minx,” which began on Starz on Friday. A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.“Minx” has plenty of company. The 2023 podcast “Stiffed,” created by Jennifer Romolini, is a history of the actual, short-lived erotic magazine Viva, an inspiration for “Minx.” Other recent work dealing with the debates of this era include the 2022 film “Call Jane” and the 2022 documentary “The Janes,” both about an underground network for women seeking safe abortions, and the 2020 FX series “Mrs. America,” about the battle over the Equal Rights Amendment.A workplace comedy set at an erotic magazine for women, “Minx” revisits the 1970s collisions, confusions and correspondences between women’s liberation and the sexual revolution.HBO MaxCultural evocations of the American past often invite a thank-God-we’re-beyond-all-that superiority. But these recent works, despite the paisley and the quaaludes, don’t encourage that same condescension. These pieces are set 50 years ago, but the debates they present — about desire and gender and equality and autonomy — feel startlingly current.“It all feels very fraught and it all feels interconnected,” said Ellen Rapoport, the creator of “Minx.” “And you can’t separate the issues.” When it comes to the sexual revolution, she said, “I’m not sure who won.”The 1970s saw significant advances in women’s rights. Abortion was legalized in all states; hormonal birth control became widely available. A woman could have a credit card in her own name, could apply for a mortgage. Title IX was passed. A concurrent sexual revolution encouraged a new openness around sex and sexuality, while also seeding a backlash still felt today.This was the environment that birthed Viva, an erotic magazine for women created by Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse and related magazines. Guccione’s goal was both cynical and utopian. Capitalizing on this new sexual candor, Viva was designed as a distaff alternative to Guccione’s other publications. Playgirl, another magazine that began in 1973, had similar aspirations. Viva may have been a cash grab, but as Romolini’s reporting for the eight-episode podcast shows, many of the women journalists who staffed it also believed that it could become a savvy, brainy, feisty publication for women interested in sex and gender. Yet it was, from the first, a study in cognitive dissonance. Articles about rape and female circumcision jostled alongside beauty tips, soft-focus photo spreads and ads for diet pills.“It never really gelled or meshed,” Romolini said. “Bob Guccione thought he knew what women wanted and, not being a woman, he did not. So it was two magazines. One was this progressive, feminist, smart, fun culture magazine. The other had these soft, flaccid penises in a variety of outrageous poses.”Viva published its last issue in 1979, having run through a masthead’s worth of editors, Anna Wintour among them, and a throng of contributors including Nikki Giovanni, Simone de Beauvoir and Joyce Carol Oates. Playgirl, which appealed mostly to gay men, hung on in increasingly attenuated form until 2016. Neither approached the popularity of similar men’s magazines. But “Minx,” particularly in its second season, has allowed Rapoport to imagine a different fate, a truly successful women’s erotic magazine, edited and eventually published by women (and gay men) who believe — sometimes haltingly, sometimes fervently — in sexual freedom and women’s liberation.She likes to think a magazine like this might have succeeded.Lovibond of “Minx” says a show set in the 1970s like hers shouldn’t still resonate, but it does.HBO Max“If you truly combined well-written thoughtful articles about women’s issues and actually erotic content, not just a guy on a horse, I think people, at least at that time, would have enjoyed that,” Rapoport said.In both “Minx” and “Stiffed,” the erotic content ultimately functions as racy camouflage. They may seem like stories about sex, but they are both mainly about work. When she began researching “Stiffed,” Romolini assumed that the governing question of the series would be, Who gets to dictate female desire and why is it not women? But in interviewing the surviving alumnae of Viva, she discovered that the women who worked there had mostly given up on that question.“Ultimately, ‘Stiffed’ is about professional desire more than it is about sexual desire,” Romolini said. “And I think that’s what it was for these women.”Rapoport had structured Season 2 of “Minx,” which moved to Starz after HBO Max scrapped the series, around a similar premise. “In the first season, we really just wanted to normalize sexuality, nudity, male nudity, and to have the idea that women were erotic creatures,” she said. “This season is really about this societal drive for success.”Desire, it turned out, could provide only piecemeal liberation, especially once people — men, mostly — discovered how to monetize it, a shift that fostered the “porno chic” of the late 1970s and the mainstream distribution of sexually explicit films. In the second episode of Season 2 of “Minx,” the magazine hosts the West Coast premiere of the real pornographic film “Deep Throat.” The movie is billed as a celebration of female sexual empowerment. But it also looks a lot like exploitation.One character, Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), inspired by Viva’s publisher, Guccione, defends the film as feminist. “It’s about a woman searching for an orgasm,” he says.Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond), the editor in chief of Minx, disagrees. “Which she finds with a clitoris conveniently located inside of her mouth?” Joyce says.Related debates within the feminist community (often referred to as the porn wars or the sex wars) fragmented the movement, making it vulnerable to attacks — attacks that “Minx” has dramatized, from both the political left and the right. As the ’80s dawned, Ronald Reagan was soon to be elected president, evangelical Christians held new sway and the Equal Rights Amendment had been defeated, leaving many of the liberating promises of the 1970s unfulfilled.“I don’t think the sexual revolution ultimately happened. It started and then devolved,” Nona Willis Aronowitz, a cultural critic and the author of “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution,” said. “Ever since, we’ve tried to claw our way back to some of the most utopian ideas and we haven’t gotten there.”Sexual liberation has real political dimensions, as the personal is only rarely apolitical. But faced with the work still incomplete — a wage gap, though narrowed, remains, and protections against domestic and sexual violence are still lacking — a focus on female pleasure can seem frivolous. So can a show and a podcast centered on a skin magazine for women.Yet in examining this narrow slice of the sexual culture of the 1970s, “Stiffed” and “Minx” suggest parallels between then and now.