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      John Early and His Dizzying New Special, ‘Now More Than Ever’

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      In his new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” the comedian mixes cringe comedy and cabaret to dizzying effect.John Early’s boundary-blurring new Max special, “Now More Than Ever,” has the perfect title. The hyperbole, salesmanship and euphony of the expression match his literate satirical persona. And it also hints at the main asset and flaw of his hour: the too-muchness of it all.Early is a triple threat in the old-school sense (singing, dancing, acting) as well as in the comedy one (stand-up, sketch, improv). And by improv, I don’t mean the Second City variety so much as the art of vamping, which he jokes is the one thing members of his generation, millennials, were taught to do. Perhaps. But anyone who has seen Early glamorously filibuster (a paradoxical phrase that also suits him) while hosting a live show knows this can be as entertaining as anything.While he might be best known for his scene-stealing flourishes on the series “Search Party” or his long-running double act with Kate Berlant, Early, whose influence can be seen on a whole generation of comedians, shows off a little bit of everything he does here. Using the frame of a behind-the-scenes pop music documentary (Think “Madonna: Truth or Dare”), he mixes goofy comic scenes in which he plays the vain, jerky star with observational stand-up and sultry cover songs.Unlike comics whose music punches up a joke, Early commits to his songs, using a lovely falsetto and pumping bass line in strutting performances of work by everyone from Britney Spears to Neil Young. It’s unusual for a special to toggle between cringe-comedy punchlines and triumphant cabaret exhilaration. And it’s a tricky mix, because the music slows the comedy, and the jokes don’t necessarily complement the music. Early likes being elusive, conflating sincerity and parody, while Ping-Ponging between broad subjects (Donald J. Trump, Silicon Valley) and rarefied references. (He’s the first comic to ever make me cackle at the word “plosive.”)He has more than enough charisma to fit together this jigsaw puzzle of a show. It’s coherent if not easy to access. The key to his persona, I think, can be found in the joke he tells about the always-be-selling vanity of his generation, presenting himself as its avatar. “Here’s what it boils down to,” he says. “I don’t know how to do my taxes, but I do know how to be a badass.” Then he clarifies, “A shell of a badass.”That’s the role Early plays here. In black leather pants, he dances across the stage, flirting with the crowd with as much ingratiation as the camera fawningly displays toward him. This shell is fun to look at, in part because it’s full of cracks. And you don’t just see it when he introduces his parents in the crowd and reverts to a bratty, insecure kid, or when he does a very funny take on the “Access Hollywood” tape that compares Trump to Early as a closeted 12-year-old in the locker room trying to convince his friends he likes a girl. “If we’re honest,” he says, “Donald Trump is not a sensual person.” It’s the way he says “If we’re honest” that cracks me up.One of the many reasons Early is so hard to pin down is that while he leans on swagger and gusto, his most distinguishing moments mix in another register, his bookish alertness to language. My favorite bit is an inspired mountain-out-of-a-molehill joke about how Apple manipulates you into giving up personal data by offering these choices when you try to download an app: “Allow,” a word he describes as “pillowy,” or “Ask App Not to Track,” which he terms “the single most suicidal sequence of monosyllabic sounds.” There’s no way I can do this justice in text, but it’s essentially five minutes of close-read literary criticism that ends in tears and hysteria. If, like me, that’s your kind of thing, you’re in luck.There’s also a strain of comedy here that lampoons the virtue-signaling language of the overly online. Early taps the microphone: “Check, check. You guys can hear me, right?” he asks before adding: “I just want to make sure this is amplifying queer voices.”While Early defines himself as the quintessential millennial, he has the Generation X obsession with a romanticized version of the culture of the 1970s. The grainy film stock and chunky red font of this special remind me of a Tarantino movie. In one revealing nostalgic riff, Early yearns for the days of Bob Fosse, when louche choreographers were on talk shows and dance could be “kinky and mysterious.”Fosse could also be both sexy and ridiculous. While I wish “Now More Than Ever” had a bit more precision and ruthlessness in its direction (by Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey), and there’s a visceral energy lost in the translation from live performance to film, at his best, Early evokes a gyrating, deliriously decadent razzle-dazzle.Toward the end, Early invites his band members to teach him how to play instruments so he can flirt and sexually harass the band, which leads to a visit from the channel’s woman from Human Resources.You get the sense that Early is annoyed by such bureaucratic scolds, but you would never find him responding to it with something as boring as complaining about cancel culture. Instead of defending himself, he flashes a guilty look and rushes into a final song. It’s a hypnotic, joyful performance of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”As the camera swirls and splotches of yellow light flare, Early, sweat glistening under a disco ball, loses himself in reverie. At the start of the special, titles on the screen instruct you to turn the volume up, and it’s good advice. You can’t recreate the feel of a New York dance party by watching a special at home, but why not try? This is comedy that wants you to get up and dance. More

