Television

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Wes Bentley Was at Rock Bottom. Now He Is on ‘Yellowstone.’

      by

      Years of addiction and struggle followed his breakout role in “American Beauty.” He lived to tell the tale, and get a major role on TV’s biggest show.It’s not easy being Jamie Dutton.The adopted son of the ruthless rancher John Dutton on Paramount Network’s wildly popular neo-western series “Yellowstone,” Jamie just wanted to be a cowboy. Instead the man who raised him sent him off to law school. He wanted to be governor of Montana, but John stepped over him in humiliating fashion. His sister, Beth, eviscerates him on a regular basis. He has spent four-and-a-half seasons desperate for the paterfamilias’ attention while also hating his guts.Nor is it easy playing Jamie Dutton. Wes Bentley can tell you all about that. Jamie has taken him to some dark places, the kinds of places he knows all too well.“He’s incredibly sad,” the actor said over brunch recently at an outdoor cafe in Los Angeles. “I’ve always dealt with my sadness with things like comedy, or humor, or drugs at one point, or trying to just ignore it and finding another way out of it. But you can’t do that when you’re trying to portray someone’s sadness. You have to let it be there. That’s been the hardest part of it all, and it’s weighed on my life a little bit.”Bentley, 44, makes it clear that he’s not complaining. He’s grateful to be a key part of the most popular drama on television, which had its midseason finale on Sunday amid a fresh batch of potential familial murder plots. More than that, he’s grateful to be alive.And yet, “The regrets are always going to be there,” he added.Most people are likely to have first encountered Bentley as Ricky Fitts, Kevin Spacey’s pot-dealing neighbor in the 1999 film “American Beauty.” He was 21 when the movie debuted, and he seemed like a handsome, soulful young man with a future. But he grew disillusioned with the roles that came his way next — “It was all vampires and underdeveloped young people,” he said — and found himself drifting into addiction. Heroin. Cocaine. Lots of booze. In 2008, he was arrested and pleaded guilty to heroin possession and trying to pass a counterfeit $100 bill. He was falling toward his bottom fast.Bentley (with Thora Birch) found his breakout role early, as the sensitive pot dealer Ricky in the Oscar-winning 1999 film “American Beauty.” Lorey Sebastian/DreamworksHe remembers taking a job on a cheapie Stephen King adaptation, “Dolan’s Cadillac” (2009), and mapping out his next steps: “This is probably my last acting job,” he told himself. “I’m going to be a drug dealer and a D.J.”Around this time he fell in love with the woman who later became his wife, the associate producer and assistant director Jacqui Swedberg. This didn’t get him sober; it rarely works that way. But it made him want to be better and made him realize that he had no control over his life, and that he might just have something to live for.“Before I was like, I’m partying, fine, but I can stop this,” he said. “Now it was like, ‘Man, I can’t stop this, and I really want to.’” A friend in the industry started taking Bentley to 12-step meetings. He liked what he heard. And he saw that a different kind of life was possible.Bentley has been sober since July 5, 2009. Today, with a beard and eyeglasses that accentuate his sharp features, he seems present, forthright and easygoing. He blows off steam playing soccer in a league and hiking. “I have a constant stream of energy,” he said. “That’s what led to my addiction. I needed something to react to that energy.”But Jamie is never far away. It’s the role that really put him on the map, after supporting parts in post-crisis movies like “The Hunger Games” and “Interstellar.” It’s the gig of his life.And sometimes, it hurts like hell.Jamie’s most frequent “Yellowstone” combatant is his sister, Beth, played by the English actress Kelly Reilly. There’s a brute force to their scenes together, emotionally and, in the midseason finale, physically. (Beth knows how to handle herself.) When they were teens, Jamie took Beth to get an abortion, without telling her she was also getting a hysterectomy. She never forgave him. Jamie blames Beth for their mother’s death (as does Beth). She takes every opportunity to emasculate Jamie.Much of the pain Jamie Dutton (Wes Bentley), left, feels as a member of the Dutton clan on “Yellowstone” is inflicted by his sister, Beth (Kelly Reilly).Paramount NetworkAs Reilly said in a recent phone interview, “There’s something about his weakness that appalls her.”It can be exhausting to watch, and to play.“Wes and I have been doing this now together for five years,” Reilly said. “We know each other quite well, and we take care of one another tremendously. We both have to be quite fearless in those scenes. They’re quite ugly sometimes.” When there’s a chance to laugh together between takes, they jump on it.“Then you try to go home without carrying it all into the rest of your day,” she said.But that’s not always easy, especially after living with a character for so long.“I’ve prided myself for most of my career on leaving it at the door, or like an athlete would say, leaving it on the field,” Bentley said. “But Jamie’s sadness permeates my life, even though I’m not sad. I’m very lucky to have a great family and be where I’m at in life, but he’s always there behind me, clawing at that, especially when I’m shooting.”He said his wife sometimes has to point out Jamie’s unwanted presence: “‘You’re letting him come home now,” she tells him. “‘Jamie’s coming home and we don’t want him here.’”This season, however, Jamie’s step has been a bit more lively. The Dutton family’s corporate foes unleashed a barracuda, Sarah Atwood (Dawn Olivieri), to turn Jamie against his family’s interests. It wasn’t hard; Jamie’s resentment had become a volcano waiting to erupt. But ever since Sarah seduced Jamie, and whispered, Lady Macbeth-like, in his ear, Olivieri has noticed a change in the actor as well as the character. Bentley had become more assertive, she said, less likely to apologize for things that aren’t his fault.“I have watched Wes change as a man, even in the short period of time that we’ve worked together,” she said in a recent video call. “It’s really hard as an actor to not absorb the character that you’re playing. You just become that person. When you’re a really good actor, it’s like you almost can’t even help it. And Wes is a really good actor.”Jamie’s sadness has always lived side by side with his capacity for evil. Under duress from Beth, he killed his biological father and, before that, a reporter who got too close to the family’s criminal ways. In the most recent episode, he began to consider the logistics of eliminating John and Beth. Through these developments Bentley has conjured a tricky mix of despair and cold, Machiavellian calculation.“Is Jamie evil?” the “Yellowstone” co-creator Taylor Sheridan wrote in an email. “In a lesser actor’s hands the answer would be easy, but Wes has crafted a vulnerable, honest and emotional character who allows the audience to understand the motivation behind his actions — even if there is no questioning the act itself.”Bentley went through a difficult period of alcohol abuse and drugs in the years after “American Beauty.” He has been sober since 2009.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesThe “Yellowstone” directors rave about Bentley’s commitment, sensitivity and ability to think on his feet. “It’s remarkable, his ability to make you mad at Jamie, make you hate him and have him break your heart at the same time,” Stephen Kay said in a phone interview. “He’s one of one, if you ask me.”Kay made the comparison to another famous fictional son and brother, this one from a different crime family.“That role is so hard, so deceptively tricky,” Kay said. “We’ve been comparing it since Season 1 to Fredo in ‘The Godfather.’ John Cazale is arguably one of the best actors of all time, so if you’re building a show with a Fredo, you better hand the part to somebody who can play.”Christina Alexandra Voros, who directed the midseason finale, marveled at Bentley’s “courage to unravel himself.”“Everyone’s tortured on the show, but Jamie is in particular one of the more tortured characters,” she continued by phone. “He’s also interesting because you never really know if he’s a villain or a hero.”Bentley is more than happy to save his unraveling for the screen. He tried the other way, and he knows he was fortunate to survive.He lived to tell. Now he can take Jamie along for the ride.“I believe in fate, and I believe I went through all that, caused all that, and experienced all that, because I was going to get here,” he said. “There are many things that I regret, but I’m just so happy with my life.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Finding Your Roots’ and ‘Mayfair Witches’

