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      On ‘S.N.L.,’ Britney Spears Renders Judgment on Matt Gaetz

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      The episode, hosted by Daniel Kaluuya, featured Chloe Fineman as the pop singer and Pete Davidson as the scandalized congressman.It worked before, so “Saturday Night Live” did it again: this weekend’s broadcast opened with another installment of “Oops, You Did It Again,” a satirical talk show where Chloe Fineman, playing the pop singer Britney Spears, looks back on recent cultural and political controversies.Fineman explained that the show is where “we shine a light on the social pariahs of the week and I get to decide whether they’re innocent or not that innocent.” She threw in a special acknowledgment of the state of Georgia, which she said was “voted the best place not to vote.”As Spears, Fineman said that she herself had recently been called out over accusations that someone else writes her social media content for her. Reading from an old Instagram post where Spears wrote, “Who else finds the sea more mysterious than space?” Fineman asked, “Who do they think is writing my account? Jacques Cousteau?”The show’s first guest was the rapper Lil Nas X (Chris Redd), who has been defending himself after putting out a racy video for his single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” and limited-edition Nike sneakers called “Satan Shoes.”Asked about the criticism and a lawsuit from Nike that followed the release of the shoes, Redd said, “Their whole thing is just do it. Well, I did it.”As for the detractors of the music video — in which Lil Nas X is seen giving a lap dance to Satan — Redd described them as “closed-minded idiots.” He added, “People are afraid of me because I’m different but really I’m just your typical gay Black country rap sneaker entrepreneur.”The show’s next guest was the Looney Tunes cartoon character Pepé Le Pew, played by Kate McKinnon who was wearing a skunk costume and wielding a cigarette holder.McKinnon lamented the fact that the character had been cut from a coming “Space Jam” sequel and told Fineman, “I would kiss you all the way up your arm but I realize that’s no longer socially acceptable.”McKinnon, in her skunk outfit, explained that career options for Le Pew were limited.“I would love to be at a point in my career where I can turn down projects but there’s not a lot of parts for old French skunks,” she said. “Every audition comes down to me or Gérard Depardieu.”Fineman introduced her last guest — “As we’d say in the early 2000s a hot mess and as we’d say today, a full-on sex pest,” she said — Representative Matt Gaetz, played by Pete Davidson.“My name is Matt Gaetz, like Bill Gates but with a Z at the end,” Davidson said. “Like a cool version for teens.”Fineman recounted several recent scandals involving Gaetz, including a Justice Department inquiry into whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, and allegations that Gaetz showed nude photos and videos of women he’d had sex with to other lawmakers.“Which is not a crime,” Davidson said of that last account. “Just horrifying.”Fineman responded, “I think I can spot a teen predator when I see one. After all I was on ‘Mickey Mouse Club.’”Davidson said he was not that different from Pepé Le Pew, arguing, “I’m just a ladies’ man.”With some revulsion, McKinnon replied, “Dude, no. I am a cartoon skunk — you are a United States congressman. Be better, OK?”Opening Monologue of the WeekThis week’s host, Daniel Kaluuya, is a star of films like “Get Out” and he received an Academy Award nomination in March for his performance in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Still, he knew his natural speaking voice would come as a surprise to some viewers.As he told the “S.N.L.” audience in his opening monologue, “First of all, I know you’re hearing my accent and thinking, oh no, he’s not Black — he’s British. Let me reassure you that I am Black. I’m Black and I’m British. Basically, I’m what the Royal Family was worried the baby would look like.”He also revisited his victory at the Golden Globes ceremony in February, when the audio went missing from the acceptance speech that he delivered over Zoom. “I was muted, can you believe that?” Kaluuya said. “I told the best joke of my life and I was muted. I felt like I was in the Sunken Place.”Fake Game Show of the Week“S.N.L.” has a proud tradition of sketches centered on fake game shows and, more recently, on game shows with coronavirus themes.“Will You Take It?” is a fine entry in this growing subgenre: Kaluuya played its host, a fictional doctor trying to convince four members of his extended family (Redd, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson and Punkie Johnson) that they all need to get Covid vaccinations. He reminded Redd that he is a diabetic who has been shot in the lung, but Redd remained reluctant because, as he said, “I never get sick ’cause I sleep in my socks.”In a further exchange, Redd said he would receive a vaccine “when white people start taking it.” Told that white people have already been getting vaccinated, Redd replied, “Man, you can’t trust white people.”Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on Matt Gaetz and on President Biden’s infrastructure plan.Jost began:Representative Matt Gaetz, who looks like a caricature artist’s drawing of me, is reportedly under investigation for an alleged sexual relationship with an underage girl. Because Gaetz believes that only voters should have to show ID. It’s also being reported that Gaetz may have paid for sex with women he met online. That story has since been confirmed by his whole vibe. Gaetz then defended himself, releasing this very normal statement. See if any of it sounds suspicious to you: “Matt Gaetz has never paid for sex. Matt Gaetz has never, ever been on any such websites whatsoever. Matt Gaetz cherishes the relationships in his past and looks forward to marrying the love of his life.” Here’s my response statement: “Colin Jost does not believe you. Colin Jost thinks you have been to alllll the websites. Colin Jost thinks you should hold off on sending out those wedding invites.”Che continued:President Biden unveiled his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which some Democrats are calling the “New New Deal.” But I thought we weren’t allowed to make fun of his stutter. Biden plans to pay for his infrastructure plan by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which, yeah, sounds like a great idea but it leaves me with one big question: How do I hide my money? More

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      ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Season 1, Episode 3: Friends in Low Places

