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      ‘Better Call Saul’: There Will Be (Way More) Blood

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      The “Breaking Bad” prequel is back for its final season. Here’s what to remember about where we left off, as Jimmy’s transformation into Saul nears completion.It’s been two years since anyone watched a new episode of “Better Call Saul,” but the characters presumably haven’t aged a minute.So before the Season 6 opener, which debuts on Monday, let’s take a moment to remember exactly what was happening to this menagerie of sociopathic drug kingpins and morally compromised lawyers as the closing credits rolled on Season 5. And let’s take it one burning question at a time.Where was Lalo Salamanca headed in that last scene of the finale?Toward revenge. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) just survived the world’s most incompetent home invasion-cum-assassination attempt, having outmaneuvered a handful of heavily armed men using little more than a frying pan of boiling oil, borrowed weapons and the artful use of his own underground escape tunnel. He knows who sent these guys — the rival meth wholesaler and fried chicken entrepreneur Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).Gus has been a few steps ahead of Lalo ever since this newest Salamanca showed up in Season 4. It was Gus who engineered Lalo’s arrest and imprisonment for murder — a crime Lalo did, in fact, commit — then promptly got him sprung when the mustachioed villano proved he could wreak plenty of havoc from behind bars.Having lost his beloved cook, and apparently everyone else on his staff, Lalo will now be looking for maximum retribution. We know this will not involve killing Fring — he is alive and well in “Breaking Bad,” this show’s sequel — but he can presumably cause chaos and damage. At minimum, he can forestall the opening of the meth super lab, which is arguably the cause dearest to Gus’s heart and most important to his bottom line.Don Eladio and Nacho Varga (Steven Bauer, left, and Michael Mando) had what may prove to have been a very meaningful tête-à-tête in the Season 5 finale.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures TelevisionIs Nacho Varga doomed?Seems like it! Nacho (Michael Mando) let those Mexican assassins into Lalo’s fortress, then split as the mayhem began. Now that Lalo has survived the carnage, it will be pretty obvious to him that Nacho played a role in it.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.Season 6 ​​Premiere: The new season began with back-to-back episodes. Read our recaps of “Wine and Roses” and “Carrot and Stick.”A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.But consider this. In the last episode, Nacho had a lengthy discussion with the cartel leader Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) about how he would manage the business in New Mexico now that there isn’t a Salamanca around to replace Lalo. Was that a waste of viewers’ time? It is if Nacho never runs operations in Albuquerque.However this pans out, it’s safe to assume that Nacho will retain his title as the Most Tormented Character in this series. Pound for pound, no one has endured more physical and psychological abuse.How bad is Kim Wexler breaking?Very bad. At the end of the last season, Kim (Rhea Seehorn) was persuading Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) to help frame her former mentor and boss, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), in some kind of career-ending act of fraud or malfeasance. The contours of this plot are unclear, but Kim is adamant that Howard deserves the worst that she and Jimmy can conjure.One obvious motive here is money. With Howard sidelined in a scandal, she and Jimmy will collect about $2 million from a long-percolating class action lawsuit against a retirement home. It’s more than that, though. Kim loathes the guy in a way that even Jimmy — no fan either — finds excessive.The hatred is complicated and worth an essay of its own. Suffice to say, Howard has a history of patronizing and demeaning Kim — he once made her toil in a poorly lit room with first-year associates back when she was an up-and-comer at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, essentially punishing her for Jimmy’s sins. But Kim and Howard had good years, too, and he forgave her student loan debt when she quit the firm.Kim (Rhea Seehorn) turned out to be a better liar under pressure than her shifty husband.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures TelevisionNot to mention the other side of their ledger. Kim gut-punched Howard, figuratively speaking, when she and Jimmy found a very underhanded way to steal a blue-chip client from H.H.M. So they have issues, and it brings to mind the truism that you can deeply hate only the people you once liked.Kim is shaping up as one of the most intellectually rich characters on this show. (Gus is her only rival.) In her exit scene from Season 5, she was dreaming of opening a law firm to help the poor, which is about as altruistic a career move as an attorney can imagine. She was also conniving to destroy a man because, as she put it, he needed to be taken a peg.Watch your back, Howard. Watch your front, too.What’s next for Jimmy?Therapy, one hopes. When last seen, Jimmy had endured the roughest 48 hours of his life, starting with a horrifically botched effort to transport $7 million in cartel money from Mexico to Albuquerque — bail for his client, Lalo. Instead of a simple handoff, Jimmy came within a millisecond of an execution-style death, then watched his would-be killer get shot, the start of a deadly spree orchestrated by Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), who turned in his finest sniper performance to date.That was the easy part. Jimmy and Mike then hoofed it through the desert overnight, dragging heavy sacks of $100 bills and barely escaping death by dehydration. Then Lalo decided that Jimmy’s version of his bagman travails — that he simply had car trouble and then walked all night — had holes in it. Specifically, bullet holes, which he discovered on Jimmy’s car when he examined it during his bail-skipping drive to the Mexican border. Lalo visited Jimmy and Kim at their apartment to confront Jimmy and was saved only by Kim’s gift for improvised lying.Whither Gus and Mike?Expect some rage from the usually even-tempered Mr. Fring over the Lalo fiasco. Expect also some countermeasures to thwart whatever vengeance Lalo has in mind, especially if it means delaying the already delayed super lab.Things were a little tense between Gus and Mike (Giancarlo Esposito, left, and Jonathan Banks) when we last saw them. But it could have been worse. Greg Lewis/AMCMike, his favorite in-house heavy, will surely provide the muscle and close combat skills needed in the coming battle. Mike and Gus have been through a rough patch. Mike took a few orders he despised, most notably shooting the heartsick super-lab engineer, Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock), for the German’s verboten efforts to briefly reunite with his wife.Maybe this is why Mike came close to an act of disobedience that verged on career suicide. He had a rifle scope trained through a window on Lalo during that confrontation in Jimmy and Kim’s apartment. If he had actually shot the guy, he would have wrecked Gus’s plans and been forced to run for his life.Better call Gene?Let’s talk about the story set after “Breaking Bad,” in which Jimmy lives in Nebraska under the assumed name Gene Takavic.The previous five seasons of “Better Call Saul” have started with a brief visit to Omaha, where a post-Saul Jimmy lives and works at a Cinnabon in a mall, having fled Albuquerque as a fugitive. (In a clever inversion of the norm, scenes set in the show’s future are shot in black and white.) In the Season 5 opener, Jimmy is confronted by a guy who seems to recognize him, suggesting that his cover has been blown.In flash-forwards to the time after “Breaking Bad,” Jimmy is hiding out as Gene Takavic, a Cinnabon employee in Nebraska.Warrick Page/AMCIt’s worth noting that the promotional poster for this new season shows Jimmy as the milquetoast Takavic — mustache, close-cropped hair, glasses. It’s possible that far more than a few minutes of the coming season will happen in Nebraska. There could be whole episodes. We may see him blackmailed. Or pursued by the feds. Or running, again.And, given that nobody knows Kim’s future, it’s at least possible that the two will meet in this time period, assuming she survives the machinations of the show’s present tense. Which is not a safe assumption.Which actor’s name should viewers be most stoked to see in the opening credits?Norbert Weisser. He plays Peter Schuler, the hyper-anxious executive — who in the future commits suicide — running a division of Madrigal Electromotive, a German conglomerate, and helping Gus build the meth super lab. He has been in exactly one episode of “Breaking Bad” and one of “Better Call Saul,” and both were exceptional.Anything else?The show is gradually docking with the starting moments of “Breaking Bad.” So Jimmy will soon fully embrace his alter ego, Saul Goodman, who has made only fleeting cameos thus far. We might get reacquainted with some old friends, too. Like the libertarian and obscure music aficionado Gale Boetticher (David Costabile), who helps set up the super lab. And producers have hinted that Walter White and Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul) could turn up.If we meet Mr. White in his pre-“Breaking Bad” incarnation, he’ll be a nebbishy chemistry teacher with plenty of unrealized ambition — and the world’s most famous pair of Wallabees. More