“‘Minx’ felt like a way to think about things that were currently happening, but through this lens of 50 years ago,” Rapoport said. “Conversations about birth control, abortion, gay rights, every social issue is now back on the table again, in a way that I don’t love.”Lovibond, the star of “Minx,” agreed. “Go to marches, as I do, and you’ll see signs today that we were holding in the ’70s,” she said. A show set then shouldn’t still resonate, she argued. But it does.Lorna Bracewell, the author of “Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era,” sees these backward-facing shows as offering counsel for the present. “This intense period of reaction that we are living through, it motivates people to look back and say, well, what did feminists do the last time this happened?”Viva had only a brief run. Minx never existed. But “Stiffed” and “Minx” allow a return to a moment of, as Bracewell described it, “really radical aspirations and fantasies and dreams and desires,” a moment when great social change seemed possible. If we look and listen closely enough, maybe we can learn what went wrong in the past and dream better for the future, with equality and an occasional hunky dance revue.“I just wonder if there’s a way for all of us to come together, agree on things and try to make progress,” Rapoport said.Maybe then, she implied, the woman in heels won’t have to fall. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The Righteous Gemstones’ and ‘Heels’

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      The third season of HBO’s dark comedy comes to an end. And the Starz show about professional wrestlers begins its second season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 24-30. Details and times are subject to change.MondaySON OF A CRITCH 8 p.m. on The CW. Based on a memoir of the same title by Mark Critch, this series stars Critch as his father and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as a younger version of himself. Filmed in and set in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, it is a coming-of-age story that focuses on Critch navigating junior high and connecting with the people in his orbit. The show originally aired on CBC in Canada but is being broadcast for the first time in the United States.THE GOLDEN BOY 9 p.m. on HBO. Shortly after graduating high school, Oscar De La Hoya won a gold medal for lightweight boxing at the 1992 Summer Olympics. The media quickly dubbed him “The Golden Boy.” This two-part documentary series focuses on the man behind the title and how his struggles later in life made it hard for him to live up to expectations.TuesdayLily James and Josh Dylan in “Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again!”Jonathan Prime/Universal PicturesMAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN (2018) 7:35 p.m. on FXM. This “Mamma Mia” prequel has all the Abba, romance and adventure our hearts could desire — not to mention the truly uncanny casting of the younger versions of Donna and the Dynamos as well as the “three dads.” The story takes place after Donna (the younger version played by Lily James; the adult version by Meryl Streep) graduates from college and decides to travel the world before settling down on a small island in Greece. The back story of how she meets Bill (Josh Dylan and Stellan Skarsgård), Sam (Jeremy Irvine and Pierce Brosnan) and Harry (Hugh Skinner and Colin Firth) are revealed, but we don’t get any closer to knowing who fathered Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) — which I guess is besides the point by now.WednesdayANIMALS WITH CAMERAS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This show is exactly what it sounds like — how better to get immersive footage of wildlife than from the wildlife itself? This episode focuses on the ocean, so sea turtles, sharks and sting rays — fitted with lightweight cameras — offer underwater perspectives that we might not have been able to see otherwise.A still from the documentary “After the Bite.”Courtesy of HBOAFTER THE BITE 10 p.m. on HBO. In September 2018, Arthur Medici died after a shark attack at Newcomb Hollow Beach on Cape Cod, Mass. This was the first fatal shark attack in the state since 1936. But the resurgence of these sorts of attacks (another man had been bitten the month prior in the same area but fought off the shark) begs for a re-examination of the relationship our communities have with nature. This documentary explores how the tragic event shook up a way of life in the area.ThursdayTRIPPIN’ WITH ANTHONY ANDERSON AND MAMA DORIS 10 p.m. on E! There’s nothing like a mother-son romp around Europe to keep us entertained. This show follows the actor and comedian Anthony Anderson and his mom, Doris Hancox, as they go on a shenanigan-filled six-week adventure: So far they have traveled to Paris, London and Venice — to name a few — and the season is ending with a last hurrah in Rome, where they take an art class featuring a nude model.FridayNEIGHBORS (2014) 8 p.m. on Cinemax. In this comedy from Nicholas Stoller, Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne play a married couple who call the police on their frat boy neighbors, Zac Efron and Dave Franco, who proceed to make the couple’s life is a living hell. Stoller (“Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “Get Him to the Greek,” “The Five-Year Engagement”) “is good at keeping the momentum going while also finding time for offbeat grace notes and occasional bursts of emotional candor,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review of the movie.Alexander Ludwig, left, and Stephen Amell in “Heels.”Courtesy of StarzHEELS 10 p.m. on Starz. Despite what the title sounds like, this show has nothing to with Louboutins or Jimmy Choos. Instead, it refers to a “heel” in a wrestling ring, which means a villain. The series, which stars Alexander Ludwig and Stephen Amell as brothers who both excel at wrestling, is starting its second season this week. “At a time when professional wrestling is more popular than it’s been in years, it is thriving as a dramatic subject because the industry’s real stories are often just as — if not more — compelling than what happens in the ring,” Jeremy Gordon wrote in a 2021 New York Times article about the show.SaturdayBODY HEAT (1981) 10 p.m. on TCM. Staring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, this erotic thriller involves a bomb maker, a murder plot and an illicit affair — all set in coastal Florida. It “is a hard-breathing, sexy, old-fashioned morality tale, which evolves into a mystery story with a couple of twists that are only matched by the last four or five minutes of Billy Wilder’s screen version of Agatha Christie’s ‘Witness for the Prosecution,’” Vincent Canby wrote in his review for The Times.SundayTOUGH AS NAILS 8 p.m. on CBS. The fifth season of this reality competition show involving challenges of endurance and strength at real job sites was filmed in Hamilton, Ontario, and features Canadian cast members for the first time — which explains all the “ehs” you might have heard. As the season rounds out, teams Dirty Hands and Savage Crew are going to have to keep battling it out with down and dirty challenges, right until the end.THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES 10 p.m on HBO. This comedy, about a famous televangelist family, is increasingly gaining popularity. According to Deadline, it is now Danny McBride’s most watched HBO show, above “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals.” “The Righteous Gemstones,” which also stars Edi Patterson, Adam Devine and John Goodman, is wrapping up its third season with a two-part finale. More

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      ‘Special Ops: Lioness’ Review: Zoe Saldana Does Strong and Silent

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      The actress stars in a new series from Taylor Sheridan, known for his prototypically male heroes. This time, the dispensers of justice and violence are women.The “politics” of the writer and producer Taylor Sheridan’s television catalog — “Yellowstone,” “1883,” “Mayor of Kingstown,” “1923” and “Tulsa King” — are the subject of exhaustive discussion that isn’t always that pertinent to the series themselves. For something of more immediate artistic interest, how about the shows’ fascination with the violent deaths of women?The number of men who die in Sheridan’s westerns, neo-westerns, Midwestern noirs and — with the Sunday premiere of “Special Ops: Lioness” on Paramount+ — terrorism dramas is much greater, but they tend to die in the usual anonymous, bullet-spraying manner. Women’s deaths are more baroque, and more elaborately presented. A tourist has her throat ripped out by a leopard and is dropped from a tree like an overripe piece of fruit; a nun is suffocated in her bed, her mouth stuffed with tissue and her face branded (both “1923”). A stoolie girlfriend is brutally strangled (“Tulsa King”). The entire season of “1883” is in effect a flashback framed by the gruesome death of its heroine, run through by an arrow.This emphasis on female death doesn’t feel particularly lurid or sexualized; its importance is as a motif. It’s in the fabric of the shows, where dead mothers are as much of an accessory for the characters as cowboy hats and the woman at the center of “1883” narrates “1923” from beyond the grave. Its function is to reinforce a central theme of Sheridan’s oeuvre: the classic onus of male duty, an essential part of which is the protection of women, even though Sheridan, who likes to hedge his cultural bets, presents the women as fierce and capable in their own right.And it’s a primary reason for the shows’ distinctiveness. Overheated melodrama and sentimentality and a canny, plausibly deniable appeal to conservative and libertarian values are the obvious parts of the package, but they get their particular flavor from an oddly literary, morbidly romantic strain of neo-Victorian kitsch.(The literary and other allegiances in Sheridan’s writing — to Hemingway and John Ford in the westerns, to Greek tragedy in “Mayor of Kingstown” — are inescapable. The most enjoyable of his shows is the least pretentious one, and the only dramedy: the Sylvester Stallone vehicle “Tulsa King,” which benefits from the involvement of the “Sopranos” veteran Terence Winter as Sheridan’s showrunner.)“Special Ops: Lioness” differs from Sheridan’s other shows in several significant ways. It is a battlefield show, set among C.I.A. agents and Marines carrying out counterterrorism operations in the Middle East. And it is entirely focused on women: Its major action figures are a C.I.A. operative played by Zoe Saldana; a Marine, recruited for an undercover assignment, played by Laysla De Oliveira; and a gung-ho Marine team leader played by Jill Wagner.Paramount+ provided only one episode for review, so judgments at this point are tentative if not superfluous. But the Sheridanness of the show is evident. It is noticeable, for instance, that the three central women embodying the values of endurance and violent capability that Sheridan fetishizes go by the unisex names of Joe, Cruz and Bobby.More noticeable is the show’s premise, at least as it appears in the first episode, written by Sheridan and directed by John Hillcoat. The women, while presented as fully qualified for combat (in some cases in punishing detail), are not tasked with taking on terrorists directly. Their mission is to gain access by befriending women in the terrorists’ lives — to run a modified honey trap. You can see how this will provide plenty of opportunities for them to engage in brutal action, and perhaps the whole thing is a satirical starting point that eventually will be knocked down. But in the first episode the retrograde setup is presented entirely at face value.(The operation Saldana’s character runs takes its name from Team Lioness, a more utilitarian real-life program in which female soldiers were added to combat teams in part because of religious prohibitions against the touching or searching of women by men.)What can be said about “Special Ops” from its first 42 minutes is that it looks like an awful lot of other counterterrorism thrillers, with a visceral punch to its action and a ticky-tacky, backlot feel whenever it moves in close on its Middle Eastern settings. Saldana registers stoic magnetism, as usual, as the overseer of the operation, who shuttles between the field and meetings in Washington with her bosses, one of whom is played by Nicole Kidman. (Morgan Freeman will show up later as the secretary of state.) Other performers have trouble adding much to their characters’ stock, neo-“Dirty Dozen” personas. One of the few things we learn about De Oliveira’s Cruz: Her mother died.There is one moment in the “Special Ops” premiere — just a fleeting reaction shot — that taps directly into the mythos Sheridan’s shows share. When a mission goes bad, Saldana’s Joe calls in a missile strike that kills her own undercover operative. Debriefed later, she explains that she did it for “the sanctity of our operation.” But having seen the look on Joe’s face as she listened to the woman screaming while being set upon by a group of angry Arab men, we know that she had a different sanctity in mind. Sometimes, the first imperative when it comes to women’s safety is preventing the fate worse than death. More