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      This week’s episode is so packed with action that an entire prison riot and jailbreak gets dispatched in under five minutes of screen time.‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Power Broker’Too often, TV series described by their creators as being “like a six-hour movie” have the kind of problems that actual six-hour movies might have. The pace can be unnecessarily slow, with characters spending a lot more time talking at length about what they’re going to do — or brooding over what they’ve already done — than taking action.So far, this hasn’t been the case with “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” which continues to rocket through its plot. This week’s “Power Broker,” for example, is so packed with incident that an entire prison riot and jailbreak gets dispatched in under five minutes of screen time. When Bucky gets back from meeting with the locked-up Baron Helmut Zemo, he says to Sam, “Can I walk you through a hypothetical?” and then proceeds to explain — quickly — how he sprung their old nemesis. There’s no time to dwell on the big brawl, because there’s so much more to do.From there, this episode’s credited writer Derek Kolstad (the creator of the “John Wick” franchise and the screenwriter of the current box office hit “Nobody”) and the director Kari Skogland speed through multiple action sequences, mostly taking place in the rogue city-state of Madripoor, where Zemo has contacts who might be able to fill in some background on the Flag Smashers’ supply of the super-soldier formula. The Sam/Bucky/Zemo trio fight their way out of a seedy neighborhood in Madripoor’s “low town,” rendezvous with the fugitive Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) in “high town,” and corner the mad scientist Dr. Wilfred Nagel (Olli Hasskivi) in one of those labyrinthine shipping docks common to action movies.Nearly any one of these big scenes in Madripoor — not to mention the opening jailbreak — could’ve anchored their own episode. So kudos to the show’s creative team for not dawdling, and instead trying to cram as much forward motion as possible into this hour. By the closing credits, our heroes (and Zemo) know all about Nagel’s involvement with creating a more “subtle, optimized” super-soldier serum, and they know more about how Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) has commandeered his doses for her Flag Smashers. There’s even a fun surprise at the end, when Wakanda’s Ayo (Florence Kasumba) confronts Bucky, demanding to see Zemo, who was responsible for the murder of her King T’Chaka. We’re zipping right along here, at the halfway point of the series.That said, there’s such a thing as moving so quickly that everything becomes a blur. While entertaining — and visually impressive, with their elaborate demimonde sets and backdrops — the Madripoor set pieces are sometimes lacking in the kind of careful setup necessary for dramatic tension. We find out a little about where the characters are and what they’re trying to do, but the plans aren’t laid out in enough detail to make it as nerve-racking as it should be when things go awry. Very quickly in Madripoor, the objective becomes more about surviving, as covers get blown and the gangs of anonymous toughs start attacking. It’s all very exciting, but not at the same level as the action in the previous weeks, where the stakes and the opponents were clearer.In the place of conversations about objectives and methods, the characters spend a lot of time this week talking about a few of the show’s major themes: namely, whether patriotism and heroism still matter, in a world where borders are blurry and it’s not easy to tell who’s “right” and who’s “wrong.”Sharon, who has been on the run and embracing the mercenary lifestyle since the events of “Captain America: Civil War,” is especially cynical about the importance of ideals and virtues, grumbling, “You know the whole hero thing is a joke, right?” Meanwhile, in Lithuania, one of Morgenthau’s close colleagues gets troubled when she blows up an occupied building at the end of one of their missions. Even Sam and Bucky have to wonder what they’re doing when they see that they’re fighting alongside Baron freakin’ Zemo — who is sporting his ominous purple mask, no less.Zemo baits Bucky throughout this episode, trying to see if some of the old Winter Soldier is still buried deep in his head — while also suggesting that Bucky was always somewhat “himself,” even when he was a brainwashed assassin. Like the Flag Smashers, Zemo sneers at heroic and nationalistic iconography, arguing that when people focus on symbols like Captain America’s shield, they forget that the men and women who wield them have flaws. Anyone could become the Winter Soldier — or a Flag Smasher — under the right pressure.Whatever this episode’s failings when it comes to the construction of thrilling and emotionally compelling fights and chases, at least Kolstad and Skogland take the time to include some of those thoughtful conversations and pertinent asides — like the part where Bucky and Sharon explain to Sam that most of the great paintings and statues in museums are replicas. Even as the story races ahead, it’s always worth taking a few moments to think about what makes an image meaningful … and whether fakes and replacements can move and inspire people, the same as the originals.The All-Winners SquadKolstad brings a little of that “John Wick”-style criminal mythology to his conception of Madripoor, a place so wild that Sam has to dress up as a stylish, platform shoes-wearing character named “the Smiling Tiger” — and consume a special cocktail containing snake innards — to fit in.The banter between Sam and Bucky keeps this show from becoming too heavy, but at times the joshing can feel a little forced. This week’s conversation about the deeper meaning of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man” soundtrack felt too much like an attempt to recreate “the modern man schools the man out of time” rapport between Sam and Steve. (Then again, given how conflicted Bucky feels about his place in the larger Captain America lore, maybe his unwillingness to play along and gush over Gaye was apt.)Speaking of Captain America — the John Walker version, anyway — he also bops around Germany this week, chasing some of the same leads as our heroes. In keeping with this episode’s themes, he alarms his sidekick Battlestar with his willingness to bend the law to aid their mission. Walker may consider himself the rightful heir to Steve’s legacy, but there are clearly some issues there, likely to be explored in this series’s second half. More

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      ‘Bridgerton’ Star Regé-Jean Page Will Not Appear in Season 2