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      in Theater

      Alan Arkin, Comic Actor With a Serious Side, Dies at 89

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      He got laughs and won awards on Broadway in “Enter Laughing” and in movies like “Little Miss Sunshine.” But he also had a flair for drama.Alan Arkin, who won a Tony Award for his first lead role on Broadway, received an Academy Award nomination for his first feature film, and went on to have a long and diverse career as a character actor who specialized in comedy but was equally adept at drama, died on Thursday in San Marcos, Calif. He was 89. His son Matthew Arkin said that Mr. Arkin, who had heart ailments, died at home.Mr. Arkin was not quite a show-business neophyte when he was cast in the 1963 Broadway comedy “Enter Laughing,” Joseph Stein’s adaptation of Carl Reiner’s semi-autobiographical novel about a stage-struck boy from the Bronx. He had toured and recorded with the Tarriers, a folk music group, and he had appeared on Broadway with the Second City, the celebrated improvisational comedy troupe. But he was still a relative unknown.He did not stay unknown for long.In a cast that included established professionals like Sylvia Sidney and Vivian Blaine, Mr. Arkin stole the show and won the hearts of the critics. “‘Enter Laughing’ is marvelously funny, and so is Alan Arkin in the principal role,” Howard Taubman wrote in The New York Times.Mr. Arkin won a Tony. The show ran for a year and made him a star.Mr. Arkin, left, with his fellow cast members Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson and the director Mike Nichols, right, preparing for the opening of the play “Luv” on Broadway in 1964.Leo FriedmanReviewers were again enthusiastic, and Mr. Arkin again found himself in a hit show, when he returned to Broadway in 1964 as a woebegone misfit in Murray Schisgal’s absurdist farce “Luv,” staged by Mike Nichols and co-starring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson. With two Broadway triumphs under his belt, it was a confident Mr. Arkin who moved from the stage to the screen in 1966.“I never had any doubts about making it in movies,” he told The Daily News a year later. “I just knew I had to, because there was no alternative.”His confidence proved justified. He was nominated for an Oscar for his first feature film, “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” an offbeat comedy about the hysteria that ensues when a Russian submarine runs aground on an island in Massachusetts. As the frantic leader of a landing party sent ashore to find a way to refloat the vessel, he earned a place in cinema history with a riotous scene in which he teaches his non-English-speaking crew to say “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”That led to a series of roles that established him as a man of a thousand accents, or close to it. He played a French detective in “Inspector Clouseau” (1968), putting his own spin on a role created (and subsequently reclaimed) by Peter Sellers; a Puerto Rican widower in “Popi” (1969); a Lithuanian sailor in the television movie “The Defection of Simas Kudirka” (1978); and many other nationalities and ethnicities.Mr. Arkin in the 1966 film “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.” His performance as a Russian submarine commander earned him his first of four Academy Award nominations.United Artists, via Photofest“I could play any kind of foreigner,” he told The Times in 1970. “But I can’t play any kind of native of anywhere.”But he soon became even better known for playing likably hapless Everyman characters. The ultimate Arkin Everyman was Captain Yossarian in “Catch-22” (1970), Mike Nichols’s film version of Joseph Heller’s celebrated World War II novel.“Catch-22” received mixed reviews and was a disappointment at the box office, but Mr. Arkin’s performance as Yossarian, a panicky bombardier constantly looking for ways to avoid combat, was widely praised. In his Times review, Vincent Canby said of Mr. Arkin that “because he projects intelligence with such monomaniacal intensity, he is both funny and heroic at the same time.”By that time Mr. Arkin had also successfully ventured outside the realm of comedy, establishing a lifelong pattern. In “Wait Until Dark” (1967), a suspense drama starring Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who is terrorized by drug dealers looking for a secret stash of heroin, he was convincingly evil as the dealer in chief.In “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1968), based on the novel by Carson McCullers, he played a deaf man drawn to help the disadvantaged in a racially divided Southern town. That performance earned him his second Oscar nomination.Mr. Arkin with Sondra Locke in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1968). His performance as a deaf man drawn to help the disadvantaged earned him his second Oscar nomination.Warner Brothers PicturesIt would be almost 40 years before his third nomination, and his only Oscar, for his portrayal of a crusty and heroin-habituated grandfather in the indie comedy “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). His fourth and final nomination was for his role as a cynical movie producer in “Argo” (2012), Ben Affleck’s based-on-a-true-story account of the made-in-Hollywood rescue of hostages in Iran.The years between nominations were busy ones.Alan Wolf Arkin was born on March 26, 1934, in Brooklyn to David Arkin, a painter and writer, and Beatrice (Wortis) Arkin, a teacher whom he later remembered as “a tough old Depression-style lefty.” The family later moved to Los Angeles, where his father lost his job as a schoolteacher when he refused to answer questions about his political beliefs.Mr. Arkin studied acting at Los Angeles City College and later at Bennington College in Vermont, which was a women’s school at the time but accepted a few male theater students.His first professional experience, however, was not as an actor but as a singer and guitarist with the Tarriers, a folk group that had hits with “The Banana Boat Song” and other records. “I thought it was going to be an entree into an acting