      by

      Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s genealogy series returns on PBS. And a TV adaptation of an Anne Rice trilogy debuts on AMC.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, Jan. 2-8. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: CHILDREN OF LAS BRISAS (2023) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The aspirations and creativity of young musicians tug against political turbulence and humanitarian crises in “Children of Las Brisas,” a documentary that follows members of a Venezuelan youth orchestra coming of age during that country’s revolution and the fallout of the death of its former president Hugo Chávez. When the film played at the DOC NYC festival in 2022, its director, Marianela Maldonado, described the intent behind it. “It’s about the pain of growing up with dreams of being an artist while living in a dysfunctional society,” she said. “It’s a story of survival and redemption through music.”WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME (2017) 6:15 p.m. on Showtime. There’s a dramatized version of the singer Whitney Houston’s life in theaters right now: the biopic “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” For a nonfictional portrait, consider this feature-length doc, which pairs the voices of some of Houston’s friends, family members and collaborators with tour footage from the late 1990s. The result, Ben Kenigsberg wrote in his review for The New York Times, is “a surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait.”TuesdayFINDING YOUR ROOTS 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the first episode of the new season of his genealogy show, the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. presents the actress Julia Roberts with a book filled with research about Roberts’s family history. Roberts, lifting the tome, looks at Gates with a smile. “This has got some heft to it,” she says. That’s often true — in more ways than one — of the research that anchors the series, which uses D.N.A. analysis and historical sleuthing to uncover the often-complicated backgrounds of its celebrity guests. Tuesday’s episode, which kicks off the show’s ninth season, features Roberts and Edward Norton. Other guests this season include the movie stars Claire Danes, Viola Davis and Danny Trejo; the pop star Cyndi Lauper; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis.WednesdayBULLITT (1968) 8 p.m. on TCM. When this now-classic neo-noir opened at Radio City Music Hall in the fall of 1968, the critic Renata Adler wrote in her review for The Times that it was “a terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen — fast, well acted, written the way people talk.” But McQueen, the human celebrity, had to share the spotlight with a material co-star: a 1968 Ford Mustang, which has become as much a symbol of the movie as McQueen. Watch man and machine undulate and snap over San Francisco streets as McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt chases mafiosos.ThursdayWes Studi, left, and Dale Dickey in “A Love Song.”Sundance InstituteA LOVE SONG (2022) 8 p.m. on Showtime. With a grand landscape and a modest story, this debut feature from the filmmaker Max Walker-Silverman centers on a widow, Faye (Dale Dickey), at a lakeside campsite in Colorado. She’s waiting on the arrival of her childhood friend Lito (Wes Studi), whom she hasn’t seen in years. Faye is isolated before Lito arrives, but things remain quiet even after he shows up; the chemistry between the two is expressed as much in silences and facial expressions as in words. It’s a “tender, laconic” movie, Jeannette Catsoulis said in her review for The Times. “More than one kind of love is being celebrated in that title, including the director’s affection for his home state, its wide-open spaces and wandering souls.”FridayRUPAUL’S DRAG RACE 8 p.m. on MTV. RuPaul’s mighty drag competition show moves to MTV from its old home, VH1, for its new, 15th season, which kicks off on Friday night with a two-hour special. The new season gathers 16 drag queens from around the country — the show’s largest cast ever — and is set to include guest appearances from Ariana Grande, Janelle Monáe and other celebrities.BOYS IN BLUE 8 p.m. on Showtime. In this four-part documentary series, the filmmaker Peter Berg (who brought “Friday Night Lights” to television) follows a high school football team in Minneapolis after the 2020 killing of George Floyd. The students had a unique and potent experience of that moment: Their team is mentored by Minneapolis police officers. Berg focuses on the tensions and conversations between players and officers.SaturdayPedro Pascal, left, and Nicolas Cage in “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.”Katalin Vermes/LionsgateTHE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT (2022) 9 p.m. on Starz. Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself in this action comedy, which has its tongue stuck so solidly in its cheek that it would be hard to say “I’m going to steal the Declaration of Independence.” The plot, such as it is, involves Cage attending the birthday party of a mega-rich fan (Pedro Pascal). “It’s another Nicolas Cage joint, a romp, a showcase, an eager-to-please ode to him in all his sui generis Caginess,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “That’s the idea, at any rate. Mostly, though, it is a single joke sustained for 106 minutes, amid many rapid tone shifts, mood swings and set changes.”SundayAlexandra Daddario in “Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches.”AMCANNE RICE’S MAYFAIR WITCHES 9 p.m. on AMC. The novelist Anne Rice’s “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” book trilogy — “The Witching Hour” (1990), “Lasher” (1993) and “Taltos” (1994) — gets a TV adaptation with this new show, which casts Alexandra Daddario as Dr. Rowan Fielding, a neurosurgeon who learns that she is a descendant of a family of witches haunted by a menacing force. If “neurosurgeon” sounds like surprisingly scientific territory for a novelist whose primary interest lies in the supernatural, consider this point that Rice made in an interview with The Times in 2021, shortly before her death. “I think some might be surprised by the sheer volume of science writing I own,” Rice said. “When you invent alternate worlds and supernatural cosmologies, it can be incredibly inspiring to read about how little we still know about the underlying fabric of the universe.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Theater

