Television

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Jimmy Fallon: Ron Johnson Could Replace Ted Cruz as Most Hated Senator

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBest of Late NightJimmy Fallon: Ron Johnson Could Replace Ted Cruz as Most Hated SenatorThe “Tonight Show” host joked that the Wisconsin Republican could be more detested for at least the 10 hours that Senate clerks read the 628-page stimulus bill aloud, as Johnson demanded.“On the bright side, after he causes a 10-hour delay, Johnson will immediately get a job offer from Delta,” Jimmy Fallon joked.Credit…NBCMarch 5, 2021, 2:27 a.m. ETWelcome 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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.10 Hours, 628 PagesThe new stimulus bill was being held up in the Senate this week after Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, demanded clerks read all 628 pages out loud.“Yeah, this means for 10 hours, Ted Cruz wasn’t the most hated senator in Congress,” Jimmy Fallon joked on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”“To make it feel even longer, Johnson hired Gilbert Gottfried to do the reading.” — JIMMY FALLON“You really think that’s going to be a deterrent? We’ve all been in quarantine for a year. I’ve done things that are a lot less exciting than listening to a bill get read aloud for 10 hours.” — SETH MEYERS“That takes guts. Reminds me of the classic film ‘Mr. Smith Forces Senate Clerks to Go to Washington.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Perhaps it’s just Ron Johnson’s way of telling us he can’t read. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Senator. We’re sending LeVar Burton.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The 600-page bill will be read aloud in the Senate for 10 hours. This is the political equivalent of making someone come to your improv show.” — JAMES CORDEN“I’m going to wait until it’s adapted on Netflix. I’ll watch it then, you know?” — JAMES CORDEN“And to all the hungry kids out there, be patient. Ron Johnson is making a symbolic point. You can eat tomorrow or maybe next week — whatever.” — TREVOR NOAH“The only thing built up more than this bill is Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Not Again Edition)“Today, you know, was supposed to be a big one for the aluminum foil hat crowd.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Because the inauguration used to be on March 4, according to Q-spiracy theorists, today was the day the former POTUS would be restored to the presidency. That did not happen, but he was restored as customer of the month at the Palm Beach KFC/Taco Bell.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m starting to not trust my QAnon message boards.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“These conspiracy aficionados picked the date March 4 because it is the date on which presidents used to be inaugurated in the olden times, which is so random. March 4 is also the anniversary of the first People’s Choice Awards. And by the way, the people chose Joe Biden, so I don’t know. Just get off the Q and call your children — they’re worried about you.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Again? Come on, Q-bees. Remember what Einstein said: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Also, QAnon. Those people are [expletive] crazy.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, were these plans ever real? Who knows. But out of an abundance of caution, the House canceled today’s legislative session. It’s kind of like a domestic terrorism snow day in that they’re both dangerous and white.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingTrevor Noah shared a brief history of first ladies in a “Daily Show” recurring segment, “If You Don’t Know Now You Know.”Also, Check This OutAdam Scott in “Party Down,” which is being brought back for a six-episode limited series.Credit…StarzStarz is reviving its short-lived cult comedy hit “Party Down” for six new episodes.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Erica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesRisk Near YouVaccine RolloutNew Variants TrackerAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThose We’ve LostErica Faye Watson, Comedic ‘Hidden Gem of Chicago,’ Dies at 48Best known as a regular on a local morning talk show, she also wrote plays and acted in movies. She died of complications of Covid-19.Erica Watson  was a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning TV talk show in Chicago. She also did stand-up comedy and acted in movies.Credit…Patti K. GillMarch 4, 2021, 6:23 p.m. ETThis obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.When a candidate for state’s attorney in Cook County, Ill., held a lunchtime fund-raiser in downtown Chicago in 2016, the campaign hired a local comedian and television personality named Erica Faye Watson to warm up the crowd.Ms. Watson had never met the candidate, Kim Foxx, but that didn’t keep her from diving into an extended riff about Ms. Foxx’s hair. “I had never been publicly roasted before,” Ms. Foxx said in an interview. “I was like, who is this woman?”But the jokes were just a setup for Ms. Watson’s real point: what it would mean to have a Black woman as the county’s chief prosecutor, and how proud she would be to see Ms. Foxx in that role. The two became fast friends.“She was very much about empowering Black women,” said Ms. Foxx, who is now in her second term. “She was fighting not just for herself but for people like her.”Ms. Watson was a Chicagoland celebrity, best known as a regular on “Windy City Live,” a morning talk show on WLS-TV, Chicago’s ABC affiliate. She also performed stand-up comedy, wrote and directed plays and acted in movies.Ms. Watson died on Saturday in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She was 48. The cause was Covid-19, Patti Gill, her former agent, said.“Erica was a hidden gem of Chicago and a voice for overlooked businesses and causes,” said Ms. Gill, who cast her in “BlacKorea,” a short film she wrote, in 2017.Erica Faye Watson was born on Feb. 26, 1973, in Chicago, to Henry Watson, a postal worker, and Willie Mae Watson, a homemaker.Her survivors include her parents and her brother, Eric.Ms. Watson attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was a fixture on the school’s Black arts scene.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Roger Englander, Producer of ‘Young People’s Concerts,’ Dies at 94