career, like the naïve young man that I was,” Mr. Arkin said in 2020 when he and his son Adam were guests on “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.” “It didn’t, so I quit them after two years.”Mr. Arkin with, from left, the writer Murray Schisgal, the producer Marc Merson and the actor John Gielgud on the set of the 1966 television movie “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesHis first notable work as an actor was with the Second City in Chicago, which he joined in 1960. “I took the Second City job because I was failing in New York,” he told The Times in 1986. “I couldn’t get arrested. When I got there I wasn’t funny at all. But slowly I built one character, then another, and the audience helped teach me what was funny and what didn’t work.”He made his Broadway debut in 1961 in the company’s revue “From the Second City.” From there, it was a short step to “Enter Laughing.”It was also a relatively short step from acting to directing. In 1966 he directed the Off Broadway play “Eh?,” which featured a young Dustin Hoffman. In 1969 he directed a successful Off Broadway revival of Jules Feiffer’s dark comedy “Little Murders.”He also directed the 1971 movie version, which starred Elliott Gould and in which Mr. Arkin played a small role. It was one of only two feature films he directed. Neither “Little Murders” nor “Fire Sale,” released in 1977, was a hit.By far the most successful of his dozen or so stage directing credits was the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon comedy “The Sunshine Boys” (1972), which starred Jack Albertson and Sam Levene as two feuding ex-vaudevillians reunited against their will, and for which he received a Tony nomination.Mr. Arkin played a mild-mannered dentist dragged into an insane adventure by a mysterious character played by Peter Falk in the 1979 comedy “The In-Laws.” Warner Brothers PicturesMr. Arkin told The Times in 1986, when he was staging an Off Broadway revival of the 1937 farce “Room Service,” that he much preferred directing for the stage to acting on it.“I’m always grateful that I don’t have to do it,” he said. “I haven’t been onstage for 20 years, and there have been maybe 15 minutes when I wanted to go back.”But he continued to stay busy in the movies. His memorable roles in the 1970s included a sympathetic Sigmund Freud coping with the drug-addicted Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), and a mild-mannered dentist — another quintessential Arkin Everyman — dragged into an insane adventure by a mysterious character (Peter Falk) who may or may not be a C.I.A. agent in “The In-Laws” (1979).Among his later film roles were a worn-out real estate salesman in the film version of David Mamet’s play “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992), a psychiatrist treating a professional hit man (John Cusack) in “Grosse Pointe Blank” (1997) and an overprotective father in “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998). But from the 1980s on, much of his best work was done on television.“There was a period of a year or two when I wasn’t getting many good offers,” he said in 1986. “And a television show came along that I thought was exceptional, and within two weeks there was another one.” He added, “Although I’m more impressed by movies, I find I’m more moved by television.”Mr. Arkin with Abigail Breslin in “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006). His portrayal of a crusty and heroin-habituated grandfather won him his only Oscar.Eric Lee/Fox Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressIn addition to numerous made-for-TV movies, Mr. Arkin’s small-screen roles included the title character, a scheming hospital administrator, on the short-lived sitcom “Harry” (1987); a judge on the cable drama “100 Centre Street” in 2001 and 2002; Grace’s father in a 2005 episode of “Will & Grace”; and, most recently, the cranky agent and best friend of an aging acting coach (Michael Douglas) on the first two seasons of the critically praised Netflix comedy “The Kominsky Method,” for which he received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations in 2019 and 2020.He was nominated for six Emmys in his career, including for his performances in two TV movies based on real events, “Escape From Sobibor” (1987) and “The Pentagon Papers” (2003), although he never won.In 1998 he returned to the stage for the first time in more than 30 years, to good reviews, when he teamed with Elaine May for “Power Plays,” an Off Broadway program of three one-acts. In addition to directing all three and writing one of them (the other two were written by Ms. May), he appeared in two: his own “Virtual Reality,” the surreal story of two men awaiting the delivery of a mysterious shipment, with his son Anthony Arkin; and Ms. May’s “In and Out of the Light,” in which he played a lecherous dentist alongside Anthony, Ms. May and her daughter, Jeannie Berlin.Mr. Arkin in an episode of the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method,” for which he received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.Saeed Adyani/Netflix, via Associated PressMr. Arkin’s first two marriages, to Jeremy Yaffe and the actress Barbara Dana, ended in divorce. In addition to his sons, Matthew, Adam and Anthony, he is survived by his wife, Suzanne Newlander Arkin, and four grandchildren.Mr. Arkin was also an occasional author. He wrote several children’s books, among them “The Lemming Condition” (1976) and “Cassie Loves Beethoven” (2000). In 2011 he published a memoir, “An Improvised Life”; he followed that in 2020 with “Out of My Mind,” a brief history of his search for meaning in the universe and his embrace of Eastern philosophy.Toward the end of “An Improvised Life,” Mr. Arkin reflected on his chosen profession. Noting that a lot of actors “are better at pretending to be other people than they are at being themselves,” he wrote, “When things get tense, when I start taking my work a bit too seriously, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be a human being.”Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor, died in January. Shivani Gonzalez contributed reporting. More

