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      in Movies

      ‘Girls State’ Review: One Nation, Under Girls

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      Balancing confidence with broad smiles, the high school students in this documentary understand that camaraderie goes hand in hand with political ambition.In 2018, over 1,000 boys gathered in Texas for an elaborate, weeklong program aimed at students interested in politics. This meeting of teenage minds — part of a countrywide initiative sponsored by the American Legion — was captured in the Sundance hit “Boys State,” a vérité chronicle of the event, where participants are elected by their peers to different positions in government.Considering that movie’s success, it hardly comes as a surprise that the filmmakers, Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, used their momentum to produce the follow-up “Girls State.” The directors shot the documentary in 2022 at Lindenwood University, in St. Charles, Mo., where, the movie repeatedly notes, it’s the first time that the boys and girls groups are holding their events simultaneously on the same campus.If you are imagining coed frivolity or drama, though, think again: These motivated girls are only concerned about the boys insofar as their proximity highlights the lack of parity between their programs. We meet Emily Worthmore, one of the film’s central subjects, as she ticks off achievements. At Girls State, Emily, a conservative Christian, hopes to be elected governor, a goal she shares with the left-leaning Cecilia Bartin, who canvasses the lunchroom by shouting from a chair. Others, including Nisha Murali, eye seats on the program’s Supreme Court, which the attendees anticipate will hear an abortion case.If the vibe of “Boys State” is that of a Young Republicans conference, the atmosphere at “Girls State” suggests a freshman orientation. By turns giddy and gutsy, the students share in communal songs, icebreakers and empowerment sessions. They seem to intuit that camaraderie goes hand in hand with political ambition, and that they shouldn’t take the curriculum, or themselves, too seriously. Here, cute selfies and résumé building receive equal attention.Modesty, sympathy, generosity — these are valuable qualities in life and not necessarily in documentary cinema, where tension often acts as a narrative engine. The film tries to complicate its sororal ethos by pointing to the ways in which women are socialized to strive for perfection and avoid raising a stink. But as the film goes on to track a series of frictionless exercises in campaigning, litigation and reporting, one wishes there were more complex ideas introduced in tandem.“Girls State” uncovers a fascinating division early on after Emily remarks that she has no trouble identifying the girls who lean liberal. “Maybe they’re just,” she pauses, searching for a diplomatic term. “Louder?” The filmmakers pair this observation with a shot in which a cluster of attendees, led by Cecilia, joyfully chant Pitbull lyrics while Emily and others watch from the side.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 Music

      Alice Randall Made Country History. Black Women Are Helping Tell Hers.

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      In “My Black Country,” the musician and author who cracked a Nashville color barrier is telling her story — and hearing her songs reimagined.The country singer Rissi Palmer could not understand why Alice Randall was emailing her.By fall 2020, when Palmer received the message, Randall was a Nashville institution, not only the first Black woman to write a chart-topping country hit but also a novelist whose books undermined entrenched racial hierarchies. Palmer herself was no slouch: “Country Girl,” her 2007 anthem of rural camaraderie, had been the first song by a Black woman to infiltrate country’s charts in two decades. She had just started “Color Me Country,” a podcast exploring the genre’s nonwhite roots and branches.But 11 years earlier, Palmer had fled Nashville, hamstrung by contract disputes, with “my tail between my legs,” she recalled recently in a video interview from her North Carolina kitchen.Randall, however, was very interested in Palmer — and her history. Working as a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, she had urged the school’s Heard Libraries to acquire Palmer’s archives: notebooks, sketches, a dress worn during her Grand Ole Opry debut.“I’ve been in this business since I was 19. I made the charts when I was 26. I’ve had these items the whole time,” said Palmer, 42. “No one has ever called me and said they had value, until Alice. There are more important people, but she saw value in me.”Randall also saw something of herself — and a glimpse of gradual progress — in Palmer. After breaking a Nashville color barrier when her treatise about being an overworked mother, “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” became a 1994 hit for Trisha Yearwood, Randall quit writing country songs.In her book “My Black Country,” which shares its name with her new compilation, Randall posits a sharp rejoinder to the standard country origin story.Arielle Gray for The New York TimesWe 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 Music

      Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is a Vivid Mission Statement. Let’s Discuss.