      10 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2023

      by

      “Succession” returns, the Spider-Verse spawns a sequel, Kelela hits the road and Michael B. Jordan makes his directing debut with “Creed III.”Miguel and Carlos CevallosMargaret LyonsThe Scheming Roys of “Succession” ReturnBrian Cox as Logan Roy in Season 4 of “Succession,” which returns to HBO in the spring.Macall Polay/HBOWhile there are no sure bets in television, and plenty of once-great shows have fallen into bland disarray, I am counting the days until “Succession” comes back for its fourth season. (HBO says it will air in the spring.) Oh, I can hear the jangly piano theme now, and just knowing that the bereft and broken Roys, their gorgeously cruel dialogue and endless, joyless quests for power will soon be back on my screen fills me with elation. God, I hope Kendall sings in front of an audience again, and Greg stammers his way into failing up somehow, and Gerri and Roman’s erotic entanglement deepens and Shiv continues her reign of ecru terror. Logan will be grumbly! Connor will be a dingus! Tom will be in hapless agony! And I will be so, so happy, reveling in the show’s mastery of tension, its push-pull of crumbling and coalescing.Maya PhillipsThe Spider-Verse Slings Into a SequelBefore Michelle Yeoh faced off against Jobu Tupaki and her everything bagel of oblivion in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and before Doctor Strange fought bizarro Strange with weaponized music notation in “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” in 2018 “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” provided a much-needed shock to the multiverse concept in film. Though it introduced a whole gang of Spider-people, each with his or her own unique back story, universe and aesthetic, “Spider-Verse” made plenty of space for its protagonist, Miles Morales, a young Afro-Latino Spider-Man whose heartfelt, humorous character arc, along with the film’s stunning animation and killer soundtrack, wasn’t lost even amid the infinite vastness of the multiverse. In June the sequel, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” will offer a more mature Miles and a new cast of Spider-variants voiced by a stellar cast, including Issa Rae as an Afro-wearing Spider-Woman, Daniel Kaluuya as Spider-Punk and Oscar Isaac as Spider-Man 2099.Jon ParelesKelela Hits the Road With Her Avant-Garde R&BThe singer and songwriter Kelela has floated on the avant-garde fringe of R&B since she released her first mixtape, “Cut 4 Me,” in 2013. Working with some of the most innovative producers around, Kelela often places her voice within eerie electronic backdrops, creating unexpected intimacy in virtual realms. But she has been elusive. She released her only full-length album, “Take Me Apart,” in 2017, and re-emerged with a few singles in 2022, starting with the enigmatic “Washed Away” and moving toward dance music and pop with “Happy Ending” and “On the Run.” Those songs are previews of her second full-length album, “Raven,” which is due in February, followed by a club tour — titled “Rave:N”—- that brings her to Webster Hall in New York on March 17. Both should reveal her latest convolutions and innovations.Mike HaleTwo Spins on the Mystery of the WeekNatasha Lyonne plays the crime-solving heroine of Peacock’s “Poker Face,” created by Rian Johnson.Phillip Caruso/PeacockTwo new crime dramas are taking different approaches to a venerable format, the mystery of the week. Fox’s “Accused” (Jan. 22) is a pure anthology, with 15 self-contained episodes set in different locales and featuring different casts. This presumably expensive venture — a lot of actors, including Wendell Pierce, Margo Martindale, Michael Chiklis, Rhea Perlman and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, need to be paid — is a joint venture of Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa (“Homeland”) and David Shore (“House”). Peacock’s “Poker Face” (Jan. 26), on the other hand, achieves its episodic structure by putting its crime-solving heroine on the road, where she finds new mysteries to tackle each week. Created by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”) and starring Natasha Lyonne, it also requires an extensive cast, which includes Adrien Brody, Cherry Jones, Chloë Sevigny, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Nolte and the busy Rhea Perlman.Jesse GreenA Rare Revival of a Hansberry DramaLorraine Hansberry, photographed in her apartment in 1959; her play “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” will be presented at BAM beginning in February.David Attie/Getty ImagesOnly two plays by Lorraine Hansberry were produced during her short lifetime. “A Raisin in the Sun,” in 1959, was the big deal: an instant classic, forever revivable. But “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which opened on Broadway in 1964 and closed days before she died in 1965, has barely been seen again. Now it will be, in a starry production (Feb. 4 through March 19) directed by Anne Kauffman for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan play a bohemian Village couple — much like Hansberry and her husband, Robert Nemiroff — struggling to align their racial, sexual and cultural positions within the treacherous crosscurrents of contemporary politics. In some ways a Black critique of white liberalism, it leaves no group unscathed in its portrait of do-gooders doing what, for Hansberry, they do best: making a mess with the best of intentions.Salamishah TilletMichael B. Jordan Gets Back in the RingShot on IMAX cameras, “Creed III” promises to get extremely close to the frenzied action of a boxing match. Michael B. Jordan, making his directorial debut, is back as the light heavyweight champion Adonis “Donnie” Creed, now a thriving family man with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter (Mila Davis-Kent). While Sylvester Stallone doesn’t star in this installment of the franchise, Jonathan Majors plays Donnie’s childhood friend Damian, who leaves prison after nearly two decades and turns into his fiercest competitor. Both men are among the most charismatic, talented and nuanced actors of their generation and I expect they’ll deliver some powerful performances inside and outside the ring. Look for the movie on March 3.Zachary WoolfeA New Staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the MetA design sketch for a new staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera, with Piotr Beczala in the title role.via Metropolitan OperaOf the core repertory, the 25 or 30 titles at the center of the Metropolitan Opera’s history, none has been absent from its stage longer than Wagner’s “Lohengrin.” This is strange, since “Lohengrin” is probably the most performed Wagner work worldwide; it’s done all the time. But the Met’s radically minimal, painstakingly still Robert Wilson production posed extreme demands on singers and technicians alike, and was last seen in 2006. So it’ll be a major event when, on Feb. 26, the opera finally returns to New York in a new staging, directed by François Girard, whose thoughtful “Parsifal,” set in a stylized present day, was a success. (His muddled “Der Fliegende Holländer” early in 2020, less so.) Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, conducts a cast that includes the plangent tenor Piotr Beczala in the title role, the budding Wagnerian Tamara Wilson as Elsa, Christine Goerke as the aggrieved Ortrud, Evgeny Nikitin and Günther Groissböck.Gia KourlasPina Bausch Takes a Trip to BrazilIn “Água” by the choreographer Pina Bausch, Tsai-Chin Yu, foreground, spins with Nicholas Losada behind her.Ursula KaufmannThe choreographer Pina Bausch found inspiration in places and in cultures in the latter part of her career, transforming those experiences into shimmering, visceral dances. While they don’t have the darkness and bite of her earlier works, they do have the potential to wash over you like a vacation — albeit one in the theater. This spring, from March 3 to 19, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will host one such trip to Brazil. In “Água,” created by Bausch during a 2001 residency, the radiance of the landscape is celebrated with voluptuous, exuberant dancing and sumptuous color. It’s been six years since Tanztheater Wuppertal, now under the artistic direction of Boris Charmatz, a French experimentalist, performed at the Academy. As usual with a Bausch work, the hair will flow, the dresses will shimmer and the soundtrack will be eclectic. This one includes music by PJ Harvey, St Germain and Tom Waits. Strap yourself in.Jason FaragoTangled Webs of Modern Invention at the GuggenheimGego installing “Reticulárea” at Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in 1969.Fundación Gego; Juan SantanaHer birth certificate read Gertrud Goldschmidt — but the German-born Venezuelan artist always preferred Gego, a shrinking of her first and last names that reverberated with an art of slender brilliance. Born to a Jewish family in Hamburg in 1912, she studied architecture before fleeing to Caracas in 1939, and only in her 40s did she begin gathering copper wires, aluminum rods and plastic dowels into striking yet splintery abstract clusters. Beguiling and forbidding by turns, her works could be suspended like a mobile, or stream from the ceiling, or else could propagate across a room like a massive spider’s web. On one point Gego was uncompromising: These metal assemblages were not sculptures, she insisted, but “drawings without paper” that took a very different route to abstraction than the clean geometries many other Latin American artists favored. (They’re also delightfully resistant to social media transmission, their finely interlaced wires beyond the ken of even the highest-resolution cameraphone.) “Gego: Measuring Infinity,” opening March 31 at the Guggenheim, will fill the museum’s white spiral with her spindly aggregations — and, amid extreme refugee crises in both Europe and Venezuela, her themes of fragility and enmeshment have lost none of their force.Jason ZinomanSara Schaefer Spoofs the Comedy WorldSpoofing the cult of comedy in the language of Scientology, the wry, incisive stand-up Sara Schaefer adopts the pose, jargon and microphone of a guru in her new solo show about how to make it in the stand-up business. “Going Up” (a riff on the Scientology term “Going Clear”), which has been performed a few times but will get a wider hearing in 2023, is ambitious and nimble, sneakily personal with enough inside-baseball jokes to make it a must-see for comedy nerds. The most impressive example of this, and the bit I am most looking forward to revisiting, is when Schaefer illustrates every kind of modern stand-up by doing the same genre of joke, over and over again, in a multitude of styles. It’s a feat of comedy as well as criticism that captures an entire scene in just a few minutes. Her show should be a staple of festivals, but early in the year, it will stop in, among other places, San Francisco, Austin and New York when she performs at Caveat on April 6. More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Dave Attell Bids a Heartfelt (and Hilarious) Farewell to Carolines