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      The breakout star of the Shonda Rhimes Netflix series has delivered his final zinger as the rakish Duke of Hastings.Dearest readers, we have bad news.Simon Bassett, the character played by Regé-Jean Page, the breakout star of the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” will not return for the show’s second season, Netflix and Shondaland, Shonda Rhimes’s production company, announced on Friday.The news was delivered, appropriately enough, via a missive from Lady Whistledown, the show’s mysterious narrator — and sometimes instigator — of scandal.“Dearest Readers, while all eyes turn to Lord Anthony Bridgerton’s quest to find a Viscountess, we bid adieu to Regé-Jean Page, who so triumphantly played the Duke of Hastings,” a letter posted by the show’s Twitter account said. “We’ll miss Simon’s presence onscreen, but he will always be a part of the Bridgerton family.”For readers of the Julia Quinn romance novels upon which the series is based, the news will not come as a shock. (The Duke of Hastings’s story line largely concludes in the series’s first novel, “The Duke and I.”)But that did not mean fans were not still mourning his loss on Twitter on Friday.“What?!?? There’s no #Bridgerton without Rene-Jean Page,” one tweeted.When the show left Page’s character and his now-wife, Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), at the end of the first season, she had just given birth to the couple’s first child, a son. Daphne will return for the new season, Netflix said, which will focus on her oldest brother, Anthony, and his own quest for romance.“Daphne will remain a devoted wife and sister, helping her brother navigate the upcoming social season and what it has to offer — more intrigue and romance than my readers may be able to bear,” the letter from Lady Whistledown said.The eight-episode saga, the first original series for Netflix by Shonda Rhimes’s production company, was a hit with both fans and critics, and Netflix reported that 82 million households watched the series in its first month following a Christmas Day release. The show follows the drama of a courting season in 1813 London, with social machinations, scheming and scandal galore as high-society families contrive to pair off their young eligibles.In his review, The New York Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, called the British period drama “sexy, smart popcorn escapism” that believes that characters of color “should get to have just as much fun, have just as much agency and range of possibility — and be just as bad — as anyone else.”Page, who last week won the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding actor in a drama series, recently finished filming the Netflix spy thriller “The Gray Man.” Next up is a role in the film adaptation of “Dungeons & Dragons” for Hasbro/eOne and Paramount.Rhimes, an executive producer of “Bridgerton,” paid tribute to Page’s scene-stealing performance on Instagram on Friday.“Remember: the Duke is never gone,” she wrote. “He’s just waiting to be binge watched all over again.” More

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      Review: ‘Hemingway’ Is a Big Two-Hearted Reconsideration

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      Ken Burns’s latest documentary, premiering Monday on PBS, traces the complicated connections between the person, the persona and the storiesOne of the more unsettling moments in “Hemingway,” the latest documentary from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, finds Ernest Hemingway, big-game hunter, chronicler of violence and seeker of danger, doing one thing that terrified him: speaking on television.It is 1954, and the author, who survived airplane crashes (plural) earlier that year in Africa, had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He agreed to an interview with NBC on the condition that he receive the questions in advance and read his answers from cue cards.The rare video clip comes after we’ve spent nearly six hours seeing the author create an image of virile swagger and invent a style of clean, lucid prose. But here Hemingway, an always-anxious public speaker still recuperating from a cerebral injury, is halting and stiff. Asked what he is currently writing about — Africa — his answer includes the punctuation on the card: “the animals comma and the changes in Africa since I was there last period.”It’s hard to watch. But it is one of many angles from which the expansive, thoughtful “Hemingway” shows us the man in full, contrasting the person and the persona, the triumphs and vulnerabilities, to help us see an old story with new eyes.Burns, whose survey of American history is interspersed with biographies of figures like Jackie Robinson, Mark Twain and Frank Lloyd Wright, might have taken on Hemingway at any time over the past few decades. But there is an accidentally timely aspect to many of his timeless subjects. His “National Parks” in 2009, for instance, came in time to echo the Obama-era battles over the role of government.Now “Hemingway,” airing over three nights starting Monday on PBS, comes along as American culture is reconsidering many of its lionized men, from figures on statues to Woody Allen. And there are few authors as associated with masculinity — literary, toxic or otherwise — than the writer who loved it when you called him Papa.It’s tempting to say that Hemingway’s macho bluster doesn’t hold up well in the light of the 21st century, but it didn’t go unnoticed in the 20th either. He embraced manliness as a kind of celebrity performance. He fought with his strong-willed mother, who accused him of having “overdrawn” from the bank of her love. He married four times, finding his next wife before leaving the previous one, wanting each to give herself over to supporting him.He clashed spectacularly with his third wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn (played in voice-over by Meryl Streep), who matched him well, maybe too well to last. A free spirit who resisted marriage at first, saying “I’d rather sin respectably,” Gellhorn would not sideline her ambitions for his. (You might find yourself wishing you were watching her documentary.)The writer Martha Gellhorn was the third of Hemingway’s four wives.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumEventually he found a fourth wife, Mary Welsh, who wrote in her diary that he wanted his wives to be “completely obedient and sexually loose.” Hemingway wrote to his son about Gellhorn, “I made a very great mistake on her — or else she changed very much — I think probably both — but mostly the latter.” The journey that sentence takes is a short story in itself.But “Hemingway” also complicates the popular image of Hemingway as he-man woman-hater (or, at least, woman-dismisser) in his life and his work. Starting with his early childhood, when he mother enjoyed “twinning” him and his sister, dressing them identically as boys or as girls, the film argues that Hemingway had an “androgynous” mind-set that disposed him to inhabit male and female perspectives in his work. (He also, the film says, experimented with gender-switching role-play with his lovers.)