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      Late Night Isn’t Thrilled About Elon Musk’s Attempted Twitter Takeover

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      “He is super smart, definitely, but he admits that he also loves dumb jokes, so we don’t know how this could turn out,” Trevor Noah said of the Tesla C.E.O.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Musk Eyes TwitterAfter becoming a major shareholder of Twitter last week, Elon Musk made an offer to buy the social media site for $43 billion on Thursday.Trevor Noah bemoaned the fact that Musk’s offer was anything but normal.“No, he offered to pay 54.20 per share. Yeah, not 54 dollars exactly — no, 54.20. And that’s how you know that you’re too rich — when you’re spending an extra few million dollars just to slip a weed joke into your takeover bid,” Noah joked.“A week ago, Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder, after buying $2.89 billion worth of the company. OK, did no one tell him you can read all the tweets for free?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“After his big investment, he spent the week sitting down with experts to plan a long-term business strategy, by which I mean he posted a bunch of troll-y nonsense, like a meme of himself smoking weed with the caption ‘Twitter’s next board meeting is gonna be lit,’ and a poll suggesting they change the name to ‘Titter.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Oh my god. He could do so much with that money: address world hunger, fix climate change, get a decent haircut.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But that is the thing with Elon Musk — nobody knows what he is going to do. He’s super smart, definitely, but he admits that he also loves dumb jokes, so we don’t know how this could turn out. This could turn Twitter into the best version of itself or he could just rename tweets ‘farts’ and retweets ‘refart.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Are You Still Suing? Edition)“But one of the American companies that has suspended service in Russia is Netflix, which has made subscribers in Russia so mad, they’re suing Netflix. They want 60 million rubles in compensation, which is about 80 bucks, I think, right?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Now, Russian Netflix subscribers launched a class-action lawsuit for loss of service. Then, after a few hours, a screen popped up saying ‘Are you still suing?’ and you had to click ‘yes.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“How great would it be if this war ends because Russians didn’t get to watch ‘Is It Cake?’ on time?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s not just the viewers who are mad, because Netflix also halted the development and acquisition of all Russian-made TV shows and films. That is rough news for anyone — sure, it’s the right thing to do. But it’s rough news for anyone excited about the new season of ‘Bridgertato.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingMichelle Yeoh visited “Desus & Mero” to talk about her role in the hit film, “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”Also, Check This OutMads Mikkelsen in “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.”Warner Bros.Mads Mikkelsen plays an evil wizard with political talent in the latest “Harry Potter” spinoff movie, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.” More