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      ‘And Just Like That …’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Hey Stranger

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      In an episode with multiple explicit callbacks to the original series, Charlotte sets a progressive example and Miranda confronts painful consequences.The O.G.s know this isn’t the first time Carrie has fanned old flames with Aidan via email. Way back in Season 4 of the original series, Carrie created her first ever email address (shoegal@aol.com!) solely for the ability to reach out to Aidan post-breakup in some way other than the phone.“I miss you. Do you miss me?” it read.This time around, her email says essentially the same thing, but is tied up in a more devil-may-care bow. “Was thinking of you the other day … and I wondered how you were doing.” That ellipsis is loaded. Pair it with the slightly sexy but nonchalant “Hey Stranger …” (another loaded ellipsis!) and it’s not hard to see what she is doing.And why not? Google is free and Carrie has used it. She knows Aidan lives in Virginia, is sitting on a fat check from West Elm, and most importantly, is divorced. It’s almost surprising it took her this long.It’s not the only callback to “Sex and the City” we see in this episode. In another scene, Seema “proposes” to Carrie that the two of them rent a summer house together in the Hamptons. Carrie giddily agrees, which is funny only because, just a couple of decades ago, she, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha all thought that as 30-somethings, they were too old for a shared Hamptons house, calling it “pathetic” and likening it to being “the oldest kid at summer camp.”But now, in their 50s, Carrie and her gal pal can afford a luxury rental on the beach with more bathrooms than occupants. Nothing pathetic about that.Alas, in this episode, summer is but a far away dream. It’s the dead of winter, and it’s snowing hard, which causes major issues for pretty much everyone.MoMA is honoring Lisa as a Black woman filmmaker on the same night that Herbert has a campaign event. The two tussle over whose event should take precedence, but Lisa makes no bones about the fact that she’s going to “do me,” and Herbert can kick rocks. Then, her car service cancels. Herbert offers to drop her off, but Lisa’s pride won’t let him “save” her. She trudges in fabulous stiletto boots to the event and makes it to the stage with no help from anyone. She is pleasantly surprised, though, when Herbert shows up in support.Similarly, Carrie absolutely can’t no-show “WidowCon,” where she will be reading from her latest memoir, “Loved and Lost.” This is partly because she couldn’t bear to let down the mass of grieving ladies, but really it is because her old writing partner, Karen (Rachel Dratch), whom Carrie apparently ghosted long ago before a critical meeting with a big studio (though Carrie has no memory of this), is the organizer, and Karen would never let her live it down I guess? How Karen wields this kind of power over Carrie is a mystery, but considering Carrie coughed up six figures to Enid because Carrie felt bad about a misinterpreted sext kind of indicates how big of a motivator shame can be for her.In any case, Carrie is particularly anxious about this gig and needs a sidekick of sorts to keep her nerves at bay, and she decides Che is just the person for the job. When snow pummels the streets of Manhattan on the big day, Che tries to weasel out of the commitment, but Carrie uses her own status as a grieving widow to rope Che back in. In what is probably the genuinely funniest scene of the episode, dare I say the entire season so far, Carrie lumbers through the blizzard all the way to the Sheraton in what amounts to a fabulous down comforter, attempting to remain composed as Charlotte shrieks on the other end of a phone about condoms.Yes, Charlotte desperately needs condoms, though not for herself. She needs to buy them for Lily and her boyfriend, Blake, who are about to do the deed for the first time. The snowpocalypse has shut down every drugstore, so Charlotte calls to ask Carrie if she has any spares. (Carrie does not.)Despite what some of us may have predicted based on the “Sex and the City” version of her character, it turns out Lily and Rock are being parented by “Woke Charlotte.” She is a bona fide sex-positive mom, so much so that she makes sure her daughter knows to prioritize her own pleasure as much as her partner’s.Eventually, Charlotte obtains a smorgasbord of condom options and drops them off at Blake’s parent’s house, giving Lily a quick hug before her daughter runs upstairs. It’s a little awkward, sure, but at the same time, it’s a surprisingly tender moment. Many of us born before the Clinton administration can barely fathom having this kind of exchange with our parents. Charlotte says as much when she tells Lily her parents made sex seem unmentionable. Maybe, just maybe, Charlotte doesn’t want her children growing up with the same stuffy ideas about sex that she had. Charlotte may be a traditionalist in so many ways, but this is progressive parenting.Over in Brooklyn, Steve and Miranda find themselves alone in their old house, and Miranda takes the opportunity to do the dirty work she knows she can’t put off forever. She presses Steve about moving out, and almost immediately, they spiral.Steve insists, loudly, that it is his house. He built the kitchen, he redid the floors, he put up the bookshelves. But Miranda’s money bought it, she reminds him. The jab sends Steve over the edge, and he cuts Miranda in the deepest way possible, screaming that she never wanted to move there, never wanted him, and never even wanted Brady.There is suddenly far too much truth in the room.Miranda nearly leaves, heaving sobs and she puts on her