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      in Television

      Without Another Debate, the Campaign Became a Duel of TV Scenes

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      As the candidates raced to claim different corners of the national screen this week, it was “Undercover Boss” vs. “Roll the clip.”In a typical election season — remember those? — right about now we would be preparing for, or recovering from, the final presidential debate. But Oct. 23, the date of a proposed CNN showdown that Kamala Harris accepted and Donald J. Trump declined, came and went without one.Instead, as Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump raced to claim different corners of the national screen, they were essentially staging a virtual debate, presenting competing versions of themselves on strikingly different stages.Mr. Trump substituted the debate podium with a takeout window, performing a shift on the fry cooker at a closed McDonald’s franchise and violating the occasional job protocol. It was a familiar kind of reality-TV stunt for a reality-TV candidate.This time, however, he was not emulating “The Apprentice” but staging a political version of “Undercover Boss.”On the CBS reality series, which aired 11 seasons from 2010 to 2022, company executives went incognito to work low-level jobs at their companies. The premise was to show bigwigs how the grunts lived. But it also served, in the years after the financial collapse and Great Recession, as a form of prime-time crisis P.R. Chief executives were people too, it told us; they shared common purpose and mutual respect with the rank and file.Mr. Trump’s shift, which lasted less time than a single “Undercover Boss” episode, had different aims. Most overtly, it was a way of using virality — what news producer can resist footage of Donald Trump shoveling fries into a container? — to spread his unsubstantiated claim that Ms. Harris had lied about working at McDonald’s while in college. (As with his birtherism campaign against Barack Obama, media coverage generally noted that his charges were baseless, but the dust still got kicked up, the doubts potentially sown.)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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Dana Carvey’s Biden Stands Out in a Season of Political Impressions on ‘S.N.L.’

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      The answer has to do with going beyond a likeness, something Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong understand for their movie about Donald Trump and Roy Cohn.Everyone expected Maya Rudolph to appear as Vice President Kamala Harris in the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.” It was less obvious who would play Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz. But when Jim Gaffigan walked onstage, face split in an open-mouthed grin like some kind of genial jack-o’-lantern, it was clear no one else should have bothered. Gaffigan’s entire comic persona is based in Walzian Big Dad Energy, even if he portrays himself as more likely to sit in his underwear eating Hot Pockets than climbing on the roof to clean out the gutters. There’s a harmony there, a vibe match.There were other interesting matchups — Andy Samberg as Doug Emhoff, James Austin Johnson and Bowen Yang as Donald J. Trump and JD Vance — but those weren’t the performers who stole that night’s show. The shocker, somehow, was an impersonation of President Biden, a performance so spot-on that for a split second I thought Lorne Michaels had just called the president and asked him to appear.This Biden was Dana Carvey, the former cast member whose work on “S.N.L.” includes perhaps the show’s greatest presidential impression, a strange and brilliant take on George H.W. Bush. Carvey’s Biden squints and chuckles, says “folks” a lot and is given to insisting that he’s “being serious right now,” even when what he’s just said — “I’ve passed more bills than any president in history, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do” — would never be mistaken for a joke. This Biden felt less like an attempt to replicate the president and more like a guess at what he’s feeling these days.Judging from social media discourse — and from this parade of imitations in the season premiere, each cued up for maximum applause and surprise — political impressions have never been more interesting even to those who don’t care about “S.N.L.” There’s no obvious reason for this intrigue, other than the novelty of watching one kind of celebrity play a different kind of celebrity, the same interest that powers a lot of awards-season movies in which great stars try to win awards by playing other famous people. See “The Apprentice,” in which Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan portray Roy Cohn and Trump.In fact, the earliest stars of “S.N.L.” are now the subject of their own impersonations, in Jason Reitman’s new “Saturday Night.” Some are more successful than others. But what’s obvious from the better performances (Cory Michael Smith’s version of Chevy Chase, Dylan O’Brien’s Dan Aykroyd) is what’s also clear from Carvey’s impression of Biden: playing real people can’t just consist of perfectly imitating their exterior. And the goal can’t just be to make the audience marvel at a remarkable likeness.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

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      ‘The Apprentice’ Gets a Young Trump Ready for His Close-Up