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      The pop superstar teased a move to country, then tackled so much more. Three critics and a reporter explore her new album’s inspirations, sounds and stakes.BEN SISARIO I don’t usually say this about news releases, but since Beyoncé says so little about the making of her art, the “Cowboy Carter” announcement was intriguing for noting that “each song is its own version of a reimagined Western film,” and that Beyoncé screened movies while she recorded, including “Urban Cowboy,” “The Hateful Eight,” even “Space Cowboys” (?!).My first reaction to hearing the album was surprised gawking at its range of genre and sound, after she head faked us all into perhaps more limited expectations of “country.” (Of course we should have known better.) Viewed only as a genre-hopping exercise, “Cowboy Carter” might be a confusing jumble. But the film frame puts narrative and character at the center of her message, and with that everything came into clearer focus for me.As a heroine, Beyoncé makes a big, bold statement of her quest in “Ameriican Requiem,” taking on nothing less than American history. She finds villains in Jolene and (ahem) the Grammys. Songs like “II Most Wanted” and “Levii’s Jeans” could be plot-break montages while our conquering cowgirl hangs with some sidekicks she meets along the way. By the final reel she’s recapitulating her complaints and declaring herself the victorious leader of a grand resistance (“We’ll be the ones to purify our fathers’ sins”).SALAMISHAH TILLET I’ve listened to the album so many times now — on a plane, in a spin class, and, as I think she intended, while I drove on the highway (sadly, 280, not the 405). Yes, Ben, she has gone big here! But, instead of longing for some lost past, she is taking on “History” — musical and American — with, as we say in academia, a big “H,” or those big narratives about identity, belonging and discrimination.I almost missed those lyrics, “Whole lotta red in that white and blue, ha/History can’t be erased, oh-oh/You lookin’ for a new America” because I was too busy Proud Marying, jerking and twerking to “Ya Ya.” I think that might be the point — it is as if she saying, “The times are so desperate, I am going to use all the vocal gifts and genres at my disposal to bring the country together and show you how good I am at doing them (again)!”Beyoncé onstage with the Chicks performing “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards.Image Group LA/ABC, via 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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      in Movies

      Paula Weinstein, Hollywood Veteran and Political Activist, Dies at 78

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      Raised by a McCarthy-era rebel, the producer and journalist Hannah Weinstein, she followed her mother’s path into movies and television, advocacy and action.Paula Weinstein, a movie producer, studio executive and political activist who became a fierce advocate for women in her industry, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.Her sister Lisa Weinstein confirmed the death. She said the cause was not yet known.In the boy’s club of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the rare female top executive: Over her long career, she was president of United Artists, a vice president of Warner Bros. and an executive vice president at 20th Century Fox. She was just 33 when she was hired at Fox in 1978, and when she was promoted to vice president a year later, The Los Angeles Times called her “the highest-ranking woman in the motion picture industry.”“A man can be mediocre in almost everything, but a women’s got to be perfect,” she told Life magazine that year, when she was included in an article about Hollywood’s “Young Tycoons.”But Ms. Weinstein, who colleagues said possessed a wicked sense of humor — her sister described her laugh as an infectious cackle — and a steely commitment to social justice, was unusual in Hollywood beyond her gender. As Ken Sunshine, the veteran public relations consultant and longtime Democratic activist, put it in a phone interview: “Unlike so many, she didn’t play at politics. To her, social and political change was paramount. She was the antithesis of a phony Hollywood activist looking for good P.R. or a career boost. She was unique in a sea of pretenders.”Ms. Weinstein accepted the Emmy Award for the HBO movie “Recount” in 2008. She was an executive producer on the film, which was based on the 2000 presidential election.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesActivism was the family business: Her mother, Hannah Weinstein, was a journalist and speechwriter who in 1950 took her three young daughters to live in Paris and then London, fleeing the grim and punitive politics of the country’s McCarthy era. In Britain, where the family lived for more than a decade, Hannah Weinstein produced movies and television series using blacklisted actors and writers like Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. She repeatedly told her daughters, as Lisa recalled, “If you believe in something, you have to be willing to get up off your ass and do something, and if you don’t get up off your ass, you really didn’t believe in it.”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 Music