“Hemingway” takes as a test case the story “Up in Michigan,” which ends with a date rape. It was controversial at the time; Gertrude Stein called it “inaccrochable,” like a painting unsuitable to be hung. But the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien unpacks how Hemingway’s raw, tactile prose centers the woman’s thoughts and sensations. “I would ask his detractors, female or male, just to read that story, and could you in all honor say this was a writer who didn’t understand women’s emotions and hated women?” she asks. “You couldn’t.”O’Brien is no one-sided Hemingway booster. (She dismisses “The Old Man and the Sea” as “schoolboy writing.”) But she is the M.V.P. of a group of literary commentators here that also includes Mario Vargas Llosa, Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, all of whom help “Hemingway” do the difficult work of describing an internal creative process from the outside.The series lays out how Hemingway stripped away excess from his language so that the reader would supply the emotion and thus feel it more deeply. He was inspired by Paul Cézanne, who would repaint the same view to find new ways of seeing it. He admired Bach for his mastery of repetition and used the device to rhythmic, incantatory effect in his prose.To the usual Burns toolbox of photo pans and archival film, “Hemingway” adds typewriter imagery — keys hammering on pages like irons in a smithy — and animations of manuscript editing.Its most powerful device, though, is the author’s own words. As sometimes happens with Burns’s celebrity voice casting, I found Jeff Daniels as Hemingway distracting at times for his recognizable voice. But Daniels (like Hemingway, a Midwesterner) gives the passages of fiction and memoir a velvet punch.You have to convey the power of the writing, after all, to show how literature is still shaped by Hemingway’s ideas of clarity, of mortality, of gender. “He changed all the furniture in the room,” Wolff says. “And we all have to sit in it.”This is true whether we sit easily or not. “Can you separate the art from the artist?” is a heated and dogmatic argument these days. You must sever the two, in a spirit of see-no-evil, to preserve the precious product; or you must handcuff them together, so that any judgment of a life becomes the judgment on the work, and the work a forensic rap sheet against its creator.Hemingway with his children, from left, Patrick, Jack and Gregory. His big-game hunting and fishing contributed to his image of virile swagger.John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum“Hemingway” doesn’t separate art and artist. Hemingway didn’t either. He created a public “avatar” that sometimes overshadowed his work (and threatened to make him a self-caricature) and wrote his life into his art (sometimes with cruelty toward friends and peers). But the documentary also recognizes that life and art don’t always correlate neatly or simply.The resulting biography is cleareyed about its subject but emotional about his legacy. It celebrates his gifts, catalogs his flaws (which included using racist language in his correspondence) and chronicles his decline with the tragic relentlessness its subject would give to the death of a bull in the ring.The biggest compliment I can pay “Hemingway” is that it made me pull my “Collected Short Stories” off the shelf after years, to read his piercing, full-feeling work in a new light. This life story is not entirely a pretty picture. But to quote its subject, “If it is all beautiful you can’t believe it. Things aren’t that way.” More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, HBO Max, Hulu and More in April

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our twice-weekly Watching newsletter here.)Ann Skelly in “The Nevers.”Keith Bernstein/HBONew to HBO Max‘Exterminate All the Brutes’Starts streaming: Apr. 7The filmmaker Raoul Peck, perhaps best-known for his Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” tackles his most ambitious project yet with the four-part cinematic essay “Exterminate All the Brutes,” based in part on Sven Lindqvist’s book of the same name about Europe’s domination of Africa and in part on the scholarly work of the historian and Indigenous rights activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Relying on a mix of clips from old movies and new dramatizations of historical incidents — all overlaid with the director’s discursive narration — Peck considers how pop culture and the literary canon have shaped the narratives around Indigenous people and their colonial invaders. Equal parts informative and provocative, this project is aimed at changing the way viewers think about who history’s heroes and villains are.‘The Nevers’Starts streaming: Apr. 11There’s a bit of steampunk and a lot of X-Men-like energy in “The Nevers,” a semi-comic action-adventure series created by Joss Whedon, the man behind “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly.” Whedon’s contributions have been downplayed by HBO’s promotional departments, in part because he left the production in the middle of its first season — and perhaps because of recent accusations of mental abuse from his past employees. Nevertheless, “The Nevers,” set in Victorian Britain, very much feels like one of his shows, with its alternately angsty and witty characters. Laura Donnelly plays Amalia True, a superhero who leads a team of strange and powerful women referred to by London aristocrats as “the touched.” As the ladies tackle supernatural phenomena, they also clash with an establishment that wants to keep them marginalized, because of what they can do and because of who they are.‘Mare of Easttown’Starts streaming: Apr. 18Kate Winslet plays a dogged small-town Pennsylvania police detective with a messy home life in “Mare of Easttown,” a crime drama created by Brad Ingelsby, a screenwriter of the films “Out of the Furnace” and “The Way Back.” As with Ingelsby’s movies, this mini-series uses a pulpy premise — a murder mystery — as an entry point to a complex and absorbing study of a place at once familiar and unique. The director Craig Zobel and a top-shelf cast (including Jean Smart as the heroine’s opinionated mother and Julianne Nicholson as her former high school basketball teammate) capture the limitations and comforts of a community where everyone knows each other’s painful secrets. The gray tones and the procedural plot resemble those of a grim European cop show, but the performances and dialogue exhibit a lot of vitality.Also arriving:Apr. 1“Made for Love”Apr. 13“Our Towns”Apr. 15“Infinity Train” Season 4Apr. 16“Mortal Kombat”Supposed Sasquatch footprints, as seen in “Sasquatch.”HuluNew to Hulu‘WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn’Starts streaming: Apr. 2Like many stories about cutting-edge business ideas, the saga of the real-estate-sharing company WeWork ultimately comes down to the disconnect between its bosses’ public ideals and the ugly practical realities of making money. Directed by Jed Rothstein, “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn” features a wealth of insider interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, all describing a start-up that began by touting a clever solution to the modern urban problem of overpriced office space but then tried to evolve into an entire unwieldy lifestyle brand. Rothstein’s film focuses mainly on the charismatic co-founder Adam Neumann, and how Neumann and his fellow execs were spending like billionaires while misrepresenting — even to their faithful employees — what was really happening.