coat, but Steve manages to stop her, apologizing profusely. The two end up lying next to each other affectionately in bed, with Miranda apologizing in turn for causing Steve so much pain.That moment, too, is surprisingly tender, at least until Miranda finds a condom wrapper on Steve’s end table. While she has been agonizing about whether or not he will ever be able to move on, Steve, apparently, has been sleeping with a girl from Whole Foods. Miranda immediately releases the guilt she has been shouldering for months and walks out, heading home to her true love, Che. (While Miranda and Steve finally have real closure, it’s still unclear who is going to find a new place.)Except Che isn’t there to receive her with open arms. Che, it turns out, believes things with Miranda have taken a turn, and won’t get better. Miranda’s eyes well up, but she agrees.It’s surprising how well Miranda takes the Che breakup, actually. Che’s magnetism was so powerful to Miranda that she blew up her entire life so they could be together. Then, Che’s pilot flops and their ego takes a hit, they spend a few weeks in the doldrums living on Pirate’s Booty, and that’s just it? The whole relationship has to sink with the “Che Pasa” ship? And Miranda just lets it all go?For all those who missed the colder, more cynical version of Miranda, maybe she is on her way back. RIP, love-dovey Miranda. We hardly knew ye. More

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      In ‘Twisted Metal’ Series, Killer Clowns Come With Class Commentary

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      Peacock’s new show indulges in the same ultraviolence as the video game that inspired it. But this time it has a message about the haves and the have-nots.When Stephanie Beatriz likes a script she enjoys reading it aloud at home to get a better feel for the character and story. She warmed up quickly to “Twisted Metal,” the new Peacock mayhem machine based on the popular PlayStation game series that first burned rubber in 1995. But as she turned the pages, encountering psycho clowns, murderous religious cults, cannibalism and other manner of good times, she had to pause. Her 8-month-old daughter was in the room.In a June video interview she recalled what she told her husband: “I’m going to take a break and stop because I’m not sure that this is great for her subconscious.”Her concern was well-founded. Premiering July 27, “Twisted Metal” is nothing if not extreme. Fast and profane, it is fueled by what “A Clockwork Orange” once called a bit of the old ultraviolence. It is blood-soaked, bullet-ridden and chaotic. In one early scene, two men sit in massive tubs, waiting to be cooked and served. One of them is sprinkled with a generous portion of lemon pepper spice as a human foot dangles from a line; Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” (“Ooh, baby, I like it raw”) blares on the soundtrack.Starring Anthony Mackie as John Doe, a wiz behind the wheel hired to deliver a mystery package across a hazardous, postapocalyptic America, and Beatriz as Quiet, his no-nonsense, vengeance-minded passenger, “Twisted Metal” stakes out a sometimes-queasy intersection between terror and glee. It’s a little like “Mad Max” on laughing gas.“It’s a very weird apocalypse,” Marc Forman, an executive producer, said. “It’s crawling with cannibals and weird cults. What’s great is that you never know what’s around the corner.”The series stars Mackie as an ace wheelman on a cross-country mission and Beatriz as his vengeful passenger.Skip Bolen/PeacockThere’s very little that is old fashioned about “Twisted Metal,” yet it has a fair amount of nostalgia in the tank — for both the pre-apocalyptic world, and for an earlier age of gaming. The story is set in the wake of a hazily defined, world-destroying event that occurred in 2002, freezing culture as the characters know it in that year. An evil interrogator uses the late ’90s Europop earworm “Barbie Girl” to torture his prisoners.As Mackie’s John drives his beat-up 2002 Subaru through a dilapidated shopping mall, he’s excited to see the remnants of a Foot Locker (he grabs some kicks as he races by). A Twisted Metal game cartridge falls onto his windshield; he looks at it quizzically.Mackie, 44, recalled playing the earliest versions of Twisted Metal. “I remember it just being destruction,” he said in a June phone interview as he sat, ironically, in traffic. “The game was just demolition derby, and I loved it, but it was impossible to play. You couldn’t control the cars — you were just flying past each other, shooting missiles and hoping they hit.”The playing experience advanced, along with the rest of the gaming industry, through subsequent iterations. Now “Twisted Metal” is just the latest TV series hoping to translate gaming popularity to small-screen success, following in the footsteps of series like Netflix’s “The Witcher” and HBO’s abundantly Emmy-nominated hit “The Last of Us.”In gaming circles, “Twisted Metal” belongs to the genre of “vehicular combat.” The game isn’t big on narrative. The series’s creative team, including the showrunner Michael Jonathan Smith and the writer-executive producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (both writers on the “Deadpool” movies), were charged with expanding the game’s world to the scale of a TV show — to take it beyond, in Mackie’s words, “just being destruction.” (PlayStation Productions and its corporate cousin Sony Pictures Television produced the series along with Universal Television.)Sweet Tooth, a macabre killer clown, is played by the body of the wrestler Joe Seanoa paired with the voice of Will Arnett.PeacockSome characters exist in both Twisted Metal mediums, including the psychotic clown Sweet Tooth, perhaps the show’s most macabre creation. A bare-chested hulk with a leering clown mask — he is played by the body of the wrestler Joe Seanoa paired with the voice of the actor Will Arnett — Sweet Tooth controls what is left of Las Vegas, driving what appears to be a refurbished ice cream truck and wielding a machete that he uses to slash open all comers.At one point he assembles a ragtag army of outcasts to do his bidding, giving him a literal insane clown posse. But Sweet Tooth has one thing in common with John and Quiet: an enmity for Agent Stone (a platinum-dyed Thomas Haden Church), a petty tyrant who essentially runs the country.Somehow, amid all the mayhem, “Twisted Metal” finds room for contemporary class consciousness. John has been tasked with a cross-country trip, from New San Francisco to New Chicago and back, with the promise of a cozy life by the bay if he succeeds. New San Francisco is a walled urban paradise where the swells dwell, while throughout most of the country, it’s a mad scramble to survive. Inside the wall you can eat dinner. Outside, you might be dinner.