      Beyond Beyoncé: Black Women of Country, Past and Present

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      Listen to songs from Rhiannon Giddens, Rissi Palmer, Linda Martell and more.Rhiannon GiddensSerena Brown for The New York TimesDear listeners,Today marks the release of Beyoncé’s eighth solo album, “Cowboy Carter,” a sprawling celebration of country music and a saucy rebuttal to its most close-minded gatekeepers. Its previously released singles, the haunting “16 Carriages” and the rowdy No. 1 hit “Texas Hold ’Em,” reignited conversations about the erasure of Black voices in country music history and the industry-enforced barriers that still make it difficult for nonwhite artists to break through.Although “Cowboy Carter” is quite collaborative, Beyoncé is such a marquee star that all eyes and ears tend to focus on her. So for today’s playlist, I wanted to widen that focus and spotlight some other Black women who have made great country music in their own varied styles.This playlist features early pioneers like the guitarist Elizabeth Cotten and the groundbreaking country star Linda Martell (who makes two appearances on “Cowboy Carter”). It also features Tina Turner and the Pointer Sisters, artists better known for their work in other genres who made impassioned country crossovers that deserve revisiting. Plus, I’ve included younger upstarts like Reyna Roberts, Brittney Spencer and Mickey Guyton, who represent the sonic diversity and genre hybridity of this current generation.This playlist is a sampler rather than a comprehensive tour of Black women’s many contributions to country past and present, and I’m sure it’s missing some names (including Tanner Adell, who appears on “Cowboy Carter” and who Jon Caramanica already recommended to Amplifier readers earlier this month). But I hope it’s a start in expanding your view of country music beyond even the vast scope of “Cowboy Carter.”Let this be a reminder that Beyoncé is not a Lone Ranger. Other Black cowgirls have done the hard work of clearing the path, and there are plenty more riding alongside her, too.Show the world you’re a country girl,LindsayWe 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 Music

      Does Country Radio’s Treehouse Have Room for Beyoncé?

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      The pop superstar’s new album, “Cowboy Carter,” could be a litmus test for a format that’s long been inhospitable to women and Black artists.When Beyoncé dropped two songs during the Super Bowl in February, it was almost pointless to ask whether they would become pop-culture phenomena. She’s Beyoncé; of course they would scale the charts and inspire a thousand memes.But another, trickier question soon took shape, highlighting music’s complex genre and racial fault lines: Would country radio stations support Beyoncé’s new direction, with its plucked banjos, foot stomps and lyrics rhyming Texas and Lexus? Or would one of the world’s most influential stars languish in the margins of a format so inhospitable to female artists that, as one radio consultant advised in 2015, songs by women should be minimized on country playlists to ensure that “the tomatoes of our salad are the females”? (Even now, Nashville progressives seethe in remembrance of “Tomato-gate.”)In the wider pop music world, radio has largely ceded its former star-making mojo to streaming and social media. But country stations still retain a significant gatekeeping power, elevating favored performers and mediating the genre’s metes and bounds for audiences and the industry at large.With her latest album, “Cowboy Carter” — its cover depicts the star on a horse’s saddle, holding an American flag and decked out in a cowboy hat and red-white-and-blue rodeo gear — Beyoncé could be a litmus test for the format’s openness and adaptability. As many commentators see it, that goes for Beyoncé’s own music as well as for Black female country performers like Mickey Guyton and Rissi Palmer, who have found solid fan bases but barely cracked radio playlists.“This could be a major turning point,” said Leslie Fram, the senior vice president of music and talent for Country Music Television and a former radio programmer and D.J.Yet a month and a half after the debut of those two first singles, “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” and on the eve of the release of “Cowboy Carter” on Friday, the results of that test are still murky.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 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Stepping Out From Hillary Clinton’s Onscreen Shadow