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      in Movies

      Stream These 8 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in July

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      The best James Bond movie of recent years is among a handful of great titles leaving soon for U.S. subscribers.This July, several Oscar-nominated performances will depart from Netflix in the United States, along with two top-notch genre films and one of the most successful entries in the James Bond franchise — and that’s saying something. Here are a few of the highlights. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Ip Man’ (July 21)If you were taken by Donnie Yen’s electrifying supporting turn in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” well, add this one to your queue posthaste. Yen stars as Grandmaster Ip Man, the legendary martial artist and Wing Chun instructor. But this is no staid biopic. It’s an action epic — packed with lightning-paced set pieces, death-defying stunts and bone-crunching fights — that just so happens to concern a real hero. The director Wilson Yip and the martial arts choreographer Sammo Hung supplement the fist-flying action with flashes of wit and ingenuity. They end up with one of the best martial-arts movies of the 21st century. (The sequels “Ip Man 2,” “Ip Man 3,” and “Ip Man 4: The Finale” will also leave Netflix on the 21st.)Stream it here.‘August: Osage County’ (July 26)Tracy Letts’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner for drama gets the big-screen, prestige treatment, with Letts adapting the screenplay for a cast of heavy hitters. Meryl Streep gets the juicy leading role of Violet, the hard-living, straight talking, terminally ill matriarch of the family at the story’s center; Julia Roberts is Barbara, Violet’s oldest daughter and most frequent adversary. Letts’s brilliant script magnificently captures how long-simmering resentments and decades’ old slights are perpetually on simmer in a family like this, and the director John Wells smoothly orchestrates a cast that includes Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroney and Sam Shepard.Stream it here.‘Flight’ (July 31)Denzel Washington was nominated for an Academy Award (for the sixth of eventually nine times) for his wrenching and powerful lead performance in this 2012 drama from the director Robert Zemeckis. Washington stars as “Whip” Whittaker, a commercial airline pilot whose quick thinking during a mechanical failure initially makes him a Sully-style hero. But when the crash is more thoroughly investigated, that perception is complicated considerably. What begins as a thrill ride becomes a nuanced addiction drama, with Washington playing Whip’s descent into darkness with genuine pathos. The top-shelf supporting cast includes Don Cheadle, John Goodman, Melissa Leo and Kelly Reilly.Stream it here.‘Julie & Julia’ (July 31)Julia Child was an easy figure to impersonate but perhaps not so simple to inhabit. Meryl Streep masters the look and distinctive sound of the character but also finds the character’s emotional spine, a sense of displacement that can be cured only by cooking; she shares that quality with Julie Powell (Amy Adams), the central character of the film’s parallel story, in which a modern blogger attempts to recreate every recipe in Child’s beloved book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The Childs story is decidedly more compelling, but the writer and director Nora Ephron (making her final film) makes ingenious connections between these two women and coaxes delightful performances from both actresses, as well as from Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina as their (mostly) supportive spouses.Stream it here.‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ (July 31)This 2006 drama from Gabriele Muccino adapts the memoir of the motivational speaker Chris Gardner, who went from being a homeless single father to becoming a successful stockbroker and entrepreneur. The film focuses on Gardner’s period of homelessness and the sacrifices he made while completing an unpaid internship at a prestigious firm. An Oscar-nominated Will Smith finds just the right notes as Gardner, whose pride and stubbornness prevented him from sharing his dire circumstances during his internship; Smith’s real-life son Jaden plays Gardner’s son, and their genuine emotional connection pulls the picture through its rougher patches. It’s a formulaic piece of work but a nevertheless affecting one.Stream it here.‘Skyfall’ (July 31)The Daniel Craig era of the James Bond franchise reached its zenith with this 2012 installment, which combined the lean, mean, “Bourne”-influenced approach of recent Bond pictures with an Academy Award winning director (Sam Mendes), his regular team (including the ace cinematographer Roger Deakins and the composer Thomas Newman) and Javier Bardem, fresh off his own Oscar win for “No Country for Old Men,” as a seductive villain. Mendes’s elegant direction gives viewers the best of both worlds; the picture has the globe-trotting locations, bold action set pieces and unapologetic sensuality of classic Bond but the snappy pace and grounded action of contemporary blockbusters.Stream it here.‘Stepmom’ (July 31)The “Home Alone” director Chris Columbus continued the softening of his touch that began with “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), moving from familial comedy to full on four-hanky drama with this 1998 tear-jerker. Julia Roberts plays the title character, a fashion photographer who is dating, and then marries, a much older, divorced father (Ed Harris). Susan Sarandon plays his ex-wife, whose difficulties maintaining a relationship with their two children — and her combination of genuine dislike for and quiet jealousy of the new woman in their lives — are complicated further by a terminal illness. It’s not exactly a subtle piece of work, but it’s an earnest one, and the leads find and play the complexities of what could have been cardboard characters.Stream it here.‘Underworld’ (July 31)When this action-horror-sci-fi hybrid opened quietly in the fall of 2003, few could have predicted it would initiate a lucrative and long-running series — five feature films (plus a video game), concluding with “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017). But it shouldn’t have been a surprise: This story of battles (and forbidden romance) between vampires, werewolves and humans was hitting the same early-21st century sweet spot of fantasy, gore and romance as the “Twilight” saga. And the films (particularly this first one) provided a rare opportunity for its star, Kate Beckinsale, to show what she could do with a full-on action-hero leading role.Stream it here. More