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      Marvin Chomsky, Director of ‘Roots’ and ‘Holocaust,’ Dies at 92

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      A four-time Emmy Award winner, he directed landmark historical TV dramas and the movie “Inside the Third Reich.”Marvin Chomsky, an Emmy Award-winning director renowned for his work on historical dramas, including the blockbuster mini-series “Roots” and “Holocaust,” died on March 28 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.His son Eric confirmed the death, in hospice care in a retirement community.Mr. Chomsky had been directing episodic television for many years when he was hired as one of the four directors of “Roots,” the groundbreaking 12-hour series based on Alex Haley’s book tracing his family’s origins from an African village to enslavement in the United States. Shown on eight consecutive nights in January 1977, it drew spectacular ratings and won nine Emmys.The “Roots” cinematographer Joseph Wilcots said in a Television Academy interview in 2007 that Mr. Chomsky was “a brilliant director” who “always thought his shots out very clearly,” in particular one in which Tom Harvey, the Black character played by Georg Stanford Brown, was whipped.Louis Gossett Jr., who played the enslaved musician Fiddler, told the syndicated columnist Cleveland Amory in 1977 that Mr. Chomsky and another director, John Erman, who were both white, were “very sensitive” and “let each of us do what we thought was best for our particular role.”Mr. Chomsky was nominated for an Emmy for “Roots” but lost to David Greene, another “Roots” director. He won his first Emmy a year later for directing “Holocaust” (1978), a four-part series, starring Meryl Streep and Michael Moriarty, that focused on two families in Nazi Germany: one Jewish, the other headed by an SS officer.Before filming a scene in which Mr. Moriarty, who played Erik Dorf, the SS officer, broke into tears, Mr. Chomsky showed him photographs of Nazi atrocities.“What you saw was Michael Moriarty’s response to those pictures,” Mr. Moriarty told The Fort Lauderdale News shortly after the series premiered. “The horror of what Dorf had done, the level of guilt — it was very close.”Eric Chomsky said in an interview that his father had been “traumatized” by the experience of filming in Germany and Austria, which included directing one scene in the former gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp and another in which a large group of extras, portraying Jewish prisoners, were forced to strip naked and machine-gunned in a ravine.One young cameraman, Mr. Chomsky said, did not believe that the scene could have been based on reality.“Mr. Marvin, you are making this up for the movie,” Mr. Chomsky recalled the man telling him in a 2007 Directors Guild of America interview. “This didn’t really happen.”Mr. Chomsky called on a German crew member to attest to its veracity.When Mr. Chomsky accepted the Emmy for “Holocaust,” he said he had mixed feelings about winning an honor for a series that “depicted events that never should have happened at all.”But, he added, “They did happen, and I’m proud to have been able to tell that story to those who didn’t know, like my sons David, Eric and Peter, and possibly to remind some of those who forgot.”Marvin Joseph Chomsky was born on May 23, 1929, in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn. His father, Harry, and his mother, Gloria (Yarmuk) Chomsky, both immigrated from what is now Belarus and owned a candy store.While Mr. Chomsky was attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, his deep voice brought him to the attention of an all-city radio workshop. That led to his appearing on a local radio station and, soon, working on a TV show for teenagers in the medium’s early days.He graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in speech in 1950 and earned a master’s in drama at Stanford University a year later. Following his Army service, Mr. Chomsky spent the next decade as an art director and scenic designer for TV shows, including “Captain Kangaroo,” “Arthur Godfrey Time” and the anthology series “Studio One.”While working as an art director on the series “The Doctors and the Nurses” in the early 1960s, Mr. Chomsky was asked by the show’s executive producer, Herbert Brodkin, if he wanted to become a producer. Mr. Chomsky declined, saying he’d rather be a director. He went on to direct three episodes of the show, followed by a long run of work on series like “The Wild Wild West,” “Star Trek,” “Gunsmoke,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Mannix.”After “Roots” and “Holocaust,” Mr. Chomsky won Emmys for directing “Attica” (1980), a TV movie about the bloody prison riot in upstate New York, and “Inside the Third Reich” (1982), a two-part film based on the autobiography of Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production.He won his fourth Emmy as a producer of “Peter the Great” (1986), a mini-series about the Russian czar Peter I, starring Maximilian Schell, which Mr. Chomsky also co-directed with Lawrence Schiller.His last credits include “Strauss Dynasty” (1991), a mini-series about the Austrian musical family, and “Catherine the Great” (1995), a TV movie starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.In addition to his son Eric, Mr. Chomsky is survived by his other sons, Peter and David, and a granddaughter. He was separated from his second wife, Christa Baum-Chomsky. His marriage to Tobye Kaplan ended in divorce.Eric Chomsky said his father had wanted the facts in his work to stand up to scrutiny:“I worked with him on ‘The Deliberate Stranger’” — a 1986 mini-series about the serial killer Ted Bundy — “and my whole job was to read the trial transcripts to make sure the script was accurate.” More