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoger Englander, Producer of ‘Young People’s Concerts,’ Dies at 94He collaborated with the charismatic conductor Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic for 14 years of programs aimed at educating children about the joys of music.Roger Englander, foreground, in 1955. He was the production force behind Leonard Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts beginning in 1958. Credit…University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research CenterMarch 4, 2021, 5:56 p.m. ETRoger Englander, the Emmy Award-winning producer and director of the acclaimed Young People’s Concerts, which featured the magnetic Leonard Bernstein leading the New York Philharmonic, died on Feb. 8 at a hospital in Newport, R.I. He was 94.The cause appeared to be pneumonia, said Michael Dupré, his companion and only survivor.Mr. Englander was a staff director at CBS in 1958 when he and Mr. Bernstein began collaborating on the Young People’s Concerts, embracing the mission to educate children about the joys of music. Mr. Englander had years earlier helped stage operas by Gian Carlo Menotti.“Lenny totally trusted Roger,” said the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano, who was an assistant to Mr. Englander for the Young People’s Concerts. “If he weren’t comfortable with the director, it would have been impossible. But he didn’t have to worry.”He added, “Lenny adored him.”The concerts, initially mounted at Carnegie Hall and later at Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, have become a classic of educational programming and a powerful presence in the lives of many musicians, and musically minded people, even today.Mr. Bernstein was their undisputed star. He wrote his own scripts; talked to guest musicians like the pianist Andre Watts; played the piano to illustrate his commentary; and led the Philharmonic in classical, folk, jazz and pop music.But he left the TV production to Mr. Englander, who regarded the scores selected by Mr. Bernstein as his directing guide.“The choice of pictures — wide views, close-ups, tracking shots, rapid-fire montages or slow, languorous dissolves from one shot to another — is determined by the music itself,” he wrote in an essay for “Leonard Bernstein: The Television Years,” a 1985 exhibition at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York (now the Paley Center for Media). “The orchestra score becomes the shooting script, and the music holds all the answers for the director’s task of translating sound into picture.”Using shots from as many as eight cameras — two of them on the stage and one trained, from behind the orchestra, on the emotive Mr. Bernstein — Mr. Englander directed all 53 hourlong episodes of the concerts, which were staged and broadcast intermittently over the years through 1972.A reviewer for The New York Times wrote in 1964 that Mr. Englander had “again demonstrated that although confined to the limits of the concert stage, he is extremely adept at mobile camerawork, which always keeps the viewer interested.”His work on the concerts brought him an Emmy in 1965.Mr. Englander, left, with the conductor Andre Kostelanetz at Avery Fisher Hall, which was formerly Philharmonic Hall and is now David Geffen Hall, at Lincoln Center. Credit…Dan J. Coy/New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital ArchivesRoger Leslie Englander was born on Nov. 23, 1926, in Cleveland. His father, William, owned a men’s clothing store, where his mother, Frieda (Osteryoung) Englander, also worked.At Cleveland Heights High School, Roger studied piano, French horn and trumpet and achieved an early ambition — to be a conductor — by leading the school’s band and orchestra. He studied drama, composition and theory at the University of Chicago and graduated in 1945.He quickly became associated with opera. In 1946, he was the stage manager for the debut of Mr. Bernstein’s production of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Mass. He also worked briefly at the Chicago Opera Company for its conductor, Fausto Cleva.Over the next few years, he staged several of Mr. Menotti’s operas, including two, “The Telephone” and “The Medium,” in 1948, on WPTZ-TV in Philadelphia, an NBC affiliate. He distilled his knowledge of opera into a book, “Opera: What’s All the Screaming About?” (1983).Mr. Englander started at CBS in the early 1950s, working on news, sports and public affairs programs. He also directed episodes of the cultural program “Omnibus” about the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the Vienna Boys Choir and the French horn.In 1957, he had an idea for a musical series for children and pitched it to a CBS executive, but the interview did not seem to go well. A few days later, he learned that the executive “had actually been interviewing me for a totally different music series that his boss, William S. Paley, had cooked up with Leonard Bernstein,” Mr. Englander wrote in his essay for the 1985 Bernstein exhibition, referring to the chairman of CBS.Leonard Bernstein conducting a Young People’s Concert in 1958 with the New York Philharmonic. One of the eight cameras involved in the productions was always trained on him.Credit…CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesThe Young People’s Concerts debuted in January 1958 with a program called “What Does Music Mean?,” and the reviews were favorable. Without a commercial sponsor, though, Mr. Englander worried that the series would not last long.But when Newton N. Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, famously excoriated television as a “vast wasteland,” CBS saw an opening to demonstrate that not all its programming was drivel. It moved the concerts from Saturday afternoons to Sundays at 7:30 p.m. More people tuned in, and Shell Oil signed on as the first sponsor.During and after his tenure on the Young People’s Concerts, Mr. Englander worked on musical segments for NBC’s “Bell Telephone Hour” — which earned him a Peabody Award in 1959 — and the Emmy-nominated “Vladimir Horowitz: A Television Concert at Carnegie Hall” (1968), which CBS carried. He recalled how that virtuoso pianist had to be persuaded to give his first recital on television.“I think what finally broke down Horowitz’s resistance,” he told The Evening Sentinel of Carlisle, Pa., “was the question: ‘Don’t you wish there had been film in Franz Liszt’s time so you could see him play the piano?’”After his CBS years, Mr. Englander staged Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”), a theater piece conducted by Leon Fleisher, narrated by John Houseman and mimed by Bil Baird’s marionettes at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan; wrote an interactive CD-ROM musical guide to Mozart’s “The Magic Flute”; and produced a series of videotapes for Music Theatre International in which writers and composers of Broadway musicals described their production techniques.But Mr. Englander understood that the concert series with Mr. Bernstein was the acme of his career. He called them “53 of the best hours that music on television had ever seen — to this day.”Mr. Englander in 1990. He directed all 53 of the Young People’s Concerts and remained active in music productions in later years.Credit…Michael DupreOne of the young people who paid rapt attention to him was Jamie Bernstein, one of Mr. Bernstein’s three children. When she was 12, she recalled in a phone interview, she would observe Mr. Englander in the production truck outside Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall).“He was like a wizard, with the score marked up in front of him, calling the shots,” she said. “He’d say, ‘Ready, Camera 3’— the one on the French horn — and he’d snap his fingers and Camera 3 came up on the central monitor. It was exciting to watch.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Move Over, RuPaul! Meet the Drag Kings

      by