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      in Movies

      Will Children Save Us at the End of the World?

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      A wave of recent and forthcoming TV series, books and movies meditate on how young people might fare during an apocalyptic event — with varying degrees of optimism.The noxious orange smoke that descended over New York this month reminded me of a parlor game I used to play with my husband: Would we have what it takes to survive the apocalypse? We abruptly stopped enjoying this thought experiment in March 2020 and when I had a child the next year, I became even less tolerant of blithely considering the end of the world. But now, suddenly, versions of our game are everywhere, in a new and near-unavoidable genre: stories that revisit our pandemic trauma via even worse — but plausible! — scenarios. Making these works doubly poignant, many of them have children at their center.Mackenzie Davis in the series “Station Eleven” (2021-22).Ian Watson/HBO MaxThere’s “Station Eleven,” the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel about the aftermath of a swine flu, which was turned into a much-discussed 2021 HBO Max series, in which an 8-year-old girl manages to survive with the help of a stranger turned surrogate parent. “The Last of Us,” HBO’s video game adaptation, which debuted in January, features a zombie-fungus pandemic; a seemingly immune teenage girl is humanity’s one hope. “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel — soon to be a movie — about a bourgeois family vacation gone very bad, features a vague but menacing threat of apocalypse. Also loosely belonging to this category are the shows “Yellowjackets” (2021-present) — a girls’ soccer team turns to cannibalism after a plane crash — and “Class of ’07” (2023) — a school reunion coincides with a climate apocalypse — and the new-to-Netflix 2019 Icelandic movie “Woman at War” (a renegade activist tries to stop the destruction of the environment and adopt a child).These stories are, in various ways, about how and whether our children can survive the mess that we’ve left them — and what it will cost them to do so. In “Station Eleven,” post-pans (children who were born after the pandemic) are both beacons of optimism and conscripted killers deployed by a self-styled prophet who hopes to erase anyone who holds on to the trauma of the past. And in “The Last of Us,” Ellie, the young girl with possible immunity (played by the actor Bella Ramsey), is forced to kill to survive, and to grapple with whether it’s worth sacrificing her own life in the search for a cure.The anxieties that these works explore — about planetary destruction and what we did to enable it — are, evidence suggests, affecting the desire of some to have children at all, either because of fear for their future or a belief that not procreating will help stave off the worst. But following the children in these fictions, who didn’t create the conditions of their suffering, isn’t just a devastating guilt trip. Almost all these stories also frame children as our best hope, as we so often do in real life. Children, we need to believe, are resilient and ingenious in ways that adults aren’t. In these stories, when the phones stop working and Amazon stops delivering, it’s children, less set in their ways, who can rebuild and imagine something different. They’re our victims but also our saviors.W. W. Norton & Company, via Associated PressNowhere is this more explicit than in Lydia Millet’s 2020 novel, “A Children’s Bible,” in which a group of middle-aged college friends rent an old mansion for a summer reunion. When a superstorm sets off a chain of events that erodes society, the parents drink and take ecstasy but the kids — teens — remain clearheaded. They care for a baby, grow food and plan for an unrecognizable future. This fantasy of a youth-led solution is both hopeful, Millet implies, and a deplorable shirking of responsibility. (It recalls somewhat Greta Thunberg’s rebuke of grown-ups: “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”) Its price, these works suggest, is a childhood robbed of innocence. In the rare moments when kids are allowed to be kids in these narratives, there is always a sense of foreboding; for every romp through an abandoned shopping mall, there’s a zombie lying in wait in a Halloween store. “Is this really all they had to worry about?” Ellie asks Joel, her companion in “The Last of Us” (played by Pedro Pascal), about the teenage girls who lived before the fungus hit. “Boys. Movies. Deciding which shirt goes with which skirt.”Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke in the forthcoming movie “Leave the World Behind.”JoJo Whilden/NetflixThis current crop of postapocalyptic stories isn’t the first to feature children prominently. Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road,” published in 2006, early in the so-called war on terror, followed a father and son after civilization had been leveled by an unnamed flash from the sky. (“Are we still the good guys?” the son asks the father as they ignore others’ pain in their struggle to survive.) The movie “Children of Men,” released the same year, imagines a world so destroyed that most humans have lost the ability to reproduce — and hope lies with the only pregnant woman. Of course, one reason these fictions foreground children is that a world without them is the most doomed world of all. It’s no accident that some of the earliest near-apocalypse stories — the biblical flood, the one in the ancient Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh” — imagined that the world was saved by bringing the “seed of all living creatures,” as the latter work puts it, onto a boat.But maybe more than any particular fear of a civilization-ending calamity, these fictions are most useful for helping us work through an unavoidable, terrifying truth on an individual level. That the world, in whatever state it descends to or remains in, will go on without us after our death, and unless tragedy strikes, our children will live in it without us. It’s not comforting to imagine, but it can be illuminating. They will navigate things we can’t imagine, but — just maybe — they’ll do better than we did, even without our help. More