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      Alexander Skarsgard’s Viking Dream

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      LONDON — In Alexander Skarsgard’s telling, the idea for what eventually became his latest film, “The Northman,” has its roots on a long, slender island off the coast of Sweden called Oland, where his great-great grandfather built a wooden house a hundred years ago.“Some of my earliest memories are from walking around with my grandfather on Oland and him showing me these massive rune stones and the inscriptions,” he explained on a recent rainy Monday over lunch at a hotel tucked away in central London. “Telling tales of Vikings that sailed down the rivers, down to Constantinople.“So, in a way,” he continued, “you could say that the dream of one day making or being part of a Viking movie was born in that moment.”Wearing a gray crew-neck sweater and dark jeans, he was centuries away from the bloody, muddy berserker he plays in “The Northman,” the much-anticipated action-adventure that marks the director Robert Eggers’s leap into big-budget filmmaking.Six-four, blond and indisputably handsome, Skarsgard would seem a no-brainer to launch a Viking film, but getting this film made took awhile. Skarsgard said he spent years working with the Danish film producer Lars Knudsen trying to determine what shape the project would take. Then, in 2017, he met with Eggers, who had fallen in love with Iceland during a visit two years earlier, to talk about another project.Skarsgard and Eggers both describe that meeting as “fated,” and it eventually led Eggers, along with the Icelandic poet and author Sjon, to write “The Northman.” Eggers, who said he had $70 million to make the film, took some inspiration from the 1982 “Conan the Barbarian,” which he watched as a kid.The actor in full Viking mode in “The Northman.”Aidan Monaghan/Focus FeaturesSkarsgard’s character is a Viking prince, Amleth, bent on vengeance after his father is murdered. Skarsgard is a producer of the new film, which opens on April 22 and also features Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman and Björk, among others.“It was a real treat as an actor to be part of the project from the genesis,” Skarsgard said. “To be part of that journey and to be able to continuously have these conversations with the screenwriters as they are shaping the story, talk about the arc of Amleth, the story, the essence of it — that was very inspiring to me.”The star, 45 and unfailingly polite, has played a Viking before. In fact, he’s played a Northman before: Eric Northman, the proudly undead, ultrasexy Viking vampire on the HBO series “True Blood.” But the title character of “The Northman” is a Viking after Skarsgard’s own heart — one faithful to the medieval lore of the Icelandic sagas, one who doesn’t question fate or faith. And one who, by design, doesn’t have a lot to say.The sagas on which the film is based are “very laconic,” he said. And the characters “don’t really speak unless absolutely necessary.”Skarsgard himself is open, with an easy smile. He’s aware of the world around him, including being up-to-date on the latest news from Ukraine and knowing that asparagus season is upon us. He gave questions his full attention, pausing to gather his thoughts before answering — and not once glancing at a cellphone.Though he grew up hearing Viking stories, Skarsgard read books and watched lectures on them to prepare for his role. He said the most interesting thing he learned was that Vikings believed each person had a female spirit guiding them.“I thought that was quite fascinating, the juxtaposition between that and the brutality you see when you first meet Amleth,” Skarsgard said. He added, “That he would have believed that there’s a female spirit inside of him that guides him, I really liked that idea.”Though he grew up hearing Viking stories, Skarsgard read books and watched lectures on them to prepare for his role.Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesHis preparation complete, it looked as if everything was coming together on the film. Just as shooting was set to begin, the pandemic hit.“For about 48 hours we were still moving forward, but everyone was like, ‘Is this happening? Are we doing this? What’s going on?’ And then finally, they pulled the plug and said we have to break and that we’re going home.”Though Skarsgard considers New York his base, going home meant heading to his hometown, Stockholm.He holed up with his large family at his mother’s country house. He’s the oldest son of the actor Stellan Skarsgard and his first wife, My, and one of eight siblings. Three of his brothers are also actors, including Bill Skarsgard, who played Pennywise, the creeper clown in the “It” movies; another brother is a doctor who kept them apprised of developments in the Covid crisis. Skarsgard said that despite the frightening circumstances, he enjoyed getting to spend time with his family.“We cooked dinners and hung out, worked in the garden,” he said, adding that gathering the whole family can be difficult because work gets in the way. “I really enjoyed it. Then I felt almost guilty because it was a pandemic and people were dying.”Family and Sweden, where Skarsgard grew up and spent some time in the military, are important themes in his life.