“The metaphors abound,” Beatriz (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”) said. “It is silly, it is violent, it is funny. But so much of the show is about who has and who doesn’t. There’s an argument to be made that there’s a certain kind of cannibalism happening now, within our society, at all times.”“The metaphors abound,” Beatriz said, but the series is also a chaotic blood bath.Cedric Angeles for The New York TimesBut fans of the Twisted Metal game needn’t worry that their beloved bedlam has gone highbrow. The series’s bread and butter remains people shooting and slicing each other to pieces, often while driving cars equipped to do the same. This is car culture at the end of the world, a land of last resorts. So it seems appropriate that John drives not a souped-up sports car but a true beater, modified to handle the wear and tear of the apocalypse. John’s true love in “Twisted Metal” isn’t Quiet, but Evelyn — or, as her license plate reads, EV3L1N.Mackie can relate. After his breakout performance in “We Are Marshall,” from 2006, he was able to purchase his dream car: a 1964 ½ Ford Mustang (as the earliest Mustang models are known by enthusiasts). He’s been tinkering with it ever since. The car’s name is Marshall.“Me and Marshall are always cruising and enjoying our time together,“ Mackie said. “Before I had my sons, Marshall was like my best friend. Some people talk to their plants, some people talk to their cats. I would talk to my car.”Beatriz had a slightly different automotive coming-of-age. She was acting in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when she started thinking of moving to Los Angeles. One problem: She didn’t know how to drive, and a car is a must in L.A. So she learned from a friend and fellow Shakespearean, Catherine E. Coulson, perhaps best known as the Log Lady in “Twin Peaks.” Coulson would take Beatriz around Ashland, Ore., where the festival was located, in her Prius, a far more fanciful image than any you will see in “Twisted Metal.”Beatriz’s maiden voyages with the Log Lady have given way to faster adventures: She was grand marshal for the Indianapolis 500 in May. As part of the gig she got to ride shotgun in an Indy car before the race, hitting speeds of 190 miles per hour. “Could have gone faster, would’ve been great,” she said.All that fun, and not a killer clown in sight. More

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      ‘Break Point’ Just Might Be the Best Way to Watch Tennis

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      The docuseries feels more like a prestige psychodrama — which gets the highs and lows of the pro circuit right.In the sixth episode of the Netflix docuseries “Break Point,” Ajla Tomljanovic, a journeywoman tennis player who has spent much of the last decade in the Top 100 of the world rankings, is shown splayed across an exercise mat in a drab training room after reaching the 2022 Wimbledon quarterfinals. Her father, Ratko, stretches out her hamstrings. She receives a congratulatory phone call from her sister and another from her idol-turned-mentor, the 18-time major champion Chris Evert, before Ratko announces that it’s time for the dreaded ice bath. “By the way,” Tomljanovic says at one point, “do we have a room?” Shortly after his daughter sealed her spot in the final eight of the world’s pre-eminent tennis tournament, Ratko was seen on booking.com, extending their stay in London.This is not the stuff of your typical sports documentary, but it is the life of a professional tennis player. Circumnavigating the globe for much of the year with only a small circle of coaches, physiotherapists and perhaps a parent, they shoulder alone the bureaucratic irritations that, in other elite sports, might be outsourced to agents and managers. If at some tournaments they surprise even themselves by outlasting their hotel accommodations, most events will only harden them to the standard torments of the circuit, which reminds them weekly of their place in the pecking order. As Taylor Fritz, now the top-ranked American men’s player, remarks in one “Break Point” episode, “It’s tough to be happy in tennis, because every single week everyone loses but one person.” This is a sobering audit, coming from a player who wins considerably more than his approximately 2,000 peers on the tour.“Break Point,” executive-produced by Paul Martin and the Oscar-winning filmmaker James Gay-Rees, arrived this year as a gift to tennis fans, for whom splashy, well-produced and readily accessible documentaries about the sport have been hard to come by. Tennis, today, finds itself in the crepuscular light of an era when at least five different players — the Williams sisters, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic — have surely deserved mini-series of their own. But the sport has never enjoyed its own “All or Nothing,” the all-access Amazon program that follows a different professional sports team each season, or the event-television status accorded to “The Last Dance,” the Netflix docuseries about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, with its luxury suite of talking heads: Nas, Isiah Thomas, “former Chicago resident” Barack Obama. Perhaps this is because the narrative tropes of the genre tend toward triumphs and Gatorade showers, while the procedural and psychological realities of professional tennis lie elsewhere. The 10 episodes of “Break Point” render tennis unromantically: This is the rare sports doc whose primary subject is loss.In Andre Agassi’s memorably frank memoir, “Open,” he describes the tennis calendar with subtle poetry, detailing “how we start the year on the other side of the world, at the Australian Open, and then just chase the sun.” This itinerary more or less dictates the structure of “Break Point,” which opens at the year’s first Grand Slam and closes at the year-end championships in November. At each tournament, the players it spotlights post impressive results — and then, typically, they lose, thwarted sometimes by the sport’s stubborn luminaries but more often by bouts of nerves or exhaustion. They find comfort where they can, juggling a soccer ball or lying back with a self-made R.