      Tenderoni outside of a barbershop in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Great ReadDrag Kings Are Ready to RuleThe blurring of gender boundaries has allowed for more freedom in online pageants — and soon, it’s hoped, back in the clubs.Tenderoni outside of a barbershop in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 4, 2021Updated 4:23 p.m. ETIt should not be a big hairy deal that a 32-year-old Chicago-based drag performer named Tenderoni will be vying in a virtual talent competition on Sunday, and yet it is truly a reason to wig out.The pageant is called Drag Queen of the Year 2021. But despite a penchant for lip-syncing to Missy Elliott, Tenderoni isn’t a drag queen. He’s a drag king, which, generally speaking means a performer born female, who takes the stage in men’s clothes. He is what was once called a “male impersonator,” penciled-on mustache, compressed chest and all.Tenderoni, his creator says, “is a mash-up of Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown, Prince, George Michael and Boy George.”It’s drag, it’s cosplay and, he hopes, it’s enough to win.While androgynous costume in this direction is hardly new — Marlene Dietrich famously set libidos afire in top hat and tuxedo in the 1930 movie classic “Morocco” — drag kings tend to be the lesser-exposed and underappreciated segment of drag. Casual fans who get their drag from TV or with a side of waffles at brunch, in fact, may never even have heard of this particular practice.“In the past, many of our audience members didn’t understand the concept of drag kings,” said Chad Kampe, a producer who has been staging popular drag brunches in Minneapolis since 2012. “We often got questions.”Chief among them: “What the heck is a drag king?”But now that drag has gone mainstream — the Season 13 premiere of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on VH1 on Jan. 1 drew 1.3 million viewers, its highest-rated episode ever — performers who exaggerate and explore the tropes of manhood are getting a closer look.Although a king has not yet been featured on “Drag Race” (a trans man named Gottmik who performs in female drag has), drag kings at last are getting more exposure elsewhere, and surprisingly, the pandemic may have helped.The closing of bars and restaurants has hit most performers’ pocketbooks very hard, but the mandated move to online entertainment may have helped level the playing field.“Covid made everyone have to go digital,” said Tenderoni, who developed his act at Berlin, a club in Chicago. “That has made the audience for all kinds of drag so much bigger. I’ve done shows and heard, ‘I’m from Brazil,’ ‘I’m from London.’ It has opened the floodgates.”‘A Seat at the Table’The Drag Queen of the Year pageant takes such diversity as its mandate.“We’ve worked with trans men and trans women and drag kings and all these different kinds of performers our whole lives,” said Alaska 5000, 35, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars” winner who founded the competition with a fellow drag queen, Lola LaCroix, in 2019.Why, they wondered one sleepless night flying home from a gig, shouldn’t such performers all compete against and celebrate each other? “Everyone has something to prove, and everyone brings so much,” Alaska 5000 said. “What they do isn’t just valid, it’s fierce.”To that end, Tenderoni will go up against seven other disparate drag artists — some bearded, burly and burlesque; some Jessica Rabbit curvaceous; some known for their lingerie-clad muscles — for the Drag Queen of the Year crown in a show to be seen on the Sessions Live platform.Whether he wins or not, it doesn’t really matter. “This gives us a seat at the table,” said Tenderoni, who started performing in drag less than five years ago. “Drag is a buffet. I don’t need to be the main course — I just want to be included.”By appearing that night, he will earn a spot in a brotherhood of drag kings that, under various names, has been around for centuries.Male mimics Vesta Tilley and Hetty King were widely celebrated on British music hall stages of the 19th century. Stormé DeLarverie, a Stonewall activist who preferred the term “male impersonator” to “drag king,” passed for a man while touring America with the Jewel Box Revue in the ’50s and ’60s.In the ’80s, the comedian and actress Lily Tomlin played Tommy Velour, a Las Vegas lounge lizard with more chest hair than talent. He lives on, in all his hirsute glory, on YouTube.In a June 2000 episode of “Sex and the City” titled “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…,” prim Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) is photographed in a mustache and a man’s suit, and her portrait is featured in a gallery show. The show used real drag kings, but only as background players.More recently, “Vida,” a Starz show about two Mexican-American sisters, featured the drag king Vico Suave, the creation of Vico Ortiz, a nonbinary actor. Tanya Saracho, the show’s creator, said she wanted to include drag kings in the cast because they’re an “underrepresented initiative” in queer entertainment. “The artistry is there,” she said, asking, “Why are they not part of the mainstream wave that’s happening right now with drag?”Twenty-five years ago, fans had to venture far beyond their living rooms to underground clubs late at night to see drag kings perform. In New York back then, that meant a watering hole like Flamingo East on Second Avenue, in an East Village much rougher than it is today.Murray Hill with barber Jack Khaimchayev, right at Model Barber in Brooklyn, N.Y.Credit…Isak Tiner for The New York TimesGoing for the clean close shave.Credit…Isak Tiner for The New York Times“Those early days in the clubs were electric, uncharted and riveting,” said Murray Hill, 49, a New York comedian known as the “hardest-working middle-aged man in show business” since his emergence as a young drag king in 1995. His earliest drag performance was as a “fat sweaty Elvis,” to use his words, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday at a party called Club Casanova at a venue called Cake on Avenue C. “It felt very underground,” he said.Mo B. Dick, 55, the drag king who ran Club Casanova before decamping for the West Coast in 2004, said that in that era, “it was more about drag king realness. You were passing as a male.” Kings were spirit-gumming their own hair clippings to their chins and chests in the name of entertainment. The illusion worked well enough, but such makeovers would be considered underwhelming today.Thanks to the special-effects-grade prosthetics and precision paint jobs seen on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag performers of every stripe have had to up their game. “Now when folks go to their local drag bar, they expect to see what they saw on television,” said Mr. Kampe, the Minneapolis producer, which encourages artists “to continually invest in new looks.”Mr. Dick thinks standards have gone up. “These kids today, I’m pleased at how extraordinary they are,” he said. “Now, there’s more artistry and more makeup. Being a king is more ‘draggy.’ The showmanship is phenomenal.” At a good brunch, he noted, “Performers now go through three or four costume changes during a one-hour show.”A 2018 all-drag-kings tribute to the boy bands Backstreet Boys and ’NSync, held at a venue in Minneapolis called the Union Rooftop, was so popular that Mr. Kampe said he had to do six shows to meet the demand.Mr. Dick recently created a website, dragkinghistory.com, to help new audiences learn about the art form’s past. On Feb. 21, he celebrated veteran drag kings with an international online event called “Drag King Legends.” The pay-what-you-can show featured stalwart performers like Fudgie Frottage of San Francisco, Flarington King of Toronto and Ken Vegas of Washington, D.C. All have been drag kings for 25 years or more.Shades of Elvis: Mo B. Dick at home by the pool.Credit…Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesMo B. Dick wipes down a dirt bike at home.Credit…Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesMr. Hill, who is perhaps the RuPaul of drag kings, headlined the night. In the coming months, he will appear in roles on three high-profile TV series: Amy Schumer’s “Love, Beth” on Hulu, Bridget Everett’s “Somebody Somewhere” on HBO, and the American reboot of the British sitcom “This Country,” on which he will play a magician. “A regular character on TV is something I’ve wanted since I started