“We’re all a very tight group,” he said. “Everyone lives within two blocks of each other in South Stockholm and we see each other all the time when I’m home.” (He is not married but answered with a resounding “no” when asked if he was single.)He started out as a child actor but took a break beginning in his early teens before fully embracing an acting career in his 20s. He has said in the past that he didn’t like the attention acting brought him when he was young.His path to “The Northman” runs through dozens of roles in film and TV, some seemingly different sides of the same coin. He’s played an Israeli spy (“The Little Drummer Girl”) and a German man coming to terms with life after World War II (“The Aftermath”). A young Marine who helps the United States invade Iraq (“Generation Kill”) and a sadistic Army sergeant who leads young recruits astray in Afghanistan (“The Kill Team”). An abusive husband (“Big Little Lies”) and an achingly sweet stepdad who steps in to care for his neglected stepdaughter (“What Maisie Knew”).Skarsgard won several awards, including an Emmy, for his turn as an abusive husband opposite Nicole Kidman in “Big Little Lies.”HBOHe also snagged a small but pivotal role in HBO’s prestigious dramedy “Succession,” playing Lukas Matsson, a Swedish tech billionaire.Mark Mylod, an executive producer on the show who directed Skarsgard in two of the three episodes in which he appears, said the actor “was really the only choice for the character because of the intelligence of his work.”The makers of “Succession” had envisioned a character with “that kind of Elon Musk” charisma but not necessarily based on the Tesla chief executive. The Matsson character had to have the gravitas to be a genuine rival to the family behind Waystar Royco, the fictional company at the heart of “Succession,” Mylod said.“He found a way to make that character so fantastic and watchable and totally credible,” Mylod said. “With a small number of scenes, he made such an impact.” (Mylod wouldn’t say if Matsson is returning in Season 4.)Rebecca Hall, an actor who had worked with Skarsgard on “Godzilla vs. Kong,” said she had struggled to get financing for her own passion project, “Passing,” her adaptation last year of the 1929 Nella Larsen novel about the friendship between two Black women in New York, one of whom is passing as white.While working on “Kong,” Hall got up the courage to ask Skarsgard to read her script. He did and agreed to play the part of a racist husband. “I got the sense that he cares about good art being in the world and will do what he can to support that,” Hall said in an interview, adding that the character was the kind he had played well. “He’s no stranger to complicated characters who do bad things.”For Skarsgard, “there is zero strategy or plan” to his career. “The sweet spot is when I’m intrigued by the character, and I understand aspects of him and he makes me curious to learn more,” he said. “That’s superfun because then that means that I’ll probably enjoy diving in and exploring that a bit deeper.”On “The Northman,” diving in meant bulking up. He is also reunited in the film with Kidman, who played his wife in “Big Little Lies,” for which he won an Emmy, a SAG Award and a Golden Globe. This time she’s his mother.The two actors traveled with the rest of the cast to Northern Ireland, Ireland and Iceland for the grueling “Northman” shoot. Skarsgard described it as “seven months in the mud.”Eggers, an exacting and meticulous director, said that he was “not a sadist to be a sadist,” but that he was dead serious about detail and accuracy, which will come as no surprise to viewers of his earlier films, like “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.”Skarsgard has spoken in interviews about being shackled and dragged through the muck. But Eggers said that, like him, Skarsgard wanted the best result. “When we embarked on this together, he was after nothing but perfection.”Eggers added, “Alex has sort of talked about me driving him to the edge, but there were many times that I can remember him asking for another take because he’s just as much of a perfectionist as I am.”The director acknowledged that the working conditions were difficult. “I am not trying to make things hard for us,” he explained, “but when you’re telling the story of the Viking Age in Northern Europe, you’re going to seek punishing locations, with extreme weather and terrain. And that’s just what it needs to be to tell this story.”When shooting was delayed, Skarsgard returned to Stockholm, where he enjoyed time spent with his family. “I felt almost guilty because it was a pandemic and people were dying.”Robbie Lawrence for The New York TimesWorking with such a large budget and cast were perks, Eggers said, but also meant a great deal of pressure. “If this movie doesn’t perform, that will be a problem,” he said.After all of the work, Skarsgard said, “I just want people to see the movie, that’s it,” adding, preferably on the big screen.As is pretty standard fare for a Skarsgard project, he’s naked in parts of “The Northman,” including during a fight scene in a volcano.Does he ever just say no to taking off his clothes? He said he had recently done just that at a photo shoot after being asked to take his shirt off, saying, “I think there’s enough nudity in the movie.”Skarsgard, who had spent the morning doing press by Zoom and had traveled around Europe promoting in the days before we talked, had by the end of the interview kind of slid down the banquette, resting his head against the cushion. He said he realized his films tend to be heavy. “I might have to do a comedy soon,” he said, adding that he would like to work with the satirist Armando Iannucci or the British comic actor Steve Coogan.“The Northman,” he said, “was so intense. It was the greatest experience of my career but, God, it was intense.” More

