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    Jimmy Fallon Rallies for Queen Bey

    The “Tonight Show” host was excited about Beyoncé’s plans to appear with the vice president: “What a night — the most powerful woman in the world and Kamala Harris.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Texas Hold ’emThe pop superstar Beyoncé will join Vice President Kamala Harris onstage at a campaign rally in Houston on Friday.“What a night — the most powerful woman in the world and Kamala Harris,” Jimmy Fallon said on Thursday.“Woo, baby. Talk about a get! The last time Beyoncé appeared onstage with a presidential candidate was Hillary in 2016, so things are looking good.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Yeah, Beyoncé will sing ‘Irreplaceable,’ and Biden will be like, ‘Too soon!’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Harris is rallying with Beyoncé while Trump will be onstage claiming migrants are eating Snoop Dogg and Doja Cat.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Daddy Issues Edition)“At a Trump campaign rally yesterday in Georgia, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson compared former President Trump returning to office to a father who comes home to give a ‘bad little girl’ a ‘vigorous spanking’ for being disobedient. Wow. I guess for my part, I’m just glad he’s standing behind a podium.” — SETH MEYERS“OK, so this might be why you’ve never been invited to speak at a political rally before.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“You know, most people just clear their browser history, they don’t put it in their speeches.” — SETH MEYERS“Not to fact-check you there, Tuck, but we know from Stormy Daniels that Daddy’s the one who likes to get spanked.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“You see, America? These Trump people — they aren’t weird. They just know that Trump is a big strong daddy that’s coming home to spank us all. Totally normal stuff. I can’t wait to hear Tucker’s thoughts on the economy: ‘Inflation is like a babysitter, and she’s been naughty.’” — MICHAEL KOSTA“I just can’t figure out why they’re having trouble appealing to female voters.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingColbert and Julia Louis-Dreyfus shared their earliest memories during “The Colbert Questionert” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutBridget Everett in a scene from Season 3 of “Somebody Somewhere.”Sandy Morris/HBOBridget Everett’s small-town dramedy series “Somebody Somewhere” returns to HBO on Sunday for its third and final season. More

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    Jack Jones, a Suave, Hit-Making and Enduring Crooner, Dies at 86

    With his smooth voice, he drew crowds to cabarets and music halls for six decades. He also sang the themes for films and TV shows, including “The Love Boat.”Jack Jones, a crooner who beguiled concert fans and stage, screen and television audiences for decades with romantic ballads and gentle jazz tunes that even in large venues often achieved the intimacy of his celebrated nightclub performances, died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 86. His wife, Eleonora Jones, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was leukemia.While his popularity peaked in the 1960s, Mr. Jones found a new audience in later years singing the theme to the hit television show “The Love Boat.” But even then he seemed always to have stepped out of an earlier generation, one that dressed in tuxedos for the songs of Tin Pan Alley and reminded America of its love affairs with the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen.He won two Grammy Awards and recorded numerous albums of American Songbook favorites that hit the upper reaches of Billboard’s charts on the strength of his smooth vocal interpretations. He performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the White House and the London Palladium, and for more than 60 years drew crowds to cabarets and nightclubs around the world.At the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, marking his 52nd year in show business, Mr. Jones opened and closed a two-hour retrospective of his songs with Paul Williams’s “That’s What Friends Are For.” He sang to a packed house of longtime fans:Friends are like warm clothesIn the night air.Best when they’re oldAnd we miss them the most when they’re gone.“Those lyrics evoked the vanishing breed of pop-jazz crooner, of which Mr. Jones and Tony Bennett remain the great survivors,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. “Mr. Jones, now 72, draws the same kind of well-dressed sophisticated audiences that used to attend the annual appearances at the defunct Michael’s Pub of his friend Mel Tormé, who died 11 years ago at 73.”Mr. Jones with his fellow vocalist Tony Bennett in 1972.Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Lynda Obst, Producer, Dies at 74; Championed Women in Hollywood

    She helped make films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.” She also wrote widely about the industry, for The Times and other publications.Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).Ms. Obst excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She was an executive producer of the hit Nora Ephron comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, seen here with Ross Malinger.TriStar PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Menendez Brothers: How True Crime Is Re-Examining Old Cases