      by

      Each year, the comic headlined the club during the holidays. With the space closing, his final show there was a mix of deadpan and melancholy notes.How do you honor the death of a comedy club? First, you kill.Walking onstage late Friday night at the final headlining show at Carolines on Broadway, which after three decades is closing its doors, Dave Attell handled that job quickly, spraying punch lines, roasting the front row and making sure the raucous audience knew it was part of history. In one galloping tangent, Attell urged anyone not laughing to leave. “Take a table and chair with you, because we have to clear this place out,” he said.Attell has performed at Carolines between Christmas and New Year’s for 13 years, a holiday tradition for audiences who wanted something significantly dirtier than the Rockettes. This time, he mixed in a few heartfelt, even melancholy notes into his virtuosic deadpan rhythms to eulogize the passing of a legendary comedy room. But comedians mourn differently. When a waiter walked past the stage toward the door, Attell, dressed in a characteristic black jacket and baseball cap, asked him where he was going, pausing before the joke: “Unemployment.”Like a drama queen writing her will, New York is perpetually and loudly dying. Hardly a day goes by without teeth gnashing over a beloved part of this city calling it quits. Every closed diner is the end of an epoch. The most mundane and predictable demise, the end of a Broadway run, receives extended soul-searching and public autopsy. To me, this seems (mostly) sensible. It’s healthy to mark the end of things, and what is better than a great finale? But I’ve been covering show business in this dynamic city too long to get too sentimental. We shouldn’t overly fetishize institutions. One of the legacies of “Stomp,” which closes next month after a 29-year run, is all the shows that did not get produced in its theater. Change is good.Dave Attell performing at Carolines on Friday. For 13 years, he played the club over the holidays.And yet, I couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy walking down the steps into Caroline’s for the last time, a steep descent that gave you a chance to adjust from the gaudy lights of Times Square. Caroline’s isn’t technically gone; after a final show on New Year’s Eve, it is producing the New York Comedy Festival and other unnamed projects. Still, with the stage backdrop, stools and other parts of the club soon to be shipped to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, N.Y., the loss of this room is significant.When Caroline’s opened in Chelsea in 1981 (it had two homes before moving to the theater district in the next decade), New York comedy clubs were essentially dive bars with stages, featuring packed bills of short sets by lowly paid or unpaid comics desperate for performing time to work out jokes. Caroline’s introduced a new model: hour sets by more established talent, bigger pay days and a more upscale atmosphere. There was plush carpeting and a dressing room. Instead of a brick wall, the comics stood in front of a checkerboard pattern artfully missing a few pieces. In a 1985 story in The Times, Robert Morton, a producer on “Late Night With David Letterman,” described Caroline’s as “the first yuppie comedy club,” becoming maybe the last person to use that word as a compliment.Memorable performers at the club have included, from left, John Mulaney, Tracy Morgan and Leslie Jones.The stairs down into Carolines allowed patrons a chance to adjust after the gaudy lights of Times Square.Many were exposed to the club via the television show “Caroline’s Comedy Hour,” which ended in the mid-’90s. Its impressive lineups offer a history of modern stand-up. On one 1992 episode, Attell performed with Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Jon Stewart, Susie Essman and Colin Quinn.That Caroline’s was located in the heart of Broadway mattered, adding a touch of class to stand-up, an art form rooted in vaudeville and minstrel shows that was then rarely afforded the critical respect of theater and film. Caroline Hirsch, the founder of the club, played a key role in raising the stature of stand-up. You can even make the case that she helped set the stage for the transformation of Times Square, opening just a few years before Disney arrived in the neighborhood.On Friday before the show, when I asked about her most memorable nights at the club, Hirsch recalled the time Robin Williams took over a Jeff Garlin set with some inspired heckling and a string of performances by Kevin Hart. She also told a story about how Don King walked into the club when John Witherspoon was telling a joke about him. Her recollections underlined the real importance of Caroline’s: the staggering number of memorable experiences had there. I had more than my share.Caroline Hirsch opened the club in 1981; it moved a few times before settling into the Theater District. Caroline’s was the only place where I saw veteran stars like Dick Gregory, Richard Lewis and Damon Wayans. Before he was on “Saturday Night Live,” I caught Michael Che there. And years before he had a special, I knew that Ricky Velez would get one after watching him do an electric opening set. The most memorable part of a Tiffany Haddish show was when she spotted Whoopi Goldberg in the audience and tearfully described how important it was as a child to see the veteran star on television.Caroline’s was not dogmatic about the kinds of comics it booked. It didn’t have a house style, which might have hurt its brand but made it unpredictable, featuring talent from an array of ages, backgrounds and styles. Bo Burnham cut an album there early in his career, and Phoebe Robinson got her start by taking a comedy class at Caroline’s.One of the all-time funniest shows I ever saw was Rory Scovel doing an hour at Caroline’s. A decade before John Mulaney toured arenas with bits about fame and addiction, he performed a hilarious hour at Caroline’s in which he told jokes about his marriage and his alcoholism.Caroline’s was also not above oddball bookings (Larry “Bud” Melman performed there). I once saw a 13-year old do a standup act and also made the error of taking my 7-year-old daughter to a Ron Funches show, only to rush out when the jokes became too dirty.The audience at Attell’s final show at Carolines. The club didn’t have a house style and the bookings were eclectic.Toward the end of the night, Attell asked his opening acts, Ian Fidance, Jordan Jensen and Wil Sylvince to join him onstage. They riffed with one another, before Attell turned to the crowd and asked with an odd formality: “May I?” Then he took out a blue recorder, which he described as “somewhere between a flute and a bong.”In between raunchy jokes, he played simple, wistful songs. He remarked on the sadness of the instrument’s sound. Then he opened his jacket and brought out a second recorder, a yellow one. Seeing this gruff, grizzled legend wield two colorful pipes was its own sight gag. It was also a reminder that while Attell’s much imitated delivery has its own musicality, when it comes to expressing certain kinds of emotion, no joke can really match a few notes played with conviction.Then he beckoned Caroline Hirsch to the stage, called her “a force” and thanked her for “making us all better.” Describing the moment as “bittersweet,” she said she would be producing more shows in the future. Then everyone took selfies onstage to commemorate the moment and awkwardly shuffled off the stage. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Stream These 7 Movies and Shows Before They Leave Netflix in January