over 25 years ago,” he said.Paul Feig, the producer-director of “Bridesmaids,” “Freaks and Geeks” and “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” wrote in an email that “I’ve been a huge fan of Murray’s for a while. When Jenny Bicks and I sold ‘This Country’ to Fox, one of my first goals was to get him on it. I love talented people who have their own unique take on the world and will do whatever I can to get them opportunities to shine.”Most drag kings, though, are still fighting an uphill battle. “Kings are rising in popularity in many large American cities, but they aren’t provided with the same opportunities as queens,” Mr. Kampe said.Live shows often are booked by male promoters who may not appreciate drag king artistry. “Often, a show will feature a dozen queens and only one king,” Mr. Kampe said. “Drag kings face as much discrimination in the workplace as women, and they often earn less.”Another obstacle, as Mr. Dick noted, is that audiences “don’t necessarily see the comedy in a woman putting on a suit. Female masculinity is still scary to some people.” There’s less inherent theatricality and, up until now, less glitz to performing in male drag, too; plus, people are a lot more accustomed in everyday American life to seeing women in pants than men in skirts. “Doing a male character is so much harder than doing a female character,” Alaska 5000 said. “Men are just not as exciting to look at.”‘Reigning in the Darkness’But the most exciting drag kings are making do, spectacularly.Landon Cider, 39, a performer in Long Beach, Calif., for instance, was the first drag king to win an American reality competition when, in 2019, he took home the title of “America’s Next Drag Super Monster” on “Dragula,” a Netflix series that plays like a goth version of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Wearing horror-movie-grade makeup of his own design, Mr. Cider ate live spiders on one episode and dressed as a blood-splattered, axe-wielding tin man from Oz on another. He was the lone king to compete on the show, but he nailed it in all his gory glory.“We’ve been reigning in the darkness this entire time,” he said. “Now we have more light shining down on us. If audiences think they’re just getting a lesbian in their dad’s clothes, I take that as a challenge to show them.”An online pageant isn’t “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” But it’s not nothing.Wang Newton at The Norwood club in Manhattan.Credit…Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesMr. Newton combs his mustache.Credit…Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Seeing drag kings perform on these platforms and do well is another chip in the misogyny of the drag community,” said Hugo Grrrl, 29, a performer in New Zealand who in 2018 won a televised drag competition called “House of Drag.”Mr. Grrrl, who has gone from a self-described “mustachioed transvestite” to a trans man in the years since his win, said: “Audiences are learning that drag kinging is just as transformative and artistic and entertaining as drag queen art forms. They’re wearing just as much makeup, glitter and shapewear.”With names like Vigor Mortis, Spikey Van Dykey, Jack Rabid and Freddie Prinze Charming, the latest drag kings were being nurtured in out-of-the-way venues in cities around the world, ones not unlike those clubs of the ’90s. In New York, performance collectives like Brooklyn’s Switch ’N Play, led by the burlesque-inspired “sex symbol” K. James; Night Gowns, a series of events run by Sasha Velour, a “Drag Race” winner; and Cake Boys, out of Queens, have been fertile ground.Typically, younger performers blur whatever is left of gender lines. As Mr. Grrrl put it, “Right now, if you don’t have an ‘AFAB performer,’” — meaning a cisgender woman, trans man or nonbinary person dressed as a drag queen — “or a drag king in your lineup, you’re doing it wrong.” The future of drag, he said, “is going to be a big old mess and that’s a wonderful, glamorous, fantastic thing. We’re all finding new ways to spread joy through the power of sequins.”When Damien D’Luxe, a 34-year-old drag king in Minneapolis, takes the stage, he may mime a medley of “Hooked on a Feeling” and “Crocodile Rock” dressed as Captain Hook. But he does so wearing high-heeled boots and false eyelashes that Bianca Del Rio would kill for. He has been known to wear a powdered wig and floppy lace cuffs straight out of Falco’s 1986 MTV video for “Rock Me, Amadeus” while lip-syncing to “The Barber of Seville” in Italian.When you’re a drag king, it can take that much effort to get noticed.“More kings are recognizing that passing as a dude, although that takes a lot of work and dedication and talent, isn’t getting the spotlight,” Mr. Cider said. “The kingdom has evolved into vivid colors and costumes and headpieces and glitter because that’s how you stand out in a crowd.” Especially, he said, when you’re on a bill with a gag-worthy gaggle of 7-foot-tall drag queens.“We can’t compete in the Glamazon department,” said Wang Newton, 42, an Asian-American New York drag king who, in his act, tests the boundaries of political correctness while wrapped in vintage Vegas swagger. But that doesn’t mean drag kings can’t compete. “We’re not about death drops. We’re our own thing,” Mr. Newton said. “It’s a whole new bag and we can explore that now.”And an increasing number of performers are doing so.“I’m watching girls and performers of all genders who maybe five years ago would have gone into burlesque who now are seeing drag kinging as the ultimate art form,” Mr. Grrrl said. “It’s a very interesting space to be in. Masculinity is something that deserves to be made fun of.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Television

      Stephen Colbert: QAnon Supporters Suffer From ‘March Madness’

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBest of Late NightStephen Colbert: QAnon Supporters Suffer From ‘March Madness’Colbert poked fun at the group’s latest conspiracy theory that March 4 would be Donald Trump’s true Inauguration Day.“I see patterns where none exist,” Stephen Colbert said, imitating QAnon conspiracy theorists.Credit…CBSMarch 4, 2021, 2:04 a.m. ETWelcome 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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Clinically Insane’Security is being ramped up in Washington, D.C., as law enforcement officials fear more violence based on a QAnon conspiracy theory alleging that March 4 will be Inauguration Day for Donald Trump.“Now, I’m no psychologist, but you could say they’re suffering from ‘March Madness,’” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday night. “Also, they’re clinically insane.”“You see, Q followers were heartbroken on Inauguration Day, which was supposed to be the day that the ‘storm’ came that would keep their guy actually in office. So they’ve moved the date of the storm — when all the arrests and the celebrities and the Democrats happen — to March 4, which was the date of presidential inaugurations up until 1933. [Imitating QAnon follower] ‘Yes, follow me down the rabbit hole. They ended it in 1933, but add up one, nine, three, three. Add up one plus six, you get seven. What is seven? Three plus four — three, four, March 4th, when we shall march forth! [Whispers] I see patterns where none exist.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“How many more times are these people gonna prepare for a victory that doesn’t come? I don’t know who ‘Q’ is, but he’s definitely a Clippers fan.