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      in Music

      Popcast (Deluxe): Kim Petras’s New LP and Jennifer Lawrence’s Return

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:The new album from Young Thug, released as his trial has yet to seat a juror after six months; plus word of a new album from Drake, pegged to the release of a new poetry bookThe conclusion of the ongoing legal battle between Kesha and Dr. LukeThe new album from the meta-pop singer Kim PetrasA check-in on “The Idol,” the louche HBO show about the wages of pop stardom, which is on the verge of its season finale“No Hard Feelings,” the May-December quasi-romance that’s serving as a lighthearted comeback vehicle for Jennifer LawrenceA new collaboration from Juice WRLD and Cordae, and a new song from glaiveSnack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. More

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      in Television

      Does ‘And Just Like That …’ Signal the End of Stealth Wealth?

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      So does the pop culture and fashion wheel turn.And just like that, stealth wealth, the aesthetic made viral by “Succession,” with its toxic billionaires in their Loro Piana baseball caps and Tom Ford hoodies locked in a C-suite cage match to the death, has been swept off screen.In its place: logomania, branding that can be seen from whole city blocks away and accessories that jangle and gleam with the blinding light of bragging rights.The outfits, that is to say, of Carrie and Co. in Season 2 of “And Just Like That …,” the “Sex and the City” reboot come recently to Max — the streamer that, as it happens, also gave us the Roys in their greige cashmere. Both shows are set in New York City, the home of strivers and entrepreneurs, of “Washington Square” and Wharton, of constantly evolving social castes highly, and literally, invested in their own identifiable camouflage.If watching “Succession” was in part like engaging in a detective game to suss out what character was wearing what brand, so insider were the fashion politics, watching “And Just Like That …” is like attending brandapalooza: the double Cs and Fs and Gs practically whacking you on the head with their presence. (Warning: Spoilers are coming.) All the over-the-top fashionista-ing is back. The room-size closets!It’s the yin to the “Succession” yang: a veritable celebration of the comforting aspirational dreams of self-realization (or self-escapism) embedded in stuff that may actually be the most striking part of an increasingly stale series. Certainly, the clothes, which often serve as their own plot points, are more memorable than any dialogue.Well … except maybe for that instantly classic line in Episode 1, uttered by Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) on her way to the Met Gala in reference to her gown and feather hat: “It’s not crazy — it’s Valentino.” But that’s the exception that proves the rule.Lisa Todd Wexley stopping traffic on her way to the Met Gala in Valentino.Craig Blakenhorn/MaxThere is Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), with her multiple Manolos and Fendis, self-medicating with shopping, returning home one day with six Bergdorf Goodman bags. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) toting her Burberry doggy poop bag (also possessed of a Burberry apron and Burberry ear muffs) and bemoaning the fact that her teenage daughter hocked her Chanel dress to fund her musical aspirations.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her kids off for camp in a bright green Louis Vuitton jacket and scarf. And Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the character that passes for a restrained dresser thanks to her penchant for neutrals (and the occasional animal print), loudly lamenting the theft of her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin — one of her totems of self, ripped directly from her hands.Lisa Todd Wexley dropping her children off for camp in Louis Vuitton.Jason Howard/Bauer-Griffin/GC ImagesSeema with her caramel-colored Hermès Birkin.Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesThere is Loewe and Pierre Cardin; Altuzarra and Dries Van Noten. There is also an effort to repurpose clothes, like Carrie’s wedding dress, in order to promote the virtues of rewearing, but it’s pretty much lost in all the rest of the muchness. There is a dedicated Instagram account on which the costume designers Molly Rogers and Danny Santiago share their finds, with 277,000 followers. @Successionfashion, by contrast, has 184,000.All of which means what, exactly? Is the era of quiet luxury, so recently embraced by TikTok, already at an end? Have our attention spans, so famously abbreviated, moved on? Has the physics of fashion exerted its force and produced an equal and opposite reaction to an earlier action?As if. In many ways, the fashion in “And Just Like That …” seems to protest too much. In part that’s because it seems like a regurgitation of the fun that came before, which was itself a reaction to the minimalism of the early 1990s, which itself was born in that decade’s recession.The fact is, no matter how much lip service has been paid to quiet luxury or stealth wealth or whatever you want to call it, and how it is 2023’s “hottest new fashion trend,” it was never a recent invention. It has been around since way back when it was referred to as “shabby chic” or “connoisseurship” or “old money,” all synonyms for the kind of product that didn’t look overtly expensive but was a sign of aesthetic genealogy — the difference between new money and inherited money that fashion co-opted and regurgitated to its own ends. Just as more obviously coded consumption has been around since Louis Vuitton plunked his initials on some leather back in 1896 or since Jay Gatsby started tossing his shirts.Note the Fendi bag on the back of Carrie’s chair.HBO MaxFind the Burberry-branded doggy poop bag tucked on Charlotte’s arm.HBO MaxWe’ve been declaring the “end of logos” and, alternately, the “rise of stealth wealth” for decades now. There are cycles when one is more ubiquitous than the other (usually having to do with economic downturns when flaunting disposable income is not a great look), but they exist in tandem. They help define each other.Consider that during the current economic uncertainty, exactly the kind of environment that tends to fast-forward the appeal of low-key high-cost items, the most successful global brands have remained the most highly identifiable: Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès. Or that in his recent debut for Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams introduced a bag called Millionaire that costs — yup — $1 million. (It’s a yellow croc Speedy with gold and diamond hardware.)What is more interesting is, as Carrie and the gang continue on their merry wardrobed way, how clichéd both styles now seem, how performative. Once they have trickled up to television, it’s impossible not to recognize the costume. Or the fact that whichever look you buy into, they are simply different ways of expressing wealth, in all its decorative strata. And wealth itself never goes out of fashion. More

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      In ‘The Bear,’ Molly Gordon Is More Than the Girl Next Door