    A thriving genre built on podcasts and documentaries, coupled with younger generations’ more skeptical worldview, helped revitalize interest in this case and others like it.There’s a montage during the new Netflix documentary “The Menendez Brothers” in which comedians, late-night hosts and other pop culture figures of the 1990s mock Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers had recently delivered testimony at their first murder trial, detailing their accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Jose Menendez, whom they had gunned down and killed in 1989, alongside their mother, Kitty.There was a 1993 “Saturday Night Live” skit that had John Malkovich and Rob Schneider mimicking the brothers in the courtroom, weeping dramatically and sarcastically. On the “Late Show,” the comedian Sandra Bernhard told David Letterman, “These two arrogant brothers are gonna fry,” to whoops and laughter from the audience.“I called Jay Leno’s show once, to protest them making fun of them,” Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, says in the documentary. “That’s all they did. They just made fun of them.”Some 30 years later, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when the murders were committed, have gone from pariahs and punchlines to something approaching sympathetic figures in the eyes of a growing number of people.They’ve also gone from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison to having a chance at freedom after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced on Thursday that he would recommend a resentencing that would make the brothers eligible for immediate parole.Gascón cited the work the brothers have done to improve the lives of their fellow inmates. “I believe they have paid their debt to society,” Gascón said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Somebody Somewhere’ Is Back for Its Final Season

    The HBO dramedy about a Kansas woman finding love and community after tragedy returns for its third and final season on Sunday.Bridget Everett in a scene from Season 3 of “Somebody Somewhere.”Sandy Morris/HBO“Somebody Somewhere,” a perfect dramedy starring Bridget Everett as a Kansas woman finding love and community after her sister’s death, returns for its third and final season starting Sunday at 10:30 p.m., on HBO. The show is full of ecstatic tenderness and easy warmth, but it avoids pat tidiness.Sam (Everett) is ebullient and loyal, and over the course of the series, her life has stabilized a lot: The cold clutch of grief has loosened, her friendship with Joel (Jeff Hiller, fantastic) continues to blossom, and she’s more comfortable singing in front of everyone. But her battle between vulnerability and defensiveness wages on. As often as “Somebody” is a detailed taxonomy of love — platonic, familial, religious, romantic — it is also a portrait of loneliness. Perhaps there is no such thing as “enough” love, the show admits; things can be wonderful without being perfect, and they can be painful but still worth it. Even the seemingly simple love of a dog comes with complications.One of my favorite parts of “Somebody” is how often the characters laugh. They all find each other screamingly funny, for good reason, and they’re all able to laugh at themselves, too. Usually when we think about Big Acting Moments, they’re quivering, tearful monologues, sobbing or ranting. “Somebody” certainly has those, but its more cathartic scenes are ones of laughter — where the real bonding happens, the real changes, the real surrender. They are also where the ensemble shines the brightest.One of the primary arcs of the show is about Sam’s re-embracing her singing voice, and in the first episode of Season 3, she sings “Smalltown Boy” alone in her car. She moves through various harmonies but then backs off a big wail, sighing that she wishes she could hit that note. But it seems like she could hit it, if she could relax into it and be a little brave.“I’ve never been comfortable expressing my feelings in public, you know?” admits Brad (Tim Bagley), Joel’s prim and adoring boyfriend. “Yeah, I think I understand that,” Sam replies. “I think that’s what’s so great about singing: Somehow the music just makes it so much easier. It’s like you’re not doing it alone.” More

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    Erin and Sara Foster Discuss ‘Nobody Wants This’ and Their ‘IVF, Baby’ Shirts