‘Sasquatch’Starts streaming: Apr. 20The journalist David Holthouse has spent much of his career investigating odd American subcultures, spending time with people whose lives have revolved around drugs, violence or the arcane. In the three-part docu-series “Sasquatch,” Holthouse heads into Northern California’s so-called Emerald Triangle — one of the most storied cannabis-growing regions of the world — to look into a legend he heard decades ago, about a trio of farmers who were dismembered by the infamous cryptid known as Bigfoot. The director Joshua Rofé follows Holthouse into the wild as he interviews locals who are enthusiastic about both marijuana and the paranormal. The stories they unearth are partly about eerie phenomena and partly about the very real dangers of a community teeming with crime.Also arriving:Apr. 3“Hysterical”Apr. 8“Glaad Media Awards”Apr. 9“The Standard”Apr. 12“Spontaneous”Apr. 15“Younger” Season 7Apr. 16“Fly Like a Girl”“Songbird”Apr. 21“Cruel Summer”Apr. 22“Greta Thunberg: A Year to Change the World”Apr. 25“Wild Mountain Thyme”Apr. 28“The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 4From left, Deborah Ayorinde, Melody Hurd, Shahadi Wright and Ashley Thomas in “Them.”Amazon StudiosNew to Amazon‘Them’Starts streaming: Apr. 9The first season of the new horror anthology series “Them” has the subtitle “Covenant,” referring to the rules for residents of a middle-class suburban subdivision in the early 1950s. Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas play a married couple with two young daughters, who move from North Carolina to an all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles looking for their piece of the American dream. They meet open hostility from their new neighbors (including the local housewives’ cruel ringleader, played by Alison Pill), while also being haunted by strange supernatural forces. Created by Little Marvin and produced by Lena Waithe, “Them” uses the discomfiting facts of racial discrimination to unsettle the audience, even before the nonhuman monsters arrive.Also arriving:Apr. 2“Moment of Truth”Apr. 16“Frank of Ireland”Apr. 30“Without Remorse”Justin Theroux and Melissa George in “The Mosquito Coast.”Apple TV+.New to Apple TV+‘The Mosquito Coast’Starts streaming: Apr. 30Justin Theroux is both a producer and the star of the mini-series “The Mosquito Coast,” an adaptation of an acclaimed 1981 novel by his uncle Paul Theroux. The show’s co-writers Neil Cross and Tom Bissell, with the director Rupert Wyatt, have updated the story to the 21st century, but its still about the idealistic and eccentric inventor Allie Fox, who hates modern technology as much as he detests American materialism. Chasing his dreams — and dodging the federal authorities — Allie packs his family onto a rickety boat and floats them down to Latin America, where he plans to live off the land. The TV version deviates sometimes significantly from the book, but its heart is the same: a rich portrait of a brilliant madman, and of the people he’s dragged into his delusions.Also arriving:Apr. 2“Doug Unplugs” More

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      They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look, So You Can, Too

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      Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series.Of Ernest Hemingway, Ken Burns, left, said, “This is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated.” Lynn Novick said the moment for the series was apt: “We are living in times when we are re-evaluating all these icons from our past.”Kelly Burgess for The New York Times, Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesCould there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?Though his influence on generations of writers is inescapable, he has come to be seen as an avatar of toxic masculinity, the chest-thumping papa of American letters, sacrificing all to the work, headstrong and volatile, serially discarding one wife for another.And yet this contradiction is what made him interesting to the documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who have worked together on in-depth series such as “The Vietnam War” and “Baseball.”That Hemingway is a writer who has contributed so much to the form but who is also full of complexities — or, to borrow another electric word from our current moment, that he is “problematic” — only seems to have made him more of a draw.Burns’s and Novick’s new three-part series on Hemingway, which begins airing Monday on PBS, approaches the man and the writer without trying to tidy any of it up. The alcoholism; the womanizing; the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism and racism; the many, many shot lions and elephants — it’s all there. But there is also reverence for his literary gifts, a desire to remind us of them and even introduce new dimensions, such as Hemingway’s apparent interest in gender fluidity.Ernest Hemingway, pictured here in 1945, is the subject of a new documentary series on PBS.Art Shay / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of PhotographyIn a video interview from their homes last month, Burns and Novick seemed to revel in the challenge of reviving Hemingway and allowing his “mysteries,” as Burns put it, to coexist alongside the enduring myth of the man. They also discussed his relationships with women, what parts of him they see in themselves and the Hemingway book they always come back to. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why Hemingway now?KEN BURNS Well, you know, we don’t have a “now.” We were talking about Hemingway as early as the early ’80s. I found a scrap of paper from after we decided to do the Civil War that said, “Do Hemingway, Baseball,” and then it showed up on lists through the end of the aughts and into the teens. We didn’t know it was going to take six years to do. We don’t anticipate the timing of it. We just know that every project we work on will resonate in the present, because human nature doesn’t change.But you had to be aware that perhaps Hemingway wasn’t the sort of historical figure with whom a 2021 public would be eager to spend time.LYNN NOVICK We’re aware of the fact that he’s a controversial figure. And that there are people who are so put off by his public persona that they haven’t read his work or don’t want to read his work. But we are living in times when we are re-evaluating all these icons from our past. And there’s no better way to do that than looking at Ernest Hemingway. Some of it is very ugly, and very difficult. And if you’re a woman or a person of color, or you’re Jewish, or you’re Native American, there are going to be things in Hemingway that are going to be really, really tough. But he is so important