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      Beyond its story of Donald Trump’s early years in business, “The Apprentice” traces his origins as a media celebrity.“The Apprentice” is a movie about the early adult life of Donald J. Trump, but it ends with his birth.In the film’s final scene, Mr. Trump (Sebastian Stan) is meeting with Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy), the writer with whom he will collaborate on “The Art of the Deal.” Mr. Trump, as the film makes clear, was a known quantity before then. But with the best-selling book, a celebrity was born.The book, published in 1987, vaulted him from regional tabloid name to pop-culture phenomenon, portrayed in skits on “Saturday Night Live,” playing himself in sitcom and movie cameos, becoming an all-purpose media symbol of ostentatious wealth. The book helped make him a TV star — Mark Burnett, the producer of the reality-TV show “The Apprentice,” was a fan — and that stardom helped make him president.All that, however, comes after the events of the movie “The Apprentice.” Directed by Ali Abbasi, the film focuses on how the young Mr. Trump was molded by two father figures. His actual father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), instilled the belief that a man’s highest aspiration is to be a “killer.” His moral father, the lawyer, fixer and onetime Joseph McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), taught him that life is a constant fight with three rules: Attack, attack, attack; deny, deny, deny; and never admit defeat.But it is also about how a local real estate developer’s son evolved into the media-bestriding character we know. Cohn, whose life as a closeted gay man was famously captured in Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” kept a busy social calendar and believed in the value of information and social capital, of knowing people and being seen.To that end, the Mr. Cohn of the movie gives his young disciple a directive more consequential than any tips on beating housing discrimination lawsuits: “Keep your name in the papers.” The young Mr. Trump, not yet the media hound who lives for the camera lights, requires some teaching. In a memorable scene, he takes a phone call in Mr. Cohn’s car for an early newspaper profile, with Mr. Cohn coaching, correcting, almost puppeteering him.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

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Presidents in Movies Always Seem to Know What They’re Doing. In Real Life …

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      Hollywood’s polished leaders and legible story arcs never quite imagined the places real-life American politics would go.In October 1960, when the novelist Philip Roth was just 27, he shared an unsettling revelation: Reality was outstripping fiction. “The American writer,” he wrote, “has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality.” He ticked off examples of newsmakers that novelists couldn’t dream up: men like the quiz-show scammer Charles Van Doren; the Eisenhower chief of staff Sherman Adams, who resigned after accepting improper gifts; and, presciently, Roy Cohn, the sinister McCarthyite prosecutor who would become, in later years, mentor to a young Donald Trump.In the 64 years since Roth first made this observation, it has become an oft-repeated refrain that the novel can do only so much to approximate reality’s madness. Cinema and television, though, haven’t done much better. The spectacle of the screen, in some sense, was supposed to — the edict is entertainment and often entertainment alone. Shouldn’t Hollywood have offered us, at some point, a president like one of our last two, Trump and Joe Biden? Or a plot twist akin to this summer’s, in which an incumbent presidential candidate was effectively toppled and his vice president took his place without winning a single primary vote? But showrunners and moviemakers never really foresaw a presidency quite like either of the last two or a campaign like this one. Their work has underestimated both what the American political system is capable of producing and what voters could ultimately stomach.Consider the American president on film. Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact,” stoically guiding the nation through the approach of a civilization-annihilating comet. Michael Douglas in “The American President,” as a popular, introspective widower straining to date again. Or Bill Pullman’s President Thomas Whitmore in “Independence Day”: a swaggering Air Force veteran, leading his makeshift squadron into combat against the alien invaders.The generic cinema president of the 20th century was informed by politicians of that era and the sensibilities they cultivated. In style and rhetoric, the two parties often bled together. In the 1980s and ’90s, to be “presidential” was to be well coifed, almost glossy — the Kennedyesque ethos adopted by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton in equal measure. Each, for a certain segment of the populace, was a nigh-heroic figure; even for those who disagreed, there remained a halo of dignity around the office itself. It helped that the parties were converging on policy, with Clinton’s Democrats swerving rightward after the rise of Reaganomics: Hollywood’s presidents, Democrat or Republican, didn’t even need to seem so different from one another.It is difficult to imagine Trump, or Biden, risking his life in the skies to save humanity or summoning the gravitas to inspire a nation. Biden, of course, is hampered by advanced age, something no well-known Hollywood depictions of the American presidency ever reckoned with — that a president in his 80s might, say, struggle to perform in a single televised debate and find his party in revolt, pressing him to stand down. Prestige-film presidents do not forget the names of world leaders or how their sons actually died; they don’t shout out to politicians at a White House event who aren’t there because they are dead. That stuff is more Shakespearean.And Trump, of course, is sui generis. What movie fathomed a fading reality-TV star’s running for president, winning, eventually trying to steal the next election, inciting a deadly riot at the Capitol, being indicted for falsifying business records, winning the Republican nomination anyway, almost being assassinated, blathering in another televised debate about the fictional consumption of cats and dogs in Ohio — and still running almost even in the polls? Even in the most surreal comedy, this would seem too absurd. TV presidents don’t lie with so much impunity. They possess a degree of tact and reserve that is utterly alien to Trump. In a film, something like the “Access Hollywood” tape might be the pivotal plot device that decides an election.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