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      Frank Langella Fired From Netflix Show After Misconduct Investigation

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      The actor was removed from his leading role in the mini-series “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The production plans to reshoot the scenes in which he had appeared.The actor Frank Langella was fired from his leading role in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a Netflix mini-series based on Edgar Allan Poe works, after a misconduct investigation.His firing was reported by Deadline. Netflix declined to comment, but a person familiar with the matter, who was granted anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the investigation, confirmed the account on Thursday.Langella was removed from the series, which is in the middle of production, after officials determined that the actor had been involved in unacceptable conduct on set, Deadline reported. The production plans to recast Langella’s role as Roderick, the reclusive patriarch of the Usher family, and reshoot the scenes in which he had already appeared. The series also stars Carla Gugino, Mary McDonnell and Mark Hamill, among others.A spokeswoman for Langella and the show’s creator, Mike Flanagan, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Langella, 84, known for his performances both onscreen and onstage, shot to fame in the title role of the 1979 film “Dracula” after starring in a Broadway production as the count. He also played President Nixon in both the stage and screen versions of “Frost/Nixon,” earning an Oscar nomination as well as a Tony Award for best actor in a play in 2007. Recently, Langella appeared as the judge in the Netflix film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” More

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      Japanese TV Show “Old Enough!” Features Toddlers Running Errands

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      “Old Enough!,” a Japanese show that has been on the air for decades, recently came to Netflix. It features toddlers running errands without adult supervision.TOKYO — Three-year-old Yuka steps off the curb into a crosswalk that bisects a four-lane street. “Even though the light’s green,” a narrator says in a voice-over, “she still looks out for cars!”So begins a typical scene in “Old Enough!,” a Japanese reality show that began streaming on Netflix in late March. It is new to American viewers but has been running in Japan for more than three decades.The show’s popularity in Japan is a reflection of the country’s high level of public safety, as well as a parenting culture that sees toddlers’ independence as a key marker of their development.“It’s a typical way of raising children in Japan and symbolic of our cultural approach, which can be surprising for people from other countries,” said Toshiyuki Shiomi, an expert on child development and a professor emeritus at Shiraume Gakuen University in Tokyo.Short and sweet“Old Enough!” has been running on Nippon TV, initially as part of another show, since 1991. It was inspired by “Miki’s First Errand,” a 1977 children’s book by Yoriko Tsutsui that tells the story of a mother who sends her 5-year-old daughter out to buy milk for a younger sibling.The edited “Old Enough!” episodes that appear on Netflix are short (around 15 minutes or less) and upbeat. They track toddlers as young as 2 as they attempt to run errands in public for the first time, with a studio audience laughing in the background. Safety spotters and camera crews hide offscreen, with mixed results; they often stumble into the frame.As the children navigate crosswalks and busy public places full of adults, a narrator describes their incremental progress in breathless tones, like a commentator calling a baseball game in the ninth inning. And the toddlers strike up conversations with the strangers they meet along the way.Yuka, a 3-year-old girl in the Japanese city of Akashi, goes shopping by herself on the show.Netflix/Nippon TV“Mom said, instead of her, I would go to the shops today,” 3-year-old Yuka tells a shopkeeper in the coastal city of Akashi as she buys udon noodles for a family meal.“Really?” the shopkeeper replies. “Aren’t you a clever thing?”The errands inevitably go awry. Yuka briefly forgets to buy tempura, for instance, and another 3-year-old forgets what she has been asked to do because she is too busy talking to herself. In other episodes, children drop their cargo (live fish, in one case) or refuse to leave home in the first place.When 2-year-old Ao’s father, a sushi chef, asks him to take some soy-sauce-stained chef’s whites to a nearby laundromat, he won’t budge.“I can’t do it,” Ao tells his father, standing outside the family home and holding the soiled linens in a plastic bag.Eventually, Ao’s mother cajoles him into going, partly by bribing him with a snack. “It’s painful, isn’t it?” the father says to her as the boy ambles down the road alone. “It breaks my heart.”“You’re too soft on him,” she replies.A rite of passageProfessor Shiomi said that parents in Japan tried to instill a particular kind of self-sufficiency in their children. “In Japanese culture, independence doesn’t mean arguing with others or expressing oneself,” he said. “It means adapting yourself to the group while managing daily tasks, such as cooking, doing errands and greeting others.”In Japanese schools, it is common for children to clean classrooms, he noted. And at home, parents give even young children pocket money for their expenses and expect them to help prepare meals and do other chores.In a well-known example of this culture, Princess Aiko, a member of Japan’s royal family, would walk alone to elementary school in the early 2000s. (She was always under surveillance by the Imperial Household police.)The errands that toddlers run on the show inevitably go awry.Netflix/Nippon TVIn the Tokyo area, Wagakoto, a production company, films short documentaries of toddlers running errands, for a fee that starts at about $120. Jun Niitsuma, the company’s founder, said that the service was inspired by “Old Enough!” and “Miki’s First Errand,” and that clients paid for it because they wanted a record of how independent their toddlers had become.“It’s a rite of passage” for both children and their parents, Mr. Niitsuma said. “These errands have been a very symbolic mission for decades.”Room for debateBefore Netflix acquired “Old Enough!,” it had been adapted for audiences in Britain, China, Italy, Singapore and Vietnam.“‘Old Enough!’ is a reminder that unique storytelling can break down cultural and language barriers, and connect entertainment fans globally,” said Kaata Sakamoto, the vice president for Japan content at Netflix.The show does have some critics in Japan. Their main arguments seem to be that the toddlers’ errands essentially amount to coercion, or that the show could prompt parents to put their children in harm’s way.The toddlers on the show strike up conversations with strangers they meet along the way.Netflix/Nippon TVViolent crimes are rare in Japan. Still, some academics contend that common safety metrics paint a misleading portrait of public safety. They point to recent studies by the Ministry of Justice indicating that the incidence of crime in Japan, particularly sexual crimes, tends to be higher than what residents report to local police departments.“It’s a terrible show!” said Nobuo Komiya, a criminologist at Rissho University in Tokyo who has advised municipalities across Japan on public safety.“This TV station has been airing this program for years, and it’s been so popular,” he added. “But Japan is full of danger in reality. This myth of safety is manufactured by the media.”Even supporters acknowledge that “Old Enough!” was created for an older era in which different social norms governed toddlers’ behavior.Today, there is increasing debate in Japan about whether forcing young children to do chores is good for their development, as was once widely assumed, Professor Shiomi said. And parents no longer take public safety for granted.“I myself sent my 3- or 4-year-old for an errand to a vegetable shop,” he said. “She was able to get there but couldn’t remember the way back because she didn’t have a clear image of the route. So the shop owner brought her home.”Hisako Ueno More

