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      in Movies

      Times Analyzed 3,000 Videos of Capitol Riot for Documentary

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On Jan 6., as rioters were attacking the U.S. Capitol, Times journalists on the Visual Investigations team were downloading as many recordings of the violence as they could find.Over the next six months, the team, which combines traditional reporting techniques with forensic visual analysis, gathered over 3,000 videos, equaling hundreds of hours. The journalists analyzed, verified and pinpointed the location of each one, then distilled the footage into a 40-minute documentary that captured the fury and destruction moment by moment. The video, the longest the team has ever produced, provides a comprehensive picture of “a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect,” as a reporter says in the piece.The visual investigation, “Day of Rage,” which was published digitally on June 30 and which is part of a print special section in Sunday’s paper, comes as conservative lawmakers continue to minimize or deny the violence, even going as far as recasting the riot as a “normal tourist visit.” The video, in contrast, shows up-close a mob breaking through windows, the gruesome deaths of two women and a police officer crushed between doors.“In providing the definitive account of what happened that day, the piece serves to combat efforts to downplay it or to rewrite that history,” said Malachy Browne, a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team who worked on the documentary.“It serves the core mission of The Times, which is to find the truth and show it.”Haley Willis, a producer on the team who helped gather the footage, said that some of the searches required special techniques but that much of the content was easily accessible. Many of the videos came from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler, a platform that was popular with conservatives and later shut down. The team also collected recordings from journalists on the scene and police radio traffic, and went to court to unseal body camera footage.“Most of where we found this information was on platforms and places that the average person who has grown up on the internet would understand,” Ms. Willis said.In analyzing the videos, the team members verified the images, looked for specific individuals or groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and identified when and where each one was filmed. Then they put the videos on a timeline, which allowed them to reconstruct the scenes by the minute and track the key instigators.David Botti, a senior producer, said the team wanted to use this footage to explain how the riot happened, to underscore just how close the mob came to the lawmakers and to explore how much worse it could have gotten. For example, the investigation tracked the proximity of the rioters to former Vice President Mike Pence and an aide who was carrying the United States nuclear codes.“It’s rare to get an event of this magnitude that’s covered by so many cameras in so many places by so many different types of people filming with different agendas,” Mr. Botti said. “There was just so much video that someone needed to make sense of it.”Dmitriy Khavin, a video editor on the team, said he wanted viewers to feel like they were on the scene. But he also recognized the images were graphic, so he tried to modulate the pace with slower moments and other visual elements like maps and diagrams.“This event was overwhelming,” Mr. Khavin said. “So we worked a lot on trying to make it easier to process, so it’s not like you’re being bombarded and then tuning out.”Carrie Mifsud, an art director who designed the print special section, said her goal was similar, adding that she wanted to stay true to the video’s foundation. “For this project, it was the sequence and the full picture of events,” she said. Working with the graphics editors Bill Marsh and Guilbert