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Still, where there’s a will, there’s a way to cash in, because the former president’s hotel in Washington, D.C., has been jacking up prices around March 4. Sounds cynical, but they are offering premium services: If you’re exhausted from travel, you can just call the front desk and ask the concierge to hang Mike Pence.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Oh, man, what a grift. Honestly, I don’t even blame Trump. If I was him, I would milk the [expletive] out of this thing. I’d be charging my guests for things that they didn’t even buy: ‘Wait a minute — I never bought the Toblerone.’ [Imitating Trump] ‘I guess the Dems stole that, too. I feel your pain.’” — TREVOR NOAH“In a way, I understand — the deeper you fall into something, the less you want to admit you were duped, you know? Which makes you even more desperate to keep the fantasy going. I mean, that’s why I’m sure that the next Kanye album is gonna be great again. It has to be great.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Big Hats, No Masks Edition)“After Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced yesterday that he was lifting coronavirus restrictions, California Governor Gavin Newsom tweeted, ‘Absolutely reckless,’ but I don’t think it helped that he tweeted it from the French Laundry.” — SETH MEYERS“Businesses are now completely open and even the mask mandate has been lifted, to which most Texans replied, ’What mask mandate?’” — JAMES CORDEN“Corona’s not over yet. I mean, Texas is still getting over 7,000 new cases a day, but their governor got vaccinated and now he’s like, ‘Get those clubs back open — I’ma get lit. Aw yeah!’” — TREVOR NOAH“You know Governor DeSantis from Florida is like: ‘Oh. Oh snap. Oh, oh! You’re gonna try to out- Florida Florida?’”— JIMMY FALLON“Texans were like, ‘Fix our electrical grid!’ And the governor’s like, ‘OK, no masks it is.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Plus, I’ve got to be honest: I’m surprised politicians that are so pro-cowboy hat find masks uncomfortable. Maybe it’s my weak neck, but I’d rather wear 100 masks than one of those big old hats.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingSamantha Bee explored whether women can “have it all” during a pandemic.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightSacha Baron Cohen, the star of “Borat,” will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“I felt I was born with an absence of some sort, and I think that I’ve spent much of my life trying to fill that void,” said Derek DelGaudio, addressing a major theme in his new book.Credit…Calla Kessler for The New York TimesFans of the magician Derek DelGaudio’s theater show “In & Of Itself” should appreciate all the magic in his memoir, “Amoralman.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Jimmy Kimmel Skewers Andrew Cuomo Over Sexual Harassment Allegations

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBest of Late NightJimmy Kimmel Skewers Andrew Cuomo Over Sexual Harassment Allegations“In the span of one month, Andrew Cuomo has somehow done the impossible: He made Bill de Blasio the second-most-hated politician in New York,” Kimmel said.“And the craziest part is there’s a photo of it,” Jimmy Kimmel said of a woman’s allegation that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York made an unwanted advance at a wedding. “Very rarely does a wedding photographer capture anything interesting at all, but this one did.”Credit…ABCMarch 3, 2021, 2:16 a.m. ETWelcome 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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.The Opposite of ‘I Do’On Monday, a third woman accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York of sexual harassment, saying he made an unwanted advance on her at a wedding in 2019.“And the craziest part is there’s a photo of it,” Jimmy Kimmel said. “Very rarely does a wedding photographer capture anything interesting at all, but this one did.”“In the span of one month, Andrew Cuomo has somehow done the impossible: He made Bill de Blasio the second-most-hated politician in New York.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Sweet Jesus, man, what are you doing? I mean, on the one hand, asking a woman for consent before you kiss them is what you’re supposed to do. But the other part of consent is waiting for them to answer. You don’t just grab them by the face like a bear yanking on a beehive.” — TREVOR NOAH“And it’s not like this happened in 1992, and he could be like, ‘Well, it was a different time.’ This was in 2019. If you’re a public official doing this kind of thing after the #MeToo movement, either you just can’t help yourself, or you’re so dumb you shouldn’t be in office anyway.” — TREVOR NOAH“So now I want to know, was he doing this the whole night, you know? Are the bride and groom going to be looking at their wedding photos like, ‘Aw, honey! Here’s the picture of you smearing the cake on my face. Oh, and there’s the one of Governor Cuomo licking it off.’” — TREVOR NOAH“So in light of these allegations, Cuomo is now facing even more calls to resign. Although, if these allegations prove anything, it’s that Cuomo doesn’t go away when you want him to.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Horton Sees a Problem Edition)“Wow, OK, so what? We’re just going to cancel Dr. Seuss books just because they’re racist? Uh, then what are the racist kids going to read, huh? You didn’t think of that, did you?” — TREVOR NOAH, on Dr. Seuss Enterprises ceasing publication of six Dr. Seuss books because of offensive imagery“And I can understand why they’re pulling a small number of his books. ‘If I Ran the Zoo’ shows racist depictions of Asian characters, saying they’re ‘from countries no one can spell.’ So, ‘China,’ too difficult to spell, but ‘Solla Sollew’? Spelled like it sounds.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The real problem with Dr. Seuss is that all of his made-up words sound like they could be racial slurs. I mean, ‘a Zelf on the Shelf’? ‘The Nupboards in the cupboards’? [expletive], I don’t know what that means, but if a white person called me a Nupboard, we’re throwing down.” — TREVOR NOAH“But still, there may be room for compromise here. Like maybe instead of getting rid of the books completely, they can just update the imagery. For example, take that offensive drawing of the two African men, and put it in a Tucker Carlson thought bubble. That way we all understand, ‘Ah, this is racist.’” — TREVOR NOAH“And not only are they pulling some books out of print, they’re also tweaking some of the books that are in print to make them more inclusive. For instance, we now have ‘The Cat in the Problematic Headdress,’ ‘How the Grinch Appropriated Native American Culture,’ ‘Hop on Pop, With His Consent,’ ‘Horton Hears a They,’ ‘Horton Hears a Misogynist Joke and Reports It to H.R.,’ ‘There’s a Wocket in My Ethically Sourced Sustainable Pocket,’ ‘No Eggs or Ham’ — that’s a vegan thing, I guess — and ‘Yertle the Gender-Fluid Turtle, and Other Stories.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“There hadn’t been an earth-shattering outcry, but they recognized the impact that these images might have on readers, especially kids, and they’re trying to fix it, because Dr. Seuss books should be fun for all people: Black, white, straight, gay, Sneetches — both star-bellied and plain — Loraxes, Barbaloots, all the Whos down in Whoville, and the strange angry creature named Foo-Foo the Snoo.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And it’s especially important to be responsive like this, because Dr. Seuss has also so many books that are lovely and teach vital lessons that resonate to this day. ‘Horton Hears a Who’ is about listening to underrepresented voices. ‘The Butter Battle Book’ teaches tolerance. ‘The Lorax’ teaches environmental ethics. And ‘Hop on Pop’ warns against the dangers of pop-hopping. The next thing that pops might be his aorta.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAmber Ruffin, a writer on “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” couldn’t get over Texas’s latest troubles and the Free Britney movement in Tuesday night’s “Amber Says What.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightElizabeth Olsen from the Disney+ series “WandaVision” will sit down with Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutSue Lyon and James Mason in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 movie “Lolita.”Credit…MGMThe actress and screenwriter Emily Mortimer contemplated “Lolita” and its notorious ability to escape obscenity laws.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      Woody Allen, Mia Farrow and What Popular Culture Wants to Believe