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      Late Night Teases Rudy Giuliani About Seized Devices

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      Prosecutors recovered 18 devices during their current investigation into Trump’s former lawyer. “Eighteen devices? Man, that’s a lot of porn,” Stephen Colbert said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Left to His Own DevicesFederal prosecutors recovered 18 electronic devices from Rudy Giuliani during their investigation into his lobbying Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.“Eighteen devices? Man, that’s a lot of porn,” Stephen Colbert joked on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”“Always a good sign when you have three phones.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But this week, Rudy generously offered to assist the feds in finding reasons to charge him when he helped investigators unlock several electronic devices by providing a list of possible passwords. It’s a real bad sign when you have to carry around a piece of paper with a list of possible passwords.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He gave them a list of possible passwords to two other devices they seized, and even let investigators look inside the coffin he sleeps in during daylight hours.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I’m happy to say ‘The Late Show’ has acquired a copy of the list. There’s ‘L3akyheadjuice21,’ ‘seckswithcousin69,’ and ‘4SeasonsTotalManscaping.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Smile, You’re Not on Camera Edition)“And there is some good news: The Brooklyn subway shooting suspect has been arrested. That’s nice. That’s fast. The suspect’s name is Frank R. James. Authorities know this because a credit card with Mr. James’s name on it had been found at the scene of the shooting, as had a key to a van Mr. James had rented. He also left a cheek swab, a filled-out tax return and his SoulCycle emergency contact. Very generous of him.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“One of the unusual facts about this shooter is that he is 62 years old, which means technically he wasn’t on the run — he was on the mall walk.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s fortunate that James left behind plenty of evidence, because none of the station’s security cameras were in full operation at the time of the shooting. Well, that’s what the M.T.A. gets for hiring the same guy who did the cameras in Jeffrey Epstein’s cell.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Really? really? Out of 10,000 cameras in the subway system the only three that weren’t working are the ones that could have helped? Really? That is a crazy stroke of bad luck if it were true.” — TREVOR NOAH“It does explain the new subway safety posters: ‘If you see something, that’s cool — we didn’t.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Let’s not get hung up on the details. The important thing is that those cameras cost New York taxpayers $800,000 each. Don’t forget that — that is all that matters.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingLouis Virtel, a writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” protested Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law on his recurring segment, “Virtel It Like it Is.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe “Flight Attendant” star Rosie Perez will appear on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This Out“The worst nightmare is, do you wake up one day and you’re not funny anymore?” Billy Crystal, 74, said of the anxiety that comes with being an aging comedian. “Do you wake up and you’re not relevant?”Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesBilly Crystal is returning to Broadway in “Mr. Saturday Night,” a musical version of his 1992 movie about an aging performer who won’t accept that his time in the spotlight is up. More

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      Only Gilbert Gottfried Could Be So Dirty and So Heartbreaking