as a literary figure and in terms of his influence that to ignore him seems to just avoid the problem.What remains most refreshing about his work was this ability he had to trust the reader so completely.BURNS It’s a beautiful thing. And the thing I go back to often is that this is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated. Joyce and Faulkner, they’re really super complicated. And he dared to impersonate simplicity. What he understood is that you could use these seemingly simple sentences, and they would be as pregnant as any long Joycean paragraph or Faulknerian sentence that goes on and on. So much was below the surface. And it requires you to go searching for meaning. It isn’t just how to order a French meal or fire a machine gun, it’s also about life and death and these fundamental human questions. And he’s saying, I’m not going to walk you through this. It’s mesmerizing to me, when it works. There’s nothing better.Behind-the-scenes filming of Hemingway’s manuscripts and typewriters at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.Jonah VelascoThe most surprising thing for me was the thread of gender fluidity that runs through the series and seems to upend everything we’ve come to think about Hemingway — the fact that he was willing to experiment with his sexuality and take on what he thought of as a female role.NOVICK I think the world first got a hint of this when the family published “Garden of Eden” posthumously in the 1980s. But I don’t think we fully appreciated what this said about him. Even when that was published. Now we have the framework to talk about it that we didn’t have as a culture then. There’s a reason he never published “Garden of Eden.” It’s a dangerous topic for him to go into. Even in an unpublished manuscript, even in his private life, given who he is. And then there were the huge problems he had with his son who was also interested in the same things. It caused an irreconcilable conflict between them, which is so sad.BURNS It’s pretty interesting that he is pursuing this all the way through and, and not blindly, that is to say, I think there’s a consciousness to it. It’s in him asking all his wives to cut their hair short, in his sympathy for female characters in stories like “Up in Michigan” and “Hills Like White Elephants.” I don’t think it’s like, Oh, I can’t let this out of the bag. I think he’s moving toward it. And he’s exploring it all the time.The wives also punctuate the entire series, becoming a big part of the structure as he moves from Hadley Richardson to Pauline Pfeiffer to Martha Gellhorn to Mary Welsh. It’s clear that he always needs a woman in his life as both an anchor and a foil.BURNS You got to have her and you got to leave her or you got to be bad to her. Edna O’Brien [an Irish writer who appears in “Hemingway”] says in the opening: I love that he fell in love. But she also knows that he has to escape all of that, too, in order to provide himself new material.NOVICK You do feel that somehow there’s some kind of arrested development or something where he’s just sort of stuck in this place of needing to have this great romance. And then when ordinary life or tensions or problems come up, he’s out of there. To me, the most fascinating is the relationship with Martha Gellhorn because she can hold her own with him. It’s so exciting when they get together, even though he’s cheating on Pauline. But there’s something really interesting about their professional connections. And then he can’t deal with it.Lynn Novick, left, with Edna O’Brien, a writer who appears in “Hemingway.”Meghan HorvathIf Hemingway is one of our great archetypes of the artist, is there anything you recognized of yourself in him?BURNS Only one thing. I think that we have, and have always had, a really strong work ethic and a discipline. And not being satisfied until it’s really done. And we’re not afraid to take a scene that is already working and dismantle it because we learn new information. Our scripts are just filled with that same sort of crossing out and emendations that Hemingway did.NOVICK Hemingway has you in the palm of his hand from the very first word. And you know, I feel personally I should be so lucky to ever be able to do that. So we are storytellers, and the obsession and reworking that Ken is talking about is in the service of trying to tell a good story. And that’s an example that he left for us when he’s at his best, with all his flaws.So have you emerged from this process with a favorite Hemingway work?NOVICK It’s the same work that was my favorite when we started, which is surprising because I read or reread almost everything. I started with “A Farewell to Arms,” and I ended with it. I love the short stories, but I really love diving into a great novel. And that, that is one of the all-time great novels for me. It’s pure poetry from the very first words. It’s not the classic Hemingway minimalist take. It’s a big epic story, and it gives you everything you need to know. And even though I know how it’s going to end, obviously, I love to reread it because I see different things every time I go through it. It’s beautiful. It’s devastating. It’s epic. And it’s timeless for me.BURNS What she said. I champion the short stories, and I can list the 10 that really float my boat, like “Snows of Kilimanjaro” and the two parts of “Big Two-Hearted River.” But if it’s a favorite novel, then it has to be “A Farewell to Arms.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in April

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      Our streaming picks for April, including ‘Concrete Cowboy,’ ‘Made for Love’ and ‘Them’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for April.New to NetflixAPRIL 1‘Worn Stories’ Season 1Based on the Times columnist Emily Spivack’s book of the same name, the docu-series “Worn Stories” features short vignettes about what people wear and why. The show’s crew has assembled slice-of-life footage and thoughtful comments from a wide variety of people, who talk about how clothing — or the lack thereof, in the case of one segment about nudism — connects them to history, to their families, and to the communities they love. “Worn Stories” is comforting TV, designed to leave viewers feeling more optimistic about humanity.APRIL 2‘Concrete Cowboy’The “Stranger Things” actor Caleb McLaughlin plays a troubled teen named Cole in this coming-of-age drama, set in a Philadelphia neighborhood where the predominately Black residents defy the local authorities by maintaining a stable of horses. Idris Elba plays Cole’s father Harp, who tries to steer him away from the local drug trade by teaching him to cherish the responsibility of caring for a large animal. Based on a Greg Neri novel, “Concrete Cowboy” is an earnest and often lyrical look at an unusual urban subculture.