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWoody Allen, Mia Farrow and What Popular Culture Wants to BelieveThe new HBO documentary revisits a 1990s scandal. What viewers take away from it may depend on the stories they trust about women and why.The family in happier days, with Woody Allen, third from left, and Mia Farrow, far right.Credit…HBOMarch 2, 2021Updated 4:45 p.m. ETThere are two stories. In one, a father molests his 7-year-old daughter. In the other, a mother coaches that daughter to falsely accuse the father. These stories, one proposed by Mia Farrow and her advocates, one by Woody Allen and his, clearly contradict each other. No sane person can accept both. Crucially, only one lets you feel mostly OK about watching “Annie Hall” again.I was a teenager in 1992 when this particular scandal broke, so I experienced them through the cracked prism of gender narratives absorbed from the movies and shows and stealthily read supermarket tabloids of the day: That a woman should be pretty but not too pretty, sexy but not too sexy, smart but not too smart, empowered but mostly in a way that means wearing boob-forward dresses and high heels — but for you! because you want to! — and doesn’t trespass on any actual power. A fun fact about high heels: They make it harder to run away. There were limitless ways, the culture informed me, that a woman could get it wrong — “it” being her body, her career, her accusations of abuse.I can still remember an article, probably from The National Enquirer, that pitted celebrity women against one another according to their knees. The only star with acceptable ones? The “Entertainment Tonight” host Mary Hart. Her knees are truly lovely, the article read.I thought about these narratives while watching — twice, in a “Clockwork Orange,” eyes-clamped-open kind of way — “Allen v. Farrow.” A four-part documentary by Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick and Amy Herdy, now on HBO, it centers on one of the more involuted scandals of the early ’90s, the breakdown of the relationship between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow and the accusations and counteraccusations and custody trial and appeals that followed. The couple met in 1979. They had a child together in 1987, Ronan Farrow (who changed his name from Satchel). In 1991, Allen formally adopted Mia Farrow’s two youngest children, Dylan, the daughter who has accused him of abuse, and Moses.Moses Farrow, Soon-Yi Previn, Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen in a scene from the documentary.Credit…HBOIn January 1992, Farrow discovered explicit Polaroids that Allen had taken of another of her daughters, her eldest, Soon-Yi Previn, then 21. That August, Dylan Farrow has said, she was abused when Allen was alone with her for perhaps 20 minutes during his visit to Mia Farrow’s home in Connecticut. Concerned by reports from babysitters and by statements that Dylan allegedly made, Farrow took the child to a pediatrician. The pediatrician reported the suspected abuse to law enforcement. Allen sued for custody. A criminal investigation began. The news media chronicled it all with the kind of fervid enthusiasm you mostly see in circus parades. (Allen has consistently denied the accusations.)Dick and Ziering’s previous work includes “The Invisible War,” an exposé of sexual assault in the military, and “The Hunting Ground,” which addressed assault on college campuses. Their last film, “On the Record,” explored allegations against the music producer Russell Simmons. (He has denied all accusations of nonconsensual sex.) So no, “Allen v. Farrow” isn’t exactly evenhanded. Then again, in cases of abuse allegations, is even-handedness exactly what we want?Allen and Soon-Yi Previn declined to participate in the series, recently arguing, via a spokesperson, that the filmmakers hadn’t given them enough notice. Not that Allen has made his own case particularly well. In a 1992 news conference he appears whiny, aggrieved. Later, in a “60 Minutes” interview, he says that he couldn’t possibly have abused his child in that moment, because it would have been “illogical.” Is this how most men approach predation? With careful pro-and-con lists? (Also, here’s the title of Allen’s 2015 movie about a murderous professor who sleeps with his young student? “Irrational Man.”)The documentary shows evidence supporting Allen, chiefly a report from the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital, which concluded that Dylan was either fantasizing or had been coached by her mother. On the other side is the testimony, in court and for the camera, of babysitters, family friends and Dylan herself. The judge in the custody trial ultimately labeled Allen’s behavior “grossly inappropriate.”Dylan, left, and Ronan Farrow with Woody Allen, who has called the documentary “shoddy.”Credit…HBOBut at the arrhythmic heart of the matter were these two stories. Until very recently, the public preferred the one that allowed Allen to keep making movies, movies in which comparatively powerless young women willingly enter into relationships with older, more powerful men.This past summer and fall, as my marriage was very quietly imploding, I spent what little free time I had jogging around the park near my Brooklyn apartment, trying, I guess, to figure out my own story, 3.3 miles at a time. While I ran, I listened to “You’re Wrong About,” an irreverent, stiletto-sharp podcast that often discusses maligned women of the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s — Anna Nicole Smith, Tonya Harding, Janet Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, half a dozen more.These stories run a big-haired gamut in terms of individual culpability, but in every case, popular culture found a way to blame the woman, often to excuse a more blameworthy man. Take, for example, Janet Jackson’s Nipplegate, a scandal that never touched Justin Timberlake. Or Monica Lewinsky, portrayed as a slut, as though that somehow negated the outrageous power imbalance in Bill Clinton’s relationship with her. This recalls another lesson I learned from ’80s and ’90s media: The only good victim is a perfect victim. That otherwise it was probably her fault.This particular narrative re-emerges in the recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears.” That film shows news media at the turn of the century panting to tell a story about a star acting inappropriately, a party girl wilding out when she should have been at home. “Britney: Out of Control,” read an Us Weekly cover. Whose control? Conveniently, the tabloid framing lays Spears’s spiral at her own bare feet. It avoids impugning the people with actual power, the magazine editors and the record company executives who shaped and policed and profited from her image..