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      For the past two decades, female presidential candidates on TV have been made in her image. Finally, that’s beginning to change.“The Girls on the Bus” is a fizzy recasting of the campaign-trail memoir “Chasing Hillary” by Amy Chozick, who covered the 2016 election for The New York Times. But it is not a show about Hillary Clinton. Immediately, it takes pains to banish her persona from the screen. The Democratic front-runner of the pilot episode is a governor named Caroline Bennett (Joanna Gleason), and though she is a baby boomer (check) in a pantsuit (check), she also writes romance novels under a pseudonym.It’s a very un-Hillary detail, and it foretells a very un-Hillary downfall. Shortly after Chozick’s reporter stand-in, Sadie McCarthy (Melissa Benoist), eagerly hops onto Bennett’s bus, she finds her candidate sidelined by a sex scandal (and not her husband’s).These are silly choices, and savvy ones. Only when Clinton’s baggage has been dumped is “The Girls on the Bus” free to repave the trail into an escapist romp. For the better part of two decades, Clinton has gripped the cultural imagination around the idea of a first female president. Hundreds of millions of Americans, of several generations, both supporters and critics, imagined it would be her. Screenwriters foresaw it, too. “The Girls on the Bus,” now streaming on Max, is one of the first shows about presidential politics that is forced to contend with her absence. But it can’t quite quit her.As Clinton ran and lost and ran and lost in the real world, television universes selected a succession of fictionalized Hillarys to occupy their replica Oval Offices. Clinton’s politics, her path, her bearing, her wardrobe, her haircut — these character details could be mirrored or mocked or refuted onscreen, but they could not be ignored. When Cherry Jones played the first female president on “24,” beginning in 2008, she told a reporter, unprompted: “She’s not Hillary. She has nothing to do with Hillary.” But when Lynda Carter played an (alien!) president on “Supergirl” in 2016, she said, “I used Hillary to prepare.”Caroline Bennett (Joanna Gleason) and Felicity Walker (Hettienne Park) on the campaign trail in “The Girls on the Bus.”HBOWe 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

      Taylor Tomlinson Is the Perfect Late-Night Host for The TikTok Era

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      ‘After Midnight’ is not a conventional late-night show with monologue, desk and A-list guests. But that may be a good thing.If you picture a modern late-night show, you’ll probably envision a heavy, glossy desk next to an armchair or a couch, with an artificial city vista twinkling behind them. A man, most likely a white man, dressed in a dark suit. Maybe a button-down with the sleeves casually rolled up, if that man’s name is Seth Meyers.“After Midnight,” a CBS late-night show that debuted in mid-January, is altogether different. Based on Comedy Central’s “@Midnight With Chris Hardwick,” “After Midnight” pits three celebrity panelists against one another in a series of games about the latest oddities of the internet. Its host, the 30-year-old stand-up comedian Taylor Tomlinson, described it as “the smartest comedy show about the dumbest things on the internet.” Indeed, “After Midnight” looks like the screen-addicted grandchild of “Jeopardy!,” with colorful pixelated designs floating behind the contestants’ lecterns. On Tomlinson’s right, like a glowing idol, is a gigantic phone-shaped screen that displays the videos and social-media posts that serve as fodder for the show’s jokes.The first episode of “After Midnight” elicited confusion and disappointment from some fans, who thought Tomlinson would be hosting a more traditional entertainment talk show, with an opening monologue and celebrity guests. She had, after all, taken over the time slot vacated by “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” which followed that format and ended last year. At least one commenter wondered if Tomlinson had been hoodwinked by the higher-ups at CBS. In a later episode, she explained that she had not been duped: “You think I want to ask Daniel Day-Lewis about preparing for his role as an 1800s Polish butcher? No! I want to make him do #fartsongs.” Still, “After Midnight” added a winking “Talk Show Portion,” in which the host asks each panelist silly questions, simultaneously trolling the trolls and poking fun at the promotional nature of the late-night celebrity interview. A question posed to the comedian Riki Lindhome is a breezy non sequitur, not selling anything: “Riki, did you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?”Tomlinson has emerged as one of her generation’s leading comedians; her third special, “Have It All,” was the sixth-most-watched English-language TV show on Netflix the week of its Feb. 13 debut. She’s known for her preparation and precision, with an affinity for crowd work that translates well into riffing with the contestants on her show. Tomlinson brings an easy confidence to “After Midnight,” and at its best, it feels like hanging out with a group of very funny friends. The internet is dumb and the joke parade is fun, but there is something heavier riding on “After Midnight.” That is, of course, the well-documented fact that Tomlinson is the lone woman headlining a late-night network show, a form historically dominated by men. Although a number of women have won a late-night slot in recent years, only a couple of their shows have lasted more than a few seasons. After a while, news coverage of their appointments tends to have a “Groundhog Day” effect. The title of “only woman in late night” sure has been applied to a lot of people.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