      by

      Among the gems leaving for U.S. subscribers next month are two irreverent TV adaptations and the last movie from one of the most successful filmmakers of the 1970s.Streaming services typically clear the deck at the end of the calendar year, changing out significant chunks of their movie and television libraries for new titles, and December 2022 was no exception — not leaving a whole lot for Netflix in the United States to lose in January. But there are a handful of worthwhile items to stream while you can, including an unconventional biopic, two irreverent TV adaptations, two sleeper series and the last movie from one of the most successful filmmakers of the 1970s. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘CHIPS’ (Jan. 12)This R-rated buddy comedy from the actor-turned-filmmaker Dax Shepard doesn’t quite replicate the shaggy charm of his amiable 2012 crime drama “Hit and Run,” but thankfully, “CHIPS” (2017) pays limited reverence to the long-running cop show on which it is based. In this version, Shepard plays a former motocross racer and rookie cop who is paired with an undercover F.B.I. agent (Michael Peña) assigned to sniff out corruption in the California Highway Patrol. Some of the gags fall flat, and Shepard’s real-life wife, Kristen Bell, is wasted in a small, one-note role. But Shepard and Peña make a dynamic odd couple, Vincent D’Onofrio makes for a formidable villain, and the action sequences are executed with skill and panache.Stream it here.‘Steve Jobs’ (Jan. 15)Aaron Sorkin’s spiritual sequel to “The Social Network” finds the Oscar-winning screenwriter again profiling a Silicon Valley innovator with offhand wit and dramatic flair, as directed with ferocity and intelligence by Danny Boyle. Sorkin resists the urge to tell the story of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) in the cradle-to-grave fashion of the Walter Isaacson biography it’s based on, instead dramatizing three important product debuts (in 1984, 1986 and 1998). It’s an ingenious approach, directed with ferocity and intelligence by Danny Boyle; Fassbender, meanwhile, is marvelous, showcasing Jobs’s enigmatic aloofness and occasionally revealing the furious impatience underneath.Stream it here.‘Z Nation’: Seasons 1-5 (Jan. 26)This post-apocalyptic action-horror series wrapped up its five-season run in 2018; it was produced for Syfy by the Asylum, the direct-to-disc-and-streaming company known for its “mockbuster” rip-offs, films designed to fool consumers with titles and stories similar to those of major studio blockbusters. At first glance, “Z Nation” seems like a similar attempt to capitalize on the success of “The Walking Dead” (and its many spinoffs), with its ragtag group of zombie apocalypse survivors. But this is a looser, funkier show than its inspiration, puncturing the occasionally stifling solemnity of “The Walking Dead” with good old-fashioned B-movie gags and thrills.Stream it here.‘She’s Funny That Way’ (Jan. 29)The director Peter Bogdanovich’s final narrative film is a deliberate throwback to his previous screwball comedies, replicating the dazzling energy of his 1972 smash “What’s Up, Doc,” the New York setting of his delightful 1981 rom-com “They All Laughed” and the quicksilver pacing of his underrated 1992 adaptation of “Noises Off.” Owen Wilson stars as a Broadway director with a soft spot for call girls, to whom he occasionally offers financial support to help out of “the life”; Imogen Poots is delightfully dizzy as the recipient of his latest endowment. It’s not quite up to the heights of Bogdanovich’s early efforts, but it’s hard to resist a movie this charming, and his ensemble cast (which includes Jennifer Aniston, Will Forte, Kathryn Hahn and Rhys Ifans) is stellar.Stream it here.‘Addams Family Values’ (Jan. 31)One can’t help but question the timing of this particular exit, as Netflix enjoys the buzz of its original series “Wednesday” — a show that takes its inspiration from the Charles Addams cartoons and the old “Addams Family” television sitcom but especially from Barry Sonnenfeld’s darkly funny ’90s film adaptations. And when assembling this 1993 sequel, Sonnenfeld and the screenwriter Paul Rudnick clearly realized Christina Ricci’s Wednesday was the scene-stealer, building much of the story around her bone-dry wit (including an unforgettable summer camp section). The result is a “Godfather Part II” of black comedy, a rare sequel that surpasses its predecessor.Stream it here.‘Rambo’/‘Rambo: Last Blood’ (Jan. 31)The first two sequels to “First Blood,” starring Sylvester Stallone as the Vietnam veteran John Rambo, were quintessential Reagan-era cinema, a heady brew of the ’60s backlash, social conservatism and nuance-free foreign policy typical of the time. Stallone waited 20 years to make the fourth film, titled simply “Rambo” (2008), which he also co-wrote and directed, presenting his character as a man outside of his time, brought back into action by the tentativeness of his government. The series’s final film, “Last Blood” (2019), was firmly rooted in the Trump era, capitalizing on the fears and paranoia surrounding the border crisis. Both films have brutal but effective action scenes with a seemingly ageless Stallone still doing what he does well. But they’re most fascinating as snapshots of their cultural moments, and reminders of the political potency of mass entertainment.Stream ‘Rambo’ here, and ‘Rambo: Last Blood’ here.‘The Borgias: Seasons 1-3’ (Jan. 31)This well-pedigreed historical Showtime drama — created by the Oscar-winning writer and director Neil Jordan and starring Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI — had the misfortune of premiering in April 2011, the same month HBO debuted “Game of Thrones.” But now, with over a month to binge its 29 episodes, “Thrones” fans might find in it a new source of upscale action and sex, of sneering drama and ruthless political gamesmanship. Irons is on fire as the driven clergyman who ascends to papal power, and the show’s intelligent, well-researched scripts draw effective parallels between the Borgias and later families that sought and wielded political power.Stream it here. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      In 2022, TV Woke Up From the American Dream