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Understand the Allegations Against Woody AllenNearly 30 years ago, Woody Allen was accused of sexually abusing Dylan Farrow, his adoptive daughter. A new docuseries re-examines the case.This timeline reviews the major events in the complicated history of the director, his children and the Farrow family.The documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering spoke about delving into this thorny family tale. Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter in 2014, posted by the New York Times opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof, recounting her story in detail.Our book critic reviewed Mr. Allen’s recent memoir, “Apropos of Nothing.”A.O. Scott, co-chief film critic, grappled with the accusations and his complicated feelings on the filmmaker in 2018. I asked Sarah Marshall, a journalist and a host of “You’re Wrong About,” why popular culture likes to portray women as complicit and deserving of contempt. “It justifies subjugating them,” she said. “If women are randomly taken down for possessing what we see as an alarming degree of power, even if it isn’t, then maybe they’ll be more fearful about how they wield it.”Mia Farrow — with her children Daisy, Fletcher, Soon-Yi and Lark Previn — cooperated extensively with the documentary makers.Credit…HBOHas popular culture finally moved on? In a recent telephone interview, Anne Helen Petersen, a celebrity gossip expert and the author of “Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman,” discussed sympathetic attitudes toward Allen, Michael Jackson and R. Kelly in the ’90s and 2000s. “I don’t think we were equipped to deal with stories of abuse at that moment,” she said. Now she sees “a larger shift in our apparatus of language to understand and condemn when it comes to abuse,” she said.We can perhaps trace that shift if we survey the celebrity scandals of the past year — involving Marilyn Manson, Shia LaBeouf and others. Then again, when it comes to gossip and censure, the scales for men and women remain differently weighted. Armie Hammer had to allegedly ask to literally eat women in order to provoke outrage. (He’s denied the accusations.) All Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion had to do was rap about female arousal. A few weeks after they released “WAP,” Megan Thee Stallion accused the rapper Tory Lanez of shooting her in July, a charge Lanez has denied. Some social media users then suggested that the shooting was somehow her fault.The “Allen v. Farrow” series, in part because it sides so unequivocally and uncritically with Mia Farrow, will convince some but not all. Still, no matter what did or didn’t happen in that Connecticut crawl space in 1992, and even though we know, or we should know, that child sexual abuse is frighteningly common and that false reports of abuse are rare, there was one story that our culture believed. Here’s how a now adult Dylan Farrow put it in a CBS interview from 2018: “What I don’t understand is how is this crazy story of me being brainwashed and coached more believable than what I’m saying about being sexually assaulted by my father?”How? Because that story reinforces norms of power and control. Because it supports an idea of women as conniving and untrustworthy. Because making women wrong — for their knees, for their autonomy — is what our culture loves to do. And if a woman like Mia Farrow — pretty, successful, comparatively wealthy — could be exposed as a villain, it becomes that much easier to delegitimize the rest of us, particularly women of color, who are more likely to experience sexual violence and less likely to report it.If you believe Allen, his story is a happy one, at least until #MeToo came along and complicated it. He marries Previn. He makes movie after movie. He even wins another Oscar. If you believe Dylan Farrow, you recognize she grew up knowing that her abuser went unpunished, that his career flourished. That’s a terrible ending. What attitudes would our culture have to sacrifice to imagine a better one?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 200 Shares159 Views

      in Television

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

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in MarchOur streaming picks for March, including ‘Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell,’ ‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ and ‘Coming 2 America’‘Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell’Credit…NetflixMarch 2, 2021, 12:05 a.m. ETEvery month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for March.New to NetflixMARCH 1‘Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell’, Director Emmett Malloy draws on a wealth of rare home videos and in-depth interviews in this revealing documentary, finding some fresh angles on rapper Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls and the Notorious B.I.G.). “Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell” devotes a lot of its running time to Wallace’s teenage years in Brooklyn, where he made money as a crack dealer while honing his musical style. Malloy doesn’t focus as much on Wallace’s tragic murder, except to frame his story as a case study in wasted potential.MARCH 3‘Moxie’Unlike the typical Netflix adaptation of a Young Adult novel, the movie “Moxie” isn’t so much about relationships and romance (though there’s plenty of both) as it is about high school girls standing up for themselves. Based on Jennifer Mathieu’s book, “Moxie” stars Amy Poehler (who also directed) as the divorced mother of Vivian (Hadley Robinson), who discovers her mom used to be a feminist punk rocker in the ’90s. Frustrated with her sexist male peers, Vivian channels her mother’s spirit and starts an anonymously authored ‘zine in hopes of starting a revolution.MARCH 5‘City of Ghosts’In this odd and charming children’s show, a band of young Angelenos investigate paranormal activity around the city by interviewing friendly ghosts and the people they haunt. The episodes aren’t exactly plot-driven; they’re more like mini documentaries, teaching kids about the history and residents of L.A.’s neighborhoods. Animation fans should note that the series was created by Elizabeth Ito, who previously worked on “Phineas and Ferb” and “Adventure Time.” Here she’s come up with something visually striking, combining simplified characters with photographed backgrounds.MARCH 12‘The One’ Season 1In our era of advanced genetic testing, DNA can reveal everything from people’s ancestry to their criminal culpability. But can it connect soul mates? That’s the question posed by the John Marrs novel “The One,” now adapted by the writer-producer Howard Overman into a TV series. The show features multiple interwoven story lines, following both the troubles faced by the CEO of a DNA-matched dating service and the problems her customers encounter as they get to know their scientifically determined true loves.MARCH 17‘Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal’The documentary filmmaker Chris Smith should be well-known to Netflix subscribers as the director of “Fyre,” a fascinating expose of what went wrong at an infamous music festival. Smith now turns his attention to another tale of hubris and privilege with “Operation Varsity Blues,” an examination of the 2019 scandal in which several wealthy Americans were caught trying to buy their kids’ way into elite colleges. The documentary details the nuts and bolts of a scheme that involved expensive tutors, cheating on exams and bribing university staff.