    Sara and Erin Foster took a short break to discuss the hit show loosely based on Erin’s life, everyone’s love of Adam Brody and their advocacy for reproductive rights.On Tuesday morning, Sara and Erin Foster, the sisters behind the Netflix series “Nobody Wants This,” joined a video call from their respective homes in Los Angeles. Sara, 43, was wearing an oversize sweatshirt, and Erin, 42, was in a bathrobe.The sisters are known for their laid-back style, but by any standards they’ve had a busy month.“Nobody Wants This” premiered Sept. 26, rising to the top of Netflix’s ratings within a week. The show, which is written by Erin and produced by both sisters, was inspired by Erin’s real-life love story of falling in love with her now-husband, the music executive Simon Tikhman, before converting to Judaism. In the Netflix version of the story, Joanne, a blonde, agnostic relationship podcaster played by Kristen Bell, and Noah, a bearded rabbi played by Adam Brody, navigate the various hurdles of getting into a serious relationship.Last week, with less than a month before Election Day, the Fosters also waded into the debate over reproductive rights and in vitro fertilization. They released a limited edition T-shirt through their fashion brand, Favorite Daughter, with the bold, black words, “IVF, Baby.” (The sisters partnered with CCRM Fertility on the project. All proceeds will be donated to Resolve: the National Infertility Association.)“They just launched like four days ago, so we haven’t had a chance to run into anyone wearing them yet, but we hope we do,” said Erin, who underwent 20 rounds of I.V.F. before welcoming a daughter in May. Sara, who has two daughters with her ex-partner, the former tennis star Tommy Haas, said sales were higher than expected.The sisters chatted about this whirlwind time in their lives.This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Late Night Condemns Trump for Stanning Hitler

    On Wednesday, Seth Meyers said he was “starting to think Trump doesn’t watch the ends of documentaries.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Mein Bad’Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly, said the former president had said more than once while in office that Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”On Wednesday, Seth Meyers said he was “starting to think Trump doesn’t watch the ends of documentaries.”“Once you have to explain to someone that Hitler is bad, there’s not much else to talk about. You don’t see many first dates survive that.” — SETH MEYERS“Seriously, Trump, Hitler never did anything good. He even sucked at waving. Like, dude, God gave you elbows — use them.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“I don’t even think you have to know history. You can probably get all the info you need from Mel Brooks movies and Bugs Bunny cartoons.” — SETH MEYERS“This is the first election where reporters have to ask, ‘Who’d you root for when you watched ‘Saving Private Ryan’?” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump made it worse today when he said, ‘Oops, mein bad.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Lose Yourself Edition)“At a campaign event in Detroit, Eminem introduced Barack Obama. Which makes sense, they both made a career out of pretending to be Black.” — GREG GUTFELD“You know, somewhere, Trump is yelling at his aides: [imitating Trump] ‘How could M&Ms betray me? I don’t understand. Is there no loyalty?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But it’s nice to see Obama pay homage to Eminem because it means that Black people have finally accepted that Eminem is the greatest rapper of all time. And look — no, stop — I know how it feels. I went through it every time Tiger Woods won a golf tournament, OK?” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Was that song Osama bin Laden? Because Obama killed it.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I will say, maybe Obama should skip that line about ‘dropping bombs,’ you know? Are you still rapping, or are you doing a drone strike?” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Bits Worth WatchingMembers of the New York Liberty joined Jimmy Fallon for a team selfie celebrating their WNBA championship on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightJulia Louis-Dreyfus will take “The Colbert Questionert” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe gang’s all here for the sixth and final season of “What We Do in the Shadows.”Russ Martin/FXThe vampire comedy series “What We Do in the Shadows” returned for its sixth and final season on FX and Hulu this week. More

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    Ron Ely, Who Played an Updated Tarzan in the 1960s, Dies at 86

    He later built a career as a reliable TV guest star. His life turned tragic in 2019 when his son killed Mr. Ely’s wife and was then shot to death by the police.Ron Ely, a veteran television actor best known for his role as an educated, urbane vine-swinger on the 1960s show “Tarzan,” died on Sept. 29 at the home of one of his daughters near Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 86.That daughter, Kirsten Ely, announced the death on Wednesday on social media. It had not been previously reported.A tall, muscled Texas native, Mr. Ely (pronounced “EE-lee”) had made his name by the early 1960s as a reliable supporting actor on popular TV shows like the sitcoms “Father Knows Best,” “How to Marry a Millionaire” and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” before landing the lead role on “Tarzan” in 1966.The show, which ran on NBC for 57 episodes across two seasons, featured a Tarzan updated for a modern audience. Gone were the semi-verbal grunts of previous iterations; in this version, Tarzan had left the jungle and learned the ways of modern civilization before deciding to return to the creature comforts of his former home.Gone, too, was Jane, Tarzan’s traditional love interest, though Cheetah, his chimpanzee sidekick, remained.Mr. Ely performed almost all his own stunts, which left him with two broken shoulders, a torn back muscle and two lion bites.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More