      by

      How the TV of 2022 depicted the weird, warping pressures of work and ambition in a boom-and-bust economy.In the Peacock series “Killing It,” Brock (Scott MacArthur), an Everglades snake hunter and would-be YouTube influencer, gets shot in the face in an altercation over a sack of python eggs. It is the best thing that has ever happened to him.The shooting leaves Brock minus one eye. But it’s captured on video, and the upload gets millions of views, giving him the lucrative viral success he’s wanted for years.“American dream!” he says, beaming. “Getting shot in the face!”On TV, 2022 has been the year of the American dream — with a catch. For many of the hustlers, entrepreneurs and strugglers onscreen, that aspiration still exists. But as Brock experienced, it can cost you an important part of yourself.“Killing It,” created by Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” slipped under many TV watchers’ radar last spring, including, mea culpa, mine. In its first episode, it seems like a simple, wacky buddy comedy: Craig Foster (Craig Robinson), a Florida security guard with dreams of starting a prostate-supplement business, teams up with the ride-share driver Jillian Glopp (Claudia O’Doherty) in a contest to exterminate invasive pythons.But as the season goes on, it becomes a broad, big-swinging satire of an adversarial economy that can seem to be booming and busting at the same time. (Tim Heidecker has a boisterous turn as a testosterone-pumped motivational speaker who preaches the philosophy of “Dominine,” which is one more than “dominate.”)As Craig, Jillian and their opponents claw toward their prize, one foot of dead python at a time, they give us a tour of the hustler’s mirage, in which the promise of riches shimmers on the horizon, all yours if you only go to one more paid conference, pitch two more investors, take three more jobs.The work experience of Jillian, an Australian immigrant, is especially bleak-comic. She drives an Uber that tows a mobile billboard (which doubles as her home), gets a TaskRabbit stint helping a rich woman (D’Arcy Carden) perpetrate a tax-fraud scheme and takes a job murdering birds at an airport, all with a heartbreakingly cheerful spirit of optimism.The comedy is grotesque and blunt — Craig spends one episode with a dead snake nailed to his palm — but sneakily smart. In this hunt for the American dream, it says, every life form must find a lower life form to kill. And while the series is set in 2016, three years before the first stirrings of Covid, it feels pandemic-adjacent in its focus on the stratum of the work force for whom work is risky, physical and in-person. You cannot drive an Uber, or shoot a nail gun into a python’s skull, over Zoom.Nicco Annan and Brandee Evans in “P-Valley,” in which every dancer dreams of being something else.StarzThe pandemic plays explicitly in Season 2 of Starz’s strip-club melodrama “P-Valley,” about a line of work that is defined by in-person interaction. The proprietor of the Pynk nightclub, Uncle Clifford (a resplendent Nicco Annan), who is nonbinary and uses she/her pronouns, spends much of the season sporting a bejeweled mask, enforcing 2020-era Covid protocols while trying to keep her business afloat at 50 percent capacity.The Pynk is a magnet for dreams, and not only naughty ones. The “P-Valley” creator, the playwright Katori Hall, respects her pole dancers as artists and athletes, and she recognizes their work for what it is: a job that manifests the economy tangibly, translating desire into dollar bills flying in the air.And because dancers age out so quickly, the job also renders the pressures of the economy in time-lapse: You have just a few years to rise up the pole before your tiring muscles pull you back down.Every dancer enters the Pynk with an eye on something else — a showbiz life, a business career, or simply escape — but one of the most affecting journeys of Season 2 belongs to Mercedes (Brandee Evans), who comes to realize that she has reached retirement age without having figured out her next step. “You’re just going to have to learn how to dream new dreams,” Uncle Clifford tells her. That’s the price of dreaming: You can’t afford to wake up.The summer’s surprise buzz phenomenon, FX on Hulu’s “The Bear,” focused on the pressures of a different sort of service industry. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a high-end restaurant chef, comes home to run his family’s struggling Chicago sandwich joint after his drug-addicted brother’s suicide. The pandemic isn’t a factor in the story. But the show’s depiction of work as a kind of barely restrained combat (which sometimes boils over into actual combat) feels like a bespoke fit for the post-reopening economy of labor shortages and supply chain issues.The memorable, high-decibel work sequences make “The Bear” look and sound like a war story that happens to take place in a kitchen. Work here is furious, violent and relentless. Flames roar up the sides of pans, pots clatter like artillery, slabs of beef are dragged and hoisted like casualties. Hands are burned, fingers slashed; the pace of the prep rush turns the kitchen staff into sweating, shouting bodies, meat cooking meat.All the while, Carmy flashes back to memories of being mocked and belittled by his Michelin-starred boss in the restaurant where he used to work. At times, you wonder why he chooses to stick with this job that often makes him so unhappy. In the season finale, reminiscing about his brother at an Al-Anon meeting, he seems to hit on an answer: Sometimes our dreams are not ours alone, nor are they even our choice. “Me trying to fix the restaurant was me trying to fix whatever was happening with my brother,” he says. “And, I don’t know, maybe fix the whole family.”Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy Allen White in “The Bear,” which depicts work as a kind of combat.FXIn politics, “the American dream” has long been used aspirationally, to evoke family and home. But as my colleague Jazmine Ulloa detailed earlier this year, the phrase has also lately been used ominously, especially by conservative politicians, to describe a certain way of life in danger of being stolen by outsiders.The typical counterargument, both in politics and pop culture, has been that immigrants pursuing their ambitions help to strengthen all of America. (The Dream Act has its name for a reason.) But some recent stories have complicated this idea by questioning whether the dream itself — or, at least, defining that dream in mostly material terms — can be toxic.The third season of Hulu’s “Ramy,” starring the comedian Ramy Youssef as a rudderless young Muslim from an immigrant family, takes on the theme directly. The title character’s parents, Maysa (Hiam Abbass) and Farouk (Amr Waked), have found prosperity tantalizingly out of reach, signing up with ride-share and grocery-delivery apps in their middle age.Maysa has grown resigned, but Farouk remains in a poignant unrequited love affair with the dream. He chases real-estate deals; he gins up a hapless business selling ad space on takeout containers; he fantasizes about appearing on “Shark Tank.” (Ramy, meanwhile, has hit it big in the jewelry business, having partnered with some contacts in Israel, but finds himself more spiritually adrift than ever.)In the season’s final episode, Maysa and Farouk, having come across a stash of hallucinogenic mushrooms, reminisce about their early days in the country when they would feed Ramy and his sister hot dogs, not knowing they contained pork. Stoned, they make a run to buy convenience-store franks, bite into the seductive, non-halal treats and realize that they taste disgusting. “Why did we sell our souls?” Farouk asks. “We gave it all up for hot dogs.”Most recently, Hulu’s “Welcome to Chippendales” — about another kind of commercialized American meat — reconsiders the immigrant dream from the vantage of success. The story of Somen Banerjee (Kumail Nanjiani), the founder of the male-stripper empire, it is in many ways of a piece with this year’s glut of scam-and-scandal docudramas; it’s a rise-and-fall series in which the fall is less interesting and takes twice as long. (The creator, Robert Siegel, gave us the prosthetic fantasia “Pam & Tommy” earlier this year.)The series stands apart, though, for showing how Banerjee, born in India, uses a learned idea of American appetites to pursue a received idea of the American dream. In some ways, being an outsider makes his success possible — much in America is novel to him, so he’s receptive to new ideas (like seminude dancers in bow ties).“Welcome to Chippendales” on Hulu is based on the real-life origins of the famous male-stripper empire.Erin Simkin/HuluBut his embrace of Americanness (for instance, he goes by “Steve” rather than “Somen”) cuts two ways. He experiences racism before and after he hits it big, but he also uses discrimination as a business tactic, ending up in court because of a scheme to bar Black patrons (whom, he concludes from experience, will make white customers see his club as less “classy”).Banerjee has perhaps internalized the American dream too thoroughly. He gets his first intimation of this when he returns to India for his father’s funeral, his suitcase stuffed with gifts of electronics and Velveeta, hoping to be welcomed as a conquering success. Instead, his mother scolds him for leaving the family printing business to run a fleshpot. “We are middle-class people, Somen,” she says. “We did not need saving by America.”He leaves, weighed down with rejection and processed cheese. Beyond his mother’s personal disappointment is the verdict that he has stopped being himself, but in the process he has not really become a new person either. He is simply a reflection of another culture’s artifice, an imitation of an imitation.This is the danger of the American dream when you scale it down from the national to the individual level. You risk devoting your life to wanting something because it’s what you’ve been told you should want. Everybody loves a Cinderella story, but sometimes your dream, in reality, is just a wish somebody else’s heart made. More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: Kennedy Center Honors and New Year’s Eve