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      A new addition to the cast for Season 2, the actress plays Chef Carmy’s love interest — “a human woman,” she said, “not just this sweet, sweet girl.”On a recent Monday afternoon, the actress Molly Gordon ambled through Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. Gordon, a wry and sprightly presence in movies like “Booksmart,” “Good Boys” and “Shiva Baby,” wore chunky sneakers, a schoolgirl skirt and sunglasses that made her look like a cat with an active Vogue subscription.Plenty of actresses on the come-up might have chosen a walk around these streets — and maybe a look-in at a few of the fashion flagships — as an afternoon activity. But Gordon, who stars in Season 2 of the FX series “The Bear,” which arrived last week on Hulu, had a less glamorous motivation. The stress of organizing a thriving acting career while also co-writing and co-directing her first feature, “Theater Camp,” which opens in theaters on July 14, had led her to grind her teeth. She was on her way to her dentist to be measured for a new night guard.“It’s amazing, it’s sexy, it’s all the things,” she said of the dental appliance. “This will not be my last mouth guard.”I had been told that Gordon, 27, was a woman of unusual personal charm. “Charming and disarming,” was how Jeremy Allen White, the star of “The Bear,” put it. And this was abundantly true. I had also heard her described as a girl-next-door type. This rang less true. Gordon has too much savvy for that, too much drive. She is more like the girl who knows exactly where you hide your spare key and can break into your house at will.In “The Bear,” she plays Claire, an emergency room resident and a love interest for White’s jittery chef, Carmy. When Season 1 landed last summer, Carmy became a social media pinup. (Italian beef, but pouty with it.) And yet early episodes of “The Bear” had deliberately avoided any suggestion of sex or romance. In this season, Claire offers both. Which means that Gordon has been set the not exactly enviable task of playing the new girlfriend of the internet’s boyfriend.“She sees right through, in a really beautiful way, to the core of Carmy,” Jeremy Allen White, left, said of Claire, the character played by Gordon.Chuck Hodes/FXA scene from the feature film “Theater Camp,” which Gordon (pictured with Ben Platt) co-wrote, co-directed and stars in.Searchlight PicturesGordon knows that the internet can be a scary place, but on that afternoon, about two weeks before Season 2 dropped, she appeared mostly undaunted. (Mostly, not entirely: “I hope people don’t not like me. That’s all I can say.”) Claire mattered more. In her ambition and her candor and her warmth, Claire has felt closer to Gordon than any part she has played. It has made Gordon hungry for more.“She’s not the girl next door, because I don’t know what that is,” Gordon said. “I feel so grateful that I’m able to have this role where I get to be a human woman and not just this sweet, sweet girl.”A career on camera — and more recently, behind it — is Gordon’s birthright, more or less. The only child of the director Bryan Gordon and the writer and director Jessie Nelson, she grew up in Los Angeles, a precocious presence on her parents’ sets and at their dinner parties. She began acting as a toddler, participating in a neighborhood children’s studio, the Adderley School, where she met the actor Ben Platt.Platt, speaking by telephone, recalled those early performances. Props would malfunction. Costumes would come loose. But Gordon always pushed right through it, if a step or two behind the beat. She struggled in school, but theater was a place where she could shine, where she could play.Gordon had a few small parts in her parents’ projects, but otherwise she stuck to school and camp and community shows, intuiting that she could not yet handle the rejection that auditioning would bring. At 18, she enrolled at New York University. She dropped out two weeks later. “It was really expensive,” she explained. “And I couldn’t sit with how unhappy I was.”