&B. track in a hotel room. But many tears are shed, after which they redouble their commitments to work harder, be smarter, get hungrier. “You have to be cold to build a champion mind-set,” says the Greek player Stefanos Tsitsipas.‘It’s tough to be happy in tennis.’Those who watched Wimbledon this month might find, in all this, an instructive companion piece to live tennis. “Break Point” is frustratingly short on actual game play, shaving matches down to their rudiments in a way that understates the freakish tactical discipline required of players; viewers will not, for example, come away with any greater understanding of point construction than they will from having watched Djokovic pull his opponents out wide with progressively heavier forehands, only to wrong-foot them with a backhand up the line. They will, however, come to understand how intensely demoralizing it must be to stand across the net from him. In an episode following last year’s Wimbledon, we watch the talented but irascible Nick Kyrgios, as close as tennis has to its own Dennis Rodman, play Djokovic in the final. He gets off to a hot start and then, like so many before him, begins to wilt. “He’s calmer; you can’t rush him,” he says of Djokovic, in a voice-over the series aptly sets against footage of an exasperated Kyrgios admonishing the umpire, the crowd, even friends and family in his own box. These are athletes we’re accustomed to seeing at their steeliest or their most combustible; the matches in “Break Point” may be fresh in the memory of most tennis fans, but the series benefits greatly from its subjects’ clearer-headed reflections.For all its pretensions to realism, “Break Point” is a shrewd, and perhaps doomed, attempt to fill the sport’s impending power vacuum. Kyrgios and Tsitsipas are among a handful of strivers it positions as the sport’s new stars, along with others like Casper Ruud, Ons Jabeur and Aryna Sabalenka. All, naturally, subjected themselves to Netflix’s cameras. This kind of access is increasingly crucial to sports documentaries, a fact that often results in work that’s unduly deferential to its subjects, as with “The Last Dance” and Michael Jordan.Tennis, though, runs counter to this mandate. It is perhaps the sport most conducive to solipsism. Singles players perform alone. On-court coaching is generally prohibited, so there are no rousing speeches to inspire unlikely comebacks. The game’s essential psychodrama takes place within the mind — often in the 25 seconds allotted between points, or in the split seconds during which one must decide whether to go cross-court or down the line, to flatten the ball or welter it with spin. I can remember, as a junior-tennis also-ran, my coaches saying that once my eyes wandered to my opponent across the net, they knew I would lose. This might explain why tennis players so often resort to their index of obsessive tics, like hiking up their socks or adjusting their racket strings just so.By the season’s end, we meet Tomljanovic again at the U.S. Open, where she earned the awkward distinction of sending Serena Williams into retirement. At the time, ESPN’s broadcast of the match yielded nearly five million viewers, making it the most-watched tennis telecast in the network’s history. This was Serena’s swan song, but “Break Point” depicts it from the perspective of our reluctant victor. Between the second and third sets, Tomljanovic shields her face with a sweat towel, as if to quiet the sound of 24,000 spectators rooting against her. In tennis, it seems, even winning can feel like a drag.After the match, we find Tomljanovic cooling down on a stationary bike. Ratko, who has emerged as the show’s sole source of comedic relief, comes up from behind, embracing his daughter with a joke about her beating the greatest player of all time. “But why do I feel so conflicted?” she asks. There is no Gatorade bath, no confetti. To win the tournament, she still has four more matches to go.Opening illustration: Source photographs from Netflix; Tim Clayton/Corbis, via Getty ImagesJake Nevins is a writer in Brooklyn and the digital editor at Interview Magazine. He has written about books, sports and pop culture for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Nation. More

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      In Hollywood Strike, Actors and Studios Are ‘Far Apart’ on Key Issues

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      The actors’ union and the organization that bargains on behalf of the studios traded statements underscoring how much work needs to be done to reach an agreement.As tens of thousands of actors go into their fifth day of a strike versus the Hollywood studios, the two sides have shown no signs of returning to the bargaining table — and are even exchanging barbed messages that underscore how far apart they are.Late Monday, leadership of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, sent members a 12-page memo laying out its demands and the studios’ counterproposals. They “remain far apart on the most critical issues that affect the very survival of our profession,” the note said.“We marched ahead because they intentionally dragged their feet,” it continued.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that bargains on behalf of the studios, answered with a note to the news media arguing that the message from the union “deliberately distorts” the offers it had made.“A strike is not the outcome we wanted,” the alliance said. “For SAG-AFTRA to assert that we have not been responsive to the needs of its membership is disingenuous at best.”Thousands of Hollywood actors went on strike on Friday after failing to reach a new contract with the major studios, including old-line companies like Paramount, Universal and Disney and tech giants like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.The actors joined 11,500 screenwriters who went on strike 78 days ago, the first time both unions had walked out at the same time since 1960. The writers have not returned to the bargaining table with the studios since their negotiations collapsed in early May.SAG-AFTRA’s note said the two sides remained far apart on several key issues, including compensation, guardrails against artificial intelligence, and health care and pension costs.The union’s leadership said it had asked for 11 percent wage increases in the first year of a new contract; the studios came back with an offer of 5 percent, the union said.When it comes to artificial intelligence, the union’s leaders said they had argued for a number of provisions to protect them “when a ‘digital replica’ is made or our performance is changed using A.I.”They said the studio alliance “failed to address many vital concerns, leaving principal performers and background actors vulnerable to having most of their work replaced by digital replicas.”The studios said that the union’s note to its members “fails to include the proposals offered verbally” during negotiations, and that its overall package was worth more than $1 billion in wage increases, improvements on residuals (a type of royalty) and health care contributions.Regarding artificial intelligence, the studios said they had offered a “groundbreaking proposal, which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.”Union leadership sent out a chart laying out each proposal and the studios’ response. Over more than two dozen proposals, the studio response amounted to one word, according to the union: “Rejected.”