      by

      This year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony airs on CBS. And various networks offer New Year’s Eve festivities.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, Dec. 26-Jan. 1. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE YEAR: 2022 9 p.m. on ABC. For over a decade, ABC and its anchors have offered an annual retrospective look at the year’s biggest news stories. (Of course, whether a look back at the past year sounds like a gift or a nightmare is something viewers will have to decide for themselves.) The 2022 program includes segments on pickleball, Taylor Swift’s Ticketmaster saga and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.TuesdayHalle Berry, left, and Patrick Wilson in “Moonfall.”Reiner Bajo/LionsgateMOONFALL (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. You know you’re in for a particular kind of movie when its trailer shows characters yelling “Hang on!” in three different scenes. And you know you’re in for the “hang on” kind of movie when it’s directed by Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow”). Both things are true of “Moonfall,” a sci-fi disaster flick about two former astronauts (Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson) who join forces to save the planet after a geeky amateur researcher (John Bradley) discovers that the moon is heading for a collision with Earth. In a New York Times review, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the movie’s off-planet element “flirts with the transcendently goofy,” but that “Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.”AMERICAN MASTERS: GROUCHO & CAVETT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). “If Groucho never existed, we would sense a lack in the world of comedy, like the planet in the solar system that astronomers say ought to be there.” Those words, attributed to the TV host Dick Cavett, kick off this feature-length documentary, which looks at the friendship — and mentorship — between Cavett and the pioneering comic Groucho Marx. Through new interviews with Cavett and archival footage of Marx (who died in 1977), the documentary follows Marx and Cavett’s relationship from their first meeting, at the funeral of the playwright George S. Kaufman in 1961, until Marx’s death, and looks at how their friendship was a bridge between two generations of comedy.WednesdayTHE 45TH ANNUAL KENNEDY CENTER HONORS 8 p.m. on CBS. This year’s Kennedy Center Honors recognized a multigenre, multigenerational group of artists: the singer Gladys Knight; the actor and filmmaker George Clooney; the rock band U2; the singer-songwriter Amy Grant; and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León. The ceremony earlier this month, footage of which will debut on CBS on Wednesday, featured tributes to the honorees from an array of familiar faces, including Garth Brooks, Mickey Guyton, Ariana DeBose, Matt Damon, Sheryl Crow, Jason Moran, Alicia Hall Moran and Eddie Vedder.REAR WINDOW (1954) and THE WINDOW (1949) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a novel midcentury-mystery pairing: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “The Window,” a 1949 film noir directed by Ted Tetzlaff, who a few years earlier was the cinematographer on Hitchcock’s “Notorious.” These two movies also have somewhat similar setups. The classic “Rear Window” casts James Stewart as housebound photographer who believes there has been a murder at a neighboring home; “The Window” centers on a nine-year-old boy (Bobby Driscoll) who suspects the same.ThursdayREADY PLAYER ONE (2018) 11 p.m. on TBS. To see two wildly different sides of Steven Spielberg, consider pairing his semi-autobiographical period drama, “The Fabelmans” (now in theaters), with his sci-fi bonanza “Ready Player One,” a movie that manages to be nostalgic despite being set in 2045. That’s because its dystopian world uses late 20th- and early 21st-century pop culture as its building blocks. The story, adapted from Ernest Cline’s 2011 novel of the same name, centers on a young man (Tye Sheridan) searching for treasure left behind by a dead virtual-reality world-builder (Mark Rylance).FridayRosamund Pike and Ben Affleck in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 7:25 p.m. on HBO. The musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, of the band Nine Inch Nails, composed the scores of two movies playing in theaters right now: Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All” and Sam Mendes’s “Empire of Light.” For an earlier example of their movie music, see this thriller from David Fincher, about a husband and wife (played by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) whose lives derail when the wife, Amy, goes missing, and the husband, Nick, becomes a suspect in her disappearance.A SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) 8 p.m. on TCM. The playwright Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982 for “A Soldier’s Play,” about an investigation into the murder of a Black Army sergeant on a segregated Louisiana military base in the 1940s. And he wrote the screenplay of this film adaptation, which was directed by Norman Jewison and scored by Herbie Hancock. Fuller died in October, which makes the end of the year a poignant time to revisit the film.SaturdayNew Year’s Eve decorations in Times Square earlier this month.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockNEW YEAR’S EVE SHOWS on various networks. How do you take your New Year’s Eve programming? With sugar? See MILEY’S NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY, hosted by Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton, at 10:30 p.m. on NBC. With extra twang? How about NEW YEAR’S EVE LIVE: NASHVILLE’S BIG BASH, hosted by the singers Jimmie Allen and Elle King and the anchor Rachel Smith, at 10:30 p.m. on CBS. With a Times Square neon glaze? Try DICK CLARK’S NEW YEAR’S ROCKIN’ EVE WITH RYAN SEACREST 2023 at 10:30 p.m. on ABC. For those without cable TV, or who just want to watch the New York ball drop with minimal fuss, there’s a free livestream of the Times Square scene at timessquarenyc.org.SundayDIONNE WARWICK: DON’T MAKE ME OVER (2023) 9 p.m. on CNN. This new documentary about the singer Dionne Warwick’s art and activism pairs archival materials with an impressive slate of interviewees that includes Quincy Jones, Gladys Knight, Olivia Newton-John, Smokey Robinson, Elton John, Snoop Dogg, Gloria Estefan and Alicia Keys. The doc picked up solid reviews when it opened at the Toronto International Film Festival last year; it makes its wider debut on Sunday. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Is It Time for a ‘White Lotus’ Vacation?