“She’s not the girl next door, because I don’t know what that is,” Gordon said of her character in “The Bear,” who indeed did grow up with Carmy.Amy Harrity for The New York TimesHaving found a small apartment, she took acting classes, secured representation and began to land the occasional television role. Eventually, a Gordon type emerged: poised young women who could also express some kindness, some vulnerability. She seems to have come by that poise honestly, though as Platt said, the offscreen Gordon is more self-effacing and silly and neurotic.“She often plays very cool characters,” Platt said. “She is a lot more funny and Jewish than that.”Christopher Storer, the creator of “The Bear,” had worked with Gordon on the Hulu series “Ramy” and immediately thought of her for Claire. Though Season 1 had assiduously ignored the personal lives of the restaurant workers, Storer and his fellow showrunner, Joanna Calo, wanted to see what would happen if Carmy attempted a relationship outside work.“We really wanted to get to what would it be like for Carmy to actually try to experience some form of happiness in his life,” he said.He and Calo decided on a character who had known Carmy for most of his life, someone who saw him for who he was and loved him anyway. On “Ramy,” Storer had found Gordon inherently lovable. “She’s so sweet,” he said. “And she’s so smart. And she’s funny as hell.” He knew she could lend all of that to Claire.Claire and Carmy meet again in the second episode, in the freezer aisle of a grocery, over a carton of veal stock. Claire looks at Carmy, and as a ballad by R.E.M. plays, that look seems to hold history and love and hunger. Carmy has armored himself against feeling, but opposite Gordon’s Claire that armor is useless.“She sees right through, in a really beautiful way, to the core of Carmy,” White said by phone.Ayo Edebiri, a star of both “The Bear” and “Theater Camp” and a longtime friend of Gordon’s, said that Gordon, for all her coolness and penchant for comedy, has a “deep well of emotion” that she can access. “There’s this deep reservoir of desire and feeling,” Edebiri said.But desire and feeling can’t sustain a relationship, especially if the man involved has a walk-in fridge’s worth of unresolved trauma to work through. For Gordon, the scenes opposite Carmy — the sweet, morning-after ones, the anguished ones — felt uniquely personal, mirroring her experiences with past partners. “I’ve been with men and we were so happy together,” she said. “But the happiness made them so angry and sad.”“I would love to lead a project, I would love to stretch myself,” Gordon said. “I can be naïve, I can be twisted, I can be dark.”Amy Harrity for The New York TimesAnd as someone who struggles with work-life balance — in the past year or so, Gordon has shot “The Bear,” shot and sold “Theater Camp” and tried to get a series pitch and a feature script greenlighted, which is to say that her balance skews all work — she has often asked herself the same questions the show forces Carmy to interrogate.“I get to explore things that are really near and dear to my heart,” she said. “Can we accept love? Can we have a work life and a romantic life?”For now, she isn’t sure of the answers.Gordon has never minded playing friends and girlfriends. If a girl next door is what’s required, she knows the address. But in her mid-20s, she has become more comfortable with her own ambition, scope and range.“I would love to lead a project, I would love to stretch myself,” she said just before she departed for her dental appointment. “I can be naïve, I can be twisted, I can be dark. I just haven’t always been given those opportunities.“I’m very grateful for what I have. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t want more.” More