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      He turned shocking jokes and “Howard Stern” appearances into something of an art form, one he practiced even when the occasion was a school fund-raiser.Some comedians unfurl yarns in the unhurried mode of a jam band, others display the taut rhythms of pop or hip-hop. Gilbert Gottfried, who came of age in a fraught New York City and died on Tuesday at 67, always felt like punk in the classic CBGB mold: nervy, artful, deceivingly intelligent, a tad unhinged, and blissfully — beautifully — obnoxious.The juiciest moments of his decades onstage crackle with impish grandeur. Some bits are renowned, especially his appearance at a Friars Club roast in the weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, where he dared crack a 9/11 joke. Greeted with boos, the comic pivoted to a standard bit known as “The Aristocrats.” It proved so dementedly randy, in his giddy telling, that it seemed to levitate the crowd, Gottfried’s potty mouth momentarily washing away the tension and grief.Other times, he brought opportune lightning bolts to dopey TV fare. In one notorious clip from “Celebrity Apprentice,” the silky host tells the comedian, “Gilbert, I’m proud of you.” Gottfried stares down his latest mark. “Thank you, mein Führer,” he responds, characteristically more concerned about landing his joke than his odds in that season’s competition.Better still is the episode of “Celebrity Wife Swap” in which Gottfried — a notorious miser — parades around town with Alan Thicke’s horror-struck wife, treating the set more like a Marx Brothers film than a reality show. At one point, his date balks at being forced to eat a gratis meal in the Friars Club kitchen. “What are you, the queen of England?” Gottfried charges.Along with his strangely endearing stand-up act, the comedian found his mightiest platform through his years as a guest on “The Howard Stern Show.” These are tapes that should be rocketed into space to alert the galaxy of the brassy attitudes that lurk in our neck of the woods — perhaps they will scare any hostile aliens away. With the simpatico host, Gottfried is Rodney Dangerfield on “Carson” or Andy Kaufman on “Letterman”; his every appearance offers a glimpse of a berserk, quick-to-boil New York of yore.Remembering Gilbert GottfriedThe gravel-voiced comedian, whose credits ranged from the family-friendly “Aladdin” to the unfettered vulgarity of “The Aristocrats,” died on April 12.Obituary: Gilbert Gottfried’s manic, loudmouthed stand-up routines mixed old-fashioned borscht-belt shtick with cringeworthy vulgarity.An Appraisal: The comedian could bring opportune lightning bolts to anything from dopey TV fare to school fund-raisers.The Dirtiest Joke Ever Told: A Times columnist recalled Mr. Gottfried’s notorious 2001 performance of “The Aristocrats” not long after 9/11.Offstage Life: The world knew the comedian for his abrasive style. But to his wife, Dara, he was a “gentle genius.”Gottfried’s perhaps most fabled minutes on the show occurred one late-’90s morning when he wasn’t even scheduled to appear. A German-accented woman called in from Los Angeles. She explained that she worked as a babysitter for the filmmaker Amy Heckerling, who had dispatched her to pick up Gottfried from the airport. (He was too cheap for a cab.) The woman furiously recounted how, during the car ride, she had informed the comedian that her parents were Holocaust survivors. Is it any surprise that Gottfried immediately began cracking Holocaust jokes? Such was his superpower.Stern got Gottfried on the line. The comic sounded as if he was still in bed — but, like a samurai who has been attacked in his sleep and leaps to battle, he gamely began peppering the poor woman with more Holocaust jokes. Eventually, horrifyingly, the comic invoked the child the caller was babysitting: “Can she sit on my lap while you tell her about the Holocaust?” he queried. Like his later “Aristocrats” recital, it is a brilliant double negative: Gottfried follows one ghastly subject with something even more distasteful. The world thus gets contorted into a joke, the punch lines batting away our deepest woes.A few years ago, I wrote about these Stern show segments for my comedy zine, The Lowbrow Reader. The essay grew from a chance encounter I had with Gottfried at the home of Professor Irwin Corey, the anarchic comedian and the other subject of the piece. Corey was deep into his 90s but, like Gottfried, emitted riotous humor in his every step. It struck me that Gottfried provided the rare connection to the fabled funny men of a much earlier era: unrestrained, uproarious and often Jewish comics who were set on gaining a laugh at the expense of all else.The Lowbrow Reader was moribund at this point — we had recently published a book anthology, neatly ending our little run. But I so yearned to write about Gottfried, Corey and Stern that I revamped the magazine and essentially assembled an issue around the essay. Most thrillingly, Gottfried consented to let us publish two of his wonderfully eccentric drawings, which brimmed with devilishly grinning ogres, Dracula, a tiny Hitler and penises.I was fully aware that nobody cared about my stupid comedy zine’s rebirth, but it was a huge deal for me. I nervously picked up the issue from the printer, then went downtown to sell some copies to a record store, only to find it closed for the night. I headed to an event lugging a backpack full of zines — never a suave look — then walked home, depressed at having unloaded precisely zero copies.It was late at night on a misty Memorial Day weekend, and the city had emptied out. At 13th and Sixth, I waited for the light to change, sharing the corner with the only other pedestrian in sight. I side-eyed the man to make sure that he was not preparing to stab me. Then, I did a double take. It was Gilbert Gottfried.He didn’t know me from Adam, but I hurriedly thrust a copy of the publication in his confused face. “Great,” he said. “I long for somebody to write a big article about me, and then when it happens it’s in … this.”We slowly walked up Sixth Avenue to our mutual Chelsea neighborhood. His famous stage bray was muted, replaced by the oddly calming cadence later familiar to listeners of “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,” his whipsmart showbiz series with Frank Santopadre. The roaring jokes and generous laughter remained. I like to think I can be funny enough when talking to my family and friends; walking with Gottfried, I felt like a weekend guitarist trying to jam with Hendrix.As we approached West 18th Street, a group of young women spotted the comedian and instinctively began laughing and, oddly, cheering. The comic gave a wave as he passed them. “Must be your article,” he said.Years later, my daughter enrolled in the same public elementary school as Gottfried’s two indisputably charming children, briefly overlapping with his youngest. Gottfried’s wife, Dara, was a P.T.A. hero — at her last meeting, she received a standing ovation — and she oversaw an annual comedy show to raise money for the school. Naturally, Gottfried would always perform.Although the show took place at a grown-up comedy club, the audience was essentially the crew from school: parents, some teachers, the principal. In a secular society, this can feel like one’s congregation. I had witnessed Gottfried’s club act. Surely, he would not be reciting his sex jokes for these gentle souls?Yet that would be like asking Pavarotti not to sing, or perhaps a dog not to bark. And so, Gottfried stood before his community, proudly screaming his fiercely idiosyncratic material. There were surrealist rants, crooked bits that gazed at the world in childlike wonder, and bizarre jokes that answered to their own logic. And, of course, there was riotously filthy, inconceivably revolting humor. It was all so irreverent it could break your heart. More