      by

      Things turn out badly for most of the show’s well-heeled characters. But that hasn’t stopped some fans from booking a trip.For some fans of “The White Lotus,” watching the show was not enough. They want the full experience.Last month, Will Potter, an executive at Sotheby’s who lives in Brooklyn, booked a stay at the San Domenico Palace, the Four Seasons resort hotel in Taormina, Sicily, where the show’s second season was filmed.“There’s very few shows where, as I’m watching it, I’m going, ‘This is so good,’” Mr. Potter, 38, said.During the first season of the HBO series, which was set in Hawaii, Mr. Potter was especially taken with Tanya McQuoid, the bumbling heiress played by Jennifer Coolidge, he said. As he watched the second season, with his wife, on Sunday nights after they had put their two children to bed, he found himself falling for the show’s idyllic Sicilian setting. Weeks before the murderous finale aired, he had booked a summer family vacation there.“We were like, ‘This looks amazing, to do a full adventure,” Mr. Potter said. “It looks like a beautiful hotel.”Hotel staff members greet the guests in a scene from season two of “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOHe added that the family plans to go on side trips inspired by the show’s characters’ forays away from the hotel property. “We were watching the Noto region episode,” he said, “and we were like, ‘What if we mix it up and explore that?’ And then we ended up putting the exact itinerary together.”The San Domenico Palace, a former Dominican monastery perched on the edge of a promontory overlooking the Ionian Sea, was converted into a hotel in 1896. Its guests have included Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn and Sophia Loren.After the second season of “The White Lotus” began airing in October, the hotel experienced “a spike in web visits from the U.S. market, and the U.K. and Australia,” Ilaria Alber-Glanstaetten, the resort’s general manager, said. Some of the $4,200-a-night suites are still available in 2023, she added. “Bookings have been affected, but the biggest impact has been on awareness,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said.Like the majority of “White Lotus” characters, some guests have had stays that were less than tranquil. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, arguably the most headline-generating celebrity couple of the mid-20th century, became part of San Domenico lore after a dramatic argument on the terrace in 1963. “Liz apparently broke a mandolin over Dick’s head,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said. “The reason for the fight was allegedly jealousy.”The terrace of the San Domenico Palace.AlamyThe manager attributes the sometimes stormy mood of the place to Mount Etna, the active volcano that is visible from many of the suites. “It’s hard to describe, but when you are there you really feel it,” Ms. Alber-Glanstaetten said.Ida K. Mova, 37, a design consultant for Waterworks, a manufacturer of bath and kitchen fixtures, who lives in San Francisco, visited the San Domenico Palace in August. After watching “The White Lotus,” she is up for a second trip. “I can’t wait to go back,” she said.The online travel giant Expedia calls the trend of television- and film-related tourism “set-jetting.” Nearly two-thirds of travelers who took part in a recent survey reported having booked a trip inspired by a movie or TV show, the company said.The first season of “The White Lotus” was filmed at Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea in Hawaii. Like the San Domenico in recent months, that hotel had a spike in reservations last year, but it was hard to tell if it was because of the HBO series or because the pandemic lockdown had lifted soon after it aired.“We strategically wanted to try and reopen after the filming had been done,” Robert Delaney, the resort manager at the Four Seasons Maui, said. He added that many guests ask about the Pineapple Suite, a room that exists only in the “White Lotus” universe, and the most ardent fans “talk about little intricacies of the characters in the show.”A “White Lotus” scene at the San Domenico pool.HBOMike White, the creator of “The White Lotus,” has not always portrayed hotel staff members in the most flattering light. In the first season, the manager, Armond, went on a drug binge and had sex with another staff member in his office. In the second season, Valentina, the manager of the Taormina resort, makes use of an unoccupied suite to have a fling with a prostitute.Mr. Delaney said he found the depictions of hotel workers to be lacking in accuracy at times. “The portrayal of some of the activities that the characters or the managers took part in was not a fair portrayal of what the everyday role is for someone like me, for example,” he said. More