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Apprentice’ Review: An Origin Story for Donald J. Trump

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      In this ribald fictional telling of a young Trump’s rise, the man responsible is the lawyer Roy Cohn, played to sleazy perfection by Jeremy Strong.Midway through “The Apprentice,” a gleefully vulgar fictional dramatization of the loves and deals of the young Donald J. Trump, the movie’s look changes. From the start, the images have had the grainy quality that you sometimes see in films from the 1970s, which is when the movie opens. Then suddenly, while Donald — a terrific Sebastian Stan — is giving a TV interview in 1980, faint horizontal lines begin slicing across the image, evoking the flicker in analog video. It’s a sly nod at the future and a brand-new reality: A (television) star is born.“The Apprentice” is arriving in theaters less than a month before the U.S. presidential election, but it would be a strain to call this energetic, queasily funny if finally very bleak portrait an October surprise. The real Trump’s reaction to the movie suggested that it had the makings of a bombshell, though the most shocking parts of the movie have been reported elsewhere. His campaign called it “garbage” the day after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and his lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to the filmmakers. Yet the only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.In broad strokes, “The Apprentice” recounts a familiar story of individual empowerment and (gilded) bootstraps through Donald, who hungers for the very best, or at least shiniest, that life can offer, be it women, clothing, swank digs or amber waves of hair. Like the hero in a Horatio Alger tale, except with, you know, family money and connections, Donald finds success partly through his association with a slithery lawyer, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, fantastic), who was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Senate’s 1950s investigations into Communist influence in the United States. Roy becomes Donald’s mentor, helping him achieve his American dream that here has the makings of a nightmare.The director Ali Abbasi thrusts you right in the scrum, opening on Donald as he navigates the outwardly mean, trash-choked streets of Times Square. It’s 1973, and New York seems to be on the ropes. Parts of the city look like they’ve been bombed, and its rats are on the march. It’s tough out there, even for ambitious go-getters. Yet Donald, who’s in his late 20s and works for the Trump family’s sprawling real-estate business — he knocks on residential tenant doors to personally collect the rent — has grandiose plans to revive the struggling city and make his fortune by giving a hulking, rundown Midtown hotel a classy makeover.Donald’s aspirations for that hotel, the Commodore, become the first in a series of ladder rungs he grasps on his upward climb through the 1970s and into the go-go ’80s. Working from a script by Gabriel Sherman, Abbasi tracks Donald’s high points and low on his transformational journey, which takes him from testy meals in his parents’ Queens home and into Manhattan’s corridors of power, its boardrooms and party dens. Whether in the back seat of a stretch limo or riding along with Roy Cohn in a Rolls, Donald is on the make and on the move. (Sherman wrote “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” a biography of the Fox News executive Roger Ailes; Abbasi’s directing credits include “Holy Spider.”)Donald’s path, as it were, proves grim and glittering by turns, and is lined with shrewd wheedling, outlandish excesses, sketchy characters and anguished family drama. There’s also somewhat of a fork in his road, symbolized by his relationship with Roy and his romance with a feisty, skeptical Czech model, Ivana (an appealing Maria Bakalova). The movie suggests that Ivana is good for Donald and maybe a potential lodestar, but he’s in thrall to Roy and to his father, Fred (an unrecognizable Martin Donovan). A tyrant who berates his grown children at the family dining-room table, especially his eldest son, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), Fred is the father Donald conspicuously fears and whom he trades in for Roy.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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      in Movies