“So who’s making the T-Shirt that says ‘Rejected’?” the actress Senta Moses posted on Twitter.“This is why we’re on strike,” the union note said. “The A.M.P.T.P. thinks we will relent, but the will of our membership has never been stronger. We have the resolve and unity needed to defend our rights.” More

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      ‘Creamerie’ Season 2 Review: Where the Boys Aren’t

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      In a raunchy, rollicking post-pandemic (not that one) comedy from New Zealand, the men are gone but the women are as nasty to one another as ever.Contains many spoilers for Season 1 of “Creamerie.”The New Zealand post-viral-apocalypse comedy “Creamerie” likes to begin an episode right where the previous one left off. So the show’s second season, which premiered Saturday on Hulu, begins mid-cliffhanger: Its three heroines cowering and aghast as they watch their mean-girl nemesis French kiss the traitorous man they thought they loved. (One of them is his sister, another his widow. It’s complicated.) Underscoring the action are the moans of the naked men in the background who are attached, like dairy cattle, to stainless steel tubes that are rhythmically collecting their semen.Oh, did I forget to mention that the viral apocalypse in question only killed humans with Y chromosomes? “Creamerie” is in the science fiction subgenre of world-without-men shows; others include the new Netflix anime “Ooku: The Inner Chambers” and FX on Hulu’s “Y: The Last Man” from 2021. These are actually, almost invariably, world-with-a-handful-of-men shows, since much of their pleasure comes from seeing what happens when the power balance is reversed.“Creamerie” was created by the actresses who play the leads — J.J. Fong, Perlina Lau and Ally Xue — along with the writer and director Roseanne Liang. The four have been collaborators for a decade, making Web series about relatably snarky young women in urban New Zealand. What distinguishes “Creamerie” is how seamlessly it incorporates the raunchy, silly, casually comic vibe of those online shorts (along with their female point of view) into a sci-fi-series framework. It’s a clever but unassuming show, which is why its package of laughs, sentiment, consciousness raising and low-budget Saturday-serial action has considerable appeal.Fong, Lau and Xue play Jamie (determined, sorrowful, sexy), Pip (uptight, repressed, resourceful), and Alex (rebellious, profane, loyal), the proprietors of a dairy farm in rural New Zealand. (That they’re in the milk business is a joke that pays off in full with the reveal of the semen farm at the end of Season 1.) Eight years before, a virus was thought to have killed all men and it continues to kill male embryos; the survival of the remaining half of the human race is presumed to depend on the leftover inventory of sperm banks, which is distributed by lottery to prospective mothers.The fundamental question of these shows is how women would act if they were in charge, and the answer “Creamerie” offers is deflating but comically fertile: They would be really, really mean. The area around the farm is governed by Nordic-featured, yoga-toned, ecru-linen-wearing Amazons, led by Lane (the excellent Tandi Wright), an unholy cross of Gwyneth Paltrow and Martha Stewart who wields “wellness” as a tool of oppression. In the new world ruled by women, if you question authority, you are dispatched for a lobotomy — it’s called being permed — and if you don’t fit the right physical and racial mold, your place in society may be tending cows in the countryside.Of course, Lane and her cohorts are keeping secret the existence of a few surviving men, one of whom, Bobby (Jay Ryan), shows up at the farm. His arrival turns Jamie, Pip and Alex into reluctant insurgents, sending them on an antic, highly messy journey of discovery, liberation and violent payback, one that continues through the second season against ever greater odds.Liang, who has directed all 12 episodes of “Creamerie” and written them with several other writers, primarily Dan Musgrove, is best known for the rousing 2020 action-horror feature “Shadow in the Cloud.” Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, a B-17 bomber and a toothy special-effects gremlin, the film played like an extended, well-choreographed “Twilight Zone” episode. Like “Creamerie,” it wasn’t that deep or self-serious, but the confidence and brio with which it was made gave weight to its mix of feminist and maternal motifs and to its emotional payoffs.Something similar happens in the series: the jokes, the shambolic action and the matter-of-fact satire of gender, race and class alchemize into something funnier and more moving than you might expect. Fong, Lau and Xue aren’t, individually, expert comic performers, but together they have a rapport and timing that expertly serve the material.In Season 2 the scope of the story expands, moving into Auckland, where the national government is led by a gently woke prime minister (Isabella Austin) with pink-and-blue hair and a furry green hipster hat. The heroines continue to find improbable escapes from their increasingly perilous situations, falling out and making up with one another in classic buddy-comedy fashion. And they remain gloriously themselves, no matter how dire things get.Waking up after being tranquilized, not knowing where she is or why, Pip frantically checks her hair, in a joke that reaches back to the characters Lau plays in the collective’s online shorts. Against the notion of a female utopia, “Creamerie” stubbornly insists on the primary value of the individual. More