‘The Serpent’In the mid-1970s, the con man Charles Sobhraj embarked on a crime spree across eastern Asia, at first swindling and then murdering a succession of tourists, with the help of a handful of loyal followers. Tahar Rahim plays Sobhraj in the British crime drama “The Serpent.” The show features a timeline-hopping structure, meant to compare and contrast the killer’s rampage with the work of the Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle), who investigated the deaths of a young couple from his country. This eight-part mini-series is both a character sketch and a portrait of a wild and sometimes dangerous decade.‘Shadow and Bone’NetflixAPRIL 23‘Shadow and Bone’ Season 1Fans of big, sweeping Netflix fantasy series — like “The Witcher” and “The Umbrella Academy” — are the ideal audience for “Shadow and Bone.” This adaptation of Leigh Bardugo’s popular series of supernatural adventure novels is set in a world where unstoppable giant monsters terrorize a society governed by a rigid military and unscrupulous outlaws. Jessie Mei Li plays Alina Starkov, an ordinary soldier who surprises her comrades by exhibiting extraordinary superpowers — perhaps strong enough to change their lives. APRIL 29‘Yasuke’ Season 1In this animated action-adventure series, LaKeith Stanfield voices the title character, very loosely based on the historical records of an African-born samurai who fought in 16th century Japan. Created by the writer/producer LaSean Thomas (who previously worked on “Black Dynamite” and “Cannon Busters”), “Yasuke” follows this masterless swordsman as he reluctantly agrees to escort a superpowered girl on a dangerous quest. The story jumps back in forth in time, showing how Yasuke fights for his own nobility after a lifetime of bad breaks.Also arriving: “Prank Encounters” Season 2 (April 1), “Just Say Yes” (April 2), “Madame Claude” (April 2), “Family Reunion” Season 3 (April 5), “Snabba Cash” Season 1 (April 7), “This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist” (April 7), “The Wedding Coach” Season 1 (April 7), “The Way of the Househusband” Season 1 (April 8), “Night in Paradise” (April 9), “Thunder Force” (April 9), “My Love: Six Stories of True Love” (April 13), “Dad Stop Embarrassing Me!” (April 14), “Law School” (April 14), “Love and Monsters” (April 14), “The Soul” (April 14), “Arlo the Alligator Boy” (April 16), “Fast & Furious: Spy Racers” Season 4 (April 16), “Into the Beat” (April 16), “Ride or Die” (April 16), “Zero” Season 1 (April 21), “Stowaway” (April 22), “Fatima” (April 27), “Sexify” (April 28), “And Tomorrow the Entire World” (April 30), “The Innocent” (April 30), “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” (April 30), “Things Heard and Seen” (April 30).New to Stan‘Made for Love’StanAPRIL 1‘Made for Love’ Season 1The terrific comic actress Cristin Milioti takes the lead in this offbeat science-fiction dramedy, based on an Alissa Nutting novel. Milioti plays Hazel, who gets fed up with her controlling tech billionaire husband Byron (Billy Magnussen) and flees to the middle of nowhere to spend time with her relatively low-maintenance dad (Ray Romano). Unfortunately, Hazel soon finds she can’t flee modernity — not with her father’s synthetic girlfriend taking up space around the house, and not with Byron’s cutting-edge surveillance equipment tracking her every move and mood.APRIL 8‘No Activity’ Season 4The American version of the Australian series “No Activity” features a new approach for its fourth season, necessitated by the pandemic. The show is still mostly about lawmen dealing with the tedium of waiting for something to happen while investigating cases, but the format has now switched from live action to animation — which also allows for an all-star team of guest stars, including Kevin Bacon, Elle Fanning, Will Forte and D’Arcy Carden. Patrick Brammall (who cocreated the original show with the writer-director Trent O’Donnell) returns as a cop who dreams of tackling major crimes but who keeps getting assigned much duller duties.APRIL 16‘Younger’ Season 7The seventh season is the last for this beloved sitcom, created by the “Sex and the City” producer Darren Star. “Younger” started out as a shrewd and cynical take on the modern New York publishing business, with Sutton Foster playing a middle-aged divorcee pretending to be a hip 20-something in order to get a job. But over the course of its run, the series has dealt with more than just the generation gap, as Star and his team have explored the fragile state of modern media. Throughout, the heroine’s big lie has remained the main hook, and the foundation for the cliffhanger setting up this final run.‘Everything’s Gonna Be Okay’StanAPRIL 19‘Everything’s Gonna Be Okay’ Season 2One of 2020s most entertaining and emotionally engaging new comedies returns for a second season. Josh Thomas plays Nicholas, a formerly carefree Australian now saddled with the guardianship of his two American half sisters: the high-functioning autistic savant Matilda (Kayla Cromer) and the social misfit Genevieve (Maeve Press). While the show is mostly about the girls — both lovable characters, wonderfully played — it’s also about how Nicholas struggles with whether he should be more of a “dad” to these emotionally fragile teens, as they navigate upper middle-class Los Angeles.APRIL 20‘Godfather of Harlem’ Season 2The first season of this period crime drama introduced Bumpy Johnson (Forest Whitaker), an aging crime boss trying to reestablish his dominance in early 1960s New York after a decade in prison. The initial ten episodes covered the rapid changes in politics and pop culture, in an era when African-Americans were wielding power more publicly — even in the drug trade. Season two will add even more real-life (and fictional) gangsters, activists and celebrities, and should further the show’s reputation as one of TV’s best-acted and most ambitious crime dramas.APRIL 23‘Rutherford Falls’ Season 1The latest project for the writer-producer Michael Schur — one of the creators who brought “Parks and Recreation” and “The Good Place” to the small screen — is a sitcom about the complex and sometimes combative relationship between the residents of a Native American reservation and a nearby community in upstate New York. Ed Helms (another of the show’s creators) stars as the descendant of a local historical figure. The “Rutherford Falls” head writer Sierra Teller Ornelas leads a staff that is primarily made up of Indigenous people, lending authenticity — as well as some wryly self-aware humor — to these stories of small town life.APRIL 24‘Jimmy Barnes: Working Class Boy’Based on Jimmy Barnes’ frank memoir, this documentary tells the story of how the Scottish-born singer-songwriter overcame a rough childhood to become one of the most popular musicians in Australia. The film isn’t a comprehensive look at Barnes or his band Cold Chisel. Instead the director Mark Joffe lets his subject talk at length about his formative years, while cutting occasionally to some new performance footage in an intimate setting, in which Barnes strips his music — and his life — down to its soulful core.