‘The Irregulars’Credit…NetflixMARCH 26‘The Irregulars’Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mythology gets a radical reimagining in this crime series, which focuses on the gang of streetwise youngsters known as “the Baker Street Irregulars.” Created by Tom Bidwell, “The Irregulars” imagines an irreverent version of the Holmes saga in which the detective stays in a constant drugged-out fog while his disreputable assistants do all the actual mystery-solving. Bidwell also adds some supernatural elements to the story.Also arriving: “Murder Among the Mormons” (March 3), “Pacific Rim: The Black” (March 4), “Sentinelle” (March 5), “Bombay Rose” (March 8), “The Houseboat” (March 9), “Dealer” (March 10), “Last Chance U: Basketball” (March 10), “Marriage or Mortgage” (March 10), “Paper Lives” (March 12), “Yes Day” (March 12) “The Lost Pirate Kingdom” (March 15), “Zero Chill” (March 15), “RebellComedy: Straight Outta the Zoo” (March 16), ‘Waffles + Mochi” (March 16), “Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case” (March 17), “Nate Bargatze: The Greatest Average American” (March 18), “Country Comfort” (March 19), “Sky Rojo” (March 19), “Navillera” (March 22), “Who Killed Sara?” (March 24), “Bad Trip” (March 26), “Nailed It!: Double Trouble” (March 26), “A Week Away” (March 26).New to Stan‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’Credit…StanMARCH 2‘My First Summer’Katie Found wrote and directed this film about the bond between two teenage girls, who find each other right when they’re on the precipice of emotional maturity and caught between love and friendship. The accomplished young Australian actresses Markella Kavenagh and Maiah Stewardson play Claudia and Grace, who try to keep their relationship hidden away from anxious adults and their prying questions for as long as possible. With its striking visual style and its rich performances, “My First Summer” captures the beautiful fragility of adolescent romance.MARCH 4‘Shirley’Elisabeth Moss plays the reclusive author Shirley Jackson in the disturbing and moving period drama “Shirley.” The story is told largely from the perspective of a young faculty wife named Rose (Odessa Young), who becomes an aide and confidant to the acerbic and depressive Jackson, slowly becoming overwhelmed by the writer’s cynicism. The director Josephine Decker and the screenwriter Sarah Gubbins adapt a Susan Scarf Merrell novel, which is mostly fictional yet heavily influenced by Jackson’s life and work — capturing her sour, soulful take on human weakness.MARCH 9‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’The long-awaited third movie in the “Bill & Ted” series re-teams Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter — for the first time since 1991 — as the fun-loving, dimwitted, time-traveling best buds Theodore Logan and William Preston. In “Face the Music,” the boys have grown into middle-aged men, but still believe they’ll one day change the world through rock ’n’ roll. When they hear reality itself will be destroyed if they don’t get their act together immediately, Bill and Ted (and their daughters, Thea and Billie) have another adventure across the timeline, with the help of some of humankind’s greatest musicians.MARCH 10‘She Dies Tomorrow’Written and directed by Amy Seimetz, this arty horror film takes an unusual approach to a post-apocalyptic story, dramatizing the eerie premonitions that herald the end of everything. Kate Lyn Shell plays an ordinary woman who becomes convinced she’s living through her last day on Earth. Her strange behavior proves infectious, passing from friend to friend, leaving them either devastated, agitated or oddly calm. “She Dies Tomorrow” has the quality of a dream, but it’s a disturbingly realistic one.‘The Legend of Baron To’a’Credit…AmazonMARCH 14‘The Legend of Baron To’a’In the energetic action-comedy “The Legend of Baron To’a,” Uli Latukefu plays a Tongan New Zealander named Fritz who found his fortune in Australia but has returned home to defend his family’s legacy. The movie’s title refers to Fritz’s father: a former pro wrestler who also served as his neighborhood’s unofficial protector. When gangsters start bullying the locals, Fritz has to learn the fundamentals of combat in order to finish the job his dad started.MARCH 19‘Save Me Too’In the sequel to the thrilling crime drama “Save Me,” the British actor Lennie James returns to a role he wrote for himself, playing a luckless lad named Nelly who has a habit of being accused of crimes he didn’t commit. “Save Me Too” picks up about a year after the events of the first series and sees Nelly tying up some loose ends from old mysteries, while also trying to prove that he’s innocent of a murder. Part procedural and part character sketch, James digs deep into the soul of a stubborn individualist.MARCH 29‘City on a Hill’ Season 2The first season of this Boston-set crime series told a complete story, about an ambitious attorney (Aldis Hodge) and a corrupt FBI agent (Kevin Bacon), reluctantly working together and navigating the choppy waters of local politics to take down a local gang in the early 1990s. In season two the two lawmen are back to being rivals, but their paths cross again when trouble erupts at a drug-plagued housing project. Though the show takes place nearly 30 years ago, the issues it raises — about policing, race relations and institutional rot — remain timely.Also arriving: “The Affair” Season 5 (March 1),“The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 3 (March 1), “Sick of It” Season 2 (March 2),“Secret Safari: Into the Wild” (March 3), “Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable” (March 4), “A Murder of Crows” (March 4),“Manhunt: Deadly Games” (March 5), “Bloods” (March 11), “Cryptid” (March 11), “Black Hands” Season 1 (March 17), “Close to the Enemy” Season 1 (March 18), “The Disappearance” (March 18), “Safe House” Seasons 1 & 2 (March 25), “Between Black and Blue” (March 26), “Outback” (March 29).New to Amazon‘Coming 2 America’Credit…AmazonMARCH 5‘Coming 2 America’Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall reprise their roles from the hit 1988 comedy “Coming to America” in this sequel, which picks up the story of an African ruler and his trusty aide decades later. Like the original, “Coming 2 America” is filled with comic situations that allow Murphy and Hall to play multiple roles that riff on Black culture from the perspective of insiders and outsiders. The film also features appearances by some very funny comics — like Leslie Jones and Tracy Morgan — who have followed in the footsteps of Murphy and Hall.MARCH 26‘Invincible’The superhero cartoon “Invincible” looks charmingly retro, like something that would’ve aired on TV in the 1990s. But the series has a much more adult vibe than the likes of “X-Men” and “Superman.” Based on a long-running comic book written by Robert Kirkman (who also cocreated “The Walking Dead”), “Invincible” has Steven Yeun voicing a famous superhero’s teenage son, who’s enlisted into a series of fights to save the world almost as soon as he starts developing superpowers of his own. Like the comic, the show is fast-paced, colorful and clever — and also incredibly violent and shockingly bloody.Also arriving: “Honest Thief” (March 12), “Making Their Mark” (March 12), “Words on Bathroom Walls” (March 19), “La Templanza (The Vineyard)” (March 26).AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More