      ‘Separated’ Review: Interrogating a Policy

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      The latest documentary from Errol Morris looks at the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border.When the great documentarian Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) has taken on overtly political subjects, he has rarely approached them from a position of express advocacy. His perspective tends to be more philosophical, even cosmic.“American Dharma” (2019) sought to understand what made the former Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon tick. “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) revolved around the photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and how acts that might look so obviously like torture were in certain cases rationalized as routine. The director’s portraits of former defense secretaries — Robert S. McNamara in “The Fog of War” (2003) and Donald H. Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” (2014) — centered on figures who were well out of office, even if, in 2003, McNamara’s reflections on the Vietnam War held up a clear mirror to Rumsfeld and his then-current approach to Iraq.Morris’s “Separated,” on the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border, comes closer to a direct intervention. The filmmaker has been open about his desire to have it released before the presidential election, and although it is now playing in theaters, it isn’t set to air on MSNBC until Dec. 7, when its relevance will be reduced. “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election?” Morris wrote on X. “It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”If “Separated” is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity. In the film, Jonathan White, who worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services when family separations began, speaks of a period in 2017 when those actions flew under the public’s radar. “It happened for months before there was any policy to do it,” he says, “and it was going on while my own leadership maintained it wasn’t.”At the Venice Film Festival, Morris highlighted the contradiction: “If the purpose was deterrence, why do it covertly?” he said in August. (There is a hint of Peter Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove in that idea: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret.”) But White says that “harm to children was part of the point.”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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      in Movies

      Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Say ‘The Apprentice’ Is a ‘Human Tragedy’

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      It’s natural to feel nervous before presenting your movie at a major film festival. But in late August, when the director Ali Abbasi boarded a flight to the Telluride Film Festival, he wasn’t even sure if his new movie “The Apprentice” — a fictionalized look at the Machiavellian bond between the young Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) and the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) — would be permitted to play there at all.“It was really crazy what happened, and I spared Jeremy and Sebastian some of it, but it is a demoralizing feeling,” Abbasi admitted during a recent video call with his two stars. The former president had been threatening legal action against “The Apprentice” since its May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, which chilled distributor interest in the movie for months and made it a controversial prospect for any subsequent festival willing to show it.“If a movie comes out and people think it’s bad or it’s flawed, you can deal with that,” Abbasi said. “But when it goes into a safe box indefinitely, that was heavy.”In the end, Trump failed to follow through on his threats, Telluride played the movie without incident and “The Apprentice” ultimately found a distributor in Briarcliff Entertainment, which will release the film on Friday. Still, Strong was perturbed by how many major studios were unwilling to take on the film and potentially incur the presidential candidate’s wrath.“You think that things could be banned in North Korea or Russia or certain places, but you don’t think that will ever happen here,” Strong said. “It’s a real dark harbinger that it even nearly happened.”Written by Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” begins with Trump in his 20s as he toils under his real-estate magnate father and aspires to become a momentous figure in his own right. Still, Trump’s ambition exceeds his ability until he meets the savvy Cohn, who takes the young man under his wing and imparts ruthless rules for success that will eventually launch Trump onto the highest stage imaginable.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

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Janet Jackson Repeats False Claims About Kamala Harris’s Race

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      After Ms. Jackson told The Guardian that Ms. Harris is “not Black,” her representatives said a man who apologized on her behalf was not authorized to speak for her.There was a swift backlash on Saturday after the pop star Janet Jackson challenged Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity in an interview with The Guardian. On Sunday, a man who identified himself as her manager apologized for her statements.Then Ms. Jackson’s representatives quickly distanced her from that man and his apology, saying he was not her manager and was not authorized to speak for her.The unusual turn of events began when The Guardian published a wide-ranging interview with Ms. Jackson timed to promote the European leg of her concert tour. When the reporter, Nosheen Iqbal, said the United States “could be on the verge of voting in its first Black female president,” referring to Ms. Harris, Ms. Jackson responded by saying: “Well, you know what they supposedly said? She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”When Ms. Iqbal replied that Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, is the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jamaican father who is Black, Ms. Jackson responded, “Her father’s white.”“That’s what I was told,” she added. “I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white.”Across social media, people expressed bewilderment over Ms. Jackson’s comments. On “The View” on Monday, one of the hosts, Ana Navarro, said Ms. Jackson had been “very irresponsible” and had used the Guardian interview “carelessly, to spread misinformation.”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