‘The Dressmaker’StanAPRIL 25‘The Dressmaker’Kate Winslet won Best Actress at the AACTA Awards — and her co-stars Judy Davis and Hugo Weaving won Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor — for this darkly comic melodrama, about a talented tailor who returns to her inhospitable hometown with vengeance on her mind. Winslet plays the title character, who was driven away by her neighbors as a little girl because of a crime she’s pretty sure she didn’t commit. Directed and co-written by Jocelyn Moorhouse (adapting a Rosalie Ham novel), “The Dressmaker” is stylish, dynamic and shockingly — and wonderfully — dark in places. Also arriving: “Cheat” Season 1 (April 1), “Dinner with Friends” (April 1), “I Used to Go Here” (April 1), “Jiu Jitsu” (April 1), “Recoil” (April 1), “Tyson” (April 1), “The Capture” Season 1 (April 2), “The Moodys” Season 2 (April 2), “Pitch Perfect” (April 7), “Pitch Perfect 2” (April 7), “Home Economics” Season 1 (April 14), “Grow” (April 8), “Reservoir Dogs” (April 10), “Van Der Walk” Season 1 (April 16), “Confronting a Serial Killer” (April 18), “Baby Done” (April 20), “Gold Diggers” (April 22), “Anzacs” Season 1 (April 23).New to Amazon‘Them’AmazonAPRIL 9‘Them’ Season 1“The Chi” creator Lena Waithe is one of the producers of this socially conscious horror anthology, from the mind of the writer Little Marvin. In season one — subtitled “Covenant” — Deborah Ayorinde and Ashley Thomas play the Emorys, a pair of married Black parents from North Carolina who move to a white middle-class neighborhood in Los Angeles in the early 1950s. Alison Pill plays the block’s bigoted tastemaker, who persuades her girlfriends and their husbands to make the Emorys feel unwelcome. The story eventually takes a turn toward the supernatural, although it’s plenty terrifying when it’s just about discrimination.Also arriving: “Frank of Ireland” (April 16), “Without Remorse” (April 30). More

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      Review: In ‘Made for Love,’ She Can’t Get Him Out of Her Head

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      In this techno-satire, a woman tagged with a chip by her mogul husband tries to break the (block)chains of love.Cristin Milioti has claimed a curiously specific character niche: woman escaping from twisted sci-fi trap. In the “Black Mirror” episode “USS Callister,” she was programmed into a simulation by her creepy boss. In last year’s “Palm Springs,” she and Andy Samberg puzzled out how to break free of a time loop that stuck them in a vicious “Groundhog Day” rom-com cycle.In “Made for Love,” a light-handed and dark-minded comedy of technology, control and gaslighting whose first three episodes arrive Thursday on HBO Max, the snare is all in her head.As in physically. As in implanted. As in a microchip.Hazel Green (Milioti) received this unwanted hardware upgrade from her husband, Byron Gogol (Billy Magnussen), who runs a world-dominating tech company. (Feel free to play around with the first vowel sound in “Gogol.”) For 10 years, they’ve lived in a gilded cage — or rather a gilded cube, a virtual-reality environment called the Hub, secluded from the messy outside world, with eternally perfect weather and a dolphin sporting in the swimming pool.And for 10 years, Byron has grown more devoted. Too devoted. “Have your wife review her biometrically recorded orgasms to better optimize them” devoted. Finally, he decides that he loves her — and his technology — so deeply that he and she will become “Users One” of his new product, Made for Love, which makes couples into two-person neural networks, their brains digitally connected. No more secrets, no more miscommunication, no more private thoughts.Who the hell would want that? you might ask, a question “Made for Love” raises but doesn’t entirely answer. For the purposes of the story, what’s important is that Byron wants it and Hazel emphatically does not. This impels her to fly the cube, a madcap and violent escape with Byron watching from behind her eyeballs. (Turns out he implanted only her chip, not his: “I had to read your diary first to know if I could let you read mine.”)Based on the novel of the same name by Alissa Nutting, a writer and producer on the series, “Made for Love” plays out as a screwball action satire, which likely makes its chilling premise — patriarchy and techno-utopianism as two sides of the same chip — go down easier than it would as a straight drama. (Christina Lee of the mordant “Search Party” is the showrunner; other producers include Patrick Somerville of Netflix’s “Maniac,” with which this shares a skeevy-dystopian vibe.)The metaphors are never far under the surface here, like Byron and Hazel’s double-finger wedding bands, reminiscent of tiny handcuffs. And when Hazel seeks help from her widowed father, Herb (Ray Romano), she finds him having taken up a committed partnership with a sex doll — sorry, “synthetic partner” — named Diane. Their one-way relationship is an echo of what Byron is trying to make Hazel into, a wife machine, but it’s also oddly tender and respectful.“Made for Love” is hardly subtle, and its cautionary tech tale has been told repeatedly in “Black Mirror” and elsewhere. But it’s playful and funny and almost momentum-driven enough to get away with hand-waving away its many implausibilities. Among those is the question of why Hazel, presented as a wily, resourceful skeptic, would have been swept off her feet by Byron, who from their first meeting throws up enough red flags for a giant slalom course.The casting helps put this over. Milioti, with her charm and anime eyes, is an almost too-perfect rom-com-lead type. (She broke out on TV as the title figure in “How I Met Your Mother.”) But she smartly plays against that type in stories that subvert expectations. Her Hazel is cunning, feral and sardonic on the lam; in flashbacks to her married life in the Hub, you can almost hear her scream behind her 10,000-watt smile.Romano, meanwhile, may be one of the few actors you could introduce in bed with a humanoid sex toy, whom he dresses in his dead wife’s clothing, yet have your viewer think, “You know, this seems like a complicated guy who’s been through a few rough patches.”And Magnussen, given the broadest of the central roles, pushes Byron’s zealotry past tilt. Inept at most human relationships, Byron has funneled all his emotional capacity into Hazel, out of both passion and the gamifying impulse to get the all-time high score on his marriage. He’s the epitome of both the obsessive Wife Guy and the hubristic Tech Guy, and he makes plain the connection between the two types.He’s also pitiable, insofar as a billionaire with godlike powers can be. “I am the only person who actually loves you!” he pleads to Hazel. “Objectively!”But it’s Milioti who gives the season’s first half (I’ve seen four episodes of eight) its adrenaline. “Made for Love” is a loopy jolt to the cortex that demands a high tolerance for absurdity. What grounds it is Hazel’s journey from kept woman to action hero, determined not to be a character in somebody else’s love story. More