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      in Theater

      What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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      And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.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

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Tonight’s Monologue Is for Republicans’

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      Kimmel made a 19-minute case against Donald Trump on Tuesday, asking viewers to “send it to a Republican you love.” (He did throw in a Biden joke.)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.Crossing the Aisle“Tonight’s monologue is for Republicans,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Tuesday. He then made a 19-minute case against Donald Trump, asking his viewers to send the clip to “a Republican you love and respect.” “Ask them to watch this whole thing as a personal favor to you,” he said. Then, after promising no “liberal virtue-signaling” and throwing in a Biden joke, he introduced himself to “those of you who don’t ever watch.”“I’m Jimmy Kimmel. Maybe you remember me from ‘The Man Show.’ We had a pretty good relationship back then — the beer, the trampolines. Good times, right? We had fun. But now times are less fun.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“We are very divided, and not just because of Donald Trump, because of people like, if I’m being honest, me. I do a lot of mocking and belittling, and it isn’t always productive.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Am I biased against Donald Trump? Yes. Do I think I have good reasons for being biased against him? Yes. And I’m probably wrong, but I think when you hear some of those reasons, you might agree with me, even just a little bit.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Maybe there’s a little voice in the back your head saying, ‘I might not want this guy driving the bus.’ And if you’re one of those people who think Democrats are controlling the weather or Beyoncé eats baby skin, forget it. This is not going to help at all.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Donald Trump is the exact meeting point between QAnon and QVC. You remember when Ronald Reagan was selling high-tops in the 1980s? No, you don’t, because he wasn’t.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Not to mention the 34 felony convictions. Will he be president from jail? I mean, how do you see that working?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Anyway, if you made it this far, thank you for listening.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (What a Joke Edition)“It’s rare to tell a joke so bad that it alters the course of human history.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on the backlash over the comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally who compared Puerto Rico to garbage“Today, following his disastrous rally at Madison Square Garden, former President Trump defended the event and called it an ‘absolute lovefest.’ Then Kamala Harris looked at the polls and said, ‘Well, I’m certainly loving it.’” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Television

      Why Trump Uses Comics Like Tony Hinchcliffe to Spread His Message

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      Like the former president, these stand-ups loathe the news media, delight in transgression and harbor a deep-seated love of cruel insult jokes.The stand-up of Tony Hinchcliffe, a popular insult comic, became an immediate issue in the presidential campaign on Sunday after his racist lines at a Donald J. Trump rally earned immediate blowback and criticism from, among others, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz.As Hinchcliffe has done in the past when embroiled in controversy, he doubled down. On X, he wrote that Walz had found the time to “analyze a joke taken out of context to make it seem racist.” Walz didn’t do that. But to the extent that there was a relevant context to Hinchcliffe’s dopey, trolling punchlines, it’s this: They were delivered at a Trump campaign event nine days before the election.There was a time not long ago when people wondered why there weren’t more conservative comedians or why there wasn’t a right-wing version of “The Daily Show.” These questions have always been a little naïve. Comedy has long had a conservative streak, and anyone who ever attended middle school knows that jokes can be as effective at reaffirming the status quo as challenging it.But comedy has become more partisan over the years; late-night TV’s move from neutral Johnny Carson to anti-Trump hosts is only one example. In this election, a forceful new Trump-friendly contingent has emerged, one dominated by male comics, many from Joe Rogan’s orbit. Whereas the biggest names in pop music have come out aggressively for Vice President Kamala Harris, the artists who have provided the most support for Trump have been comedians.Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have made comedy podcasts a regular stop, aiming to win over young male voters dissatisfied with mainstream news outlets. Just in the past week, Vance has appeared on the podcasts of Tim Dillon, a satirical comic who specializes in booming nihilistic rants, and the oddly poetic, bro-ish comic Theo Von. After much public speculation over whether Trump would be invited to sit down with Rogan — the most popular comedy podcaster and the one who gave a boost to many of these comics — it happened. (Trump has also appeared on podcasts with Von and with the New York standup Andrew Schulz, a podcaster so popular he headlined Madison Square Garden this year.)This doesn’t even count Greg Gutfeld, who as Fox’s highly rated right-wing answer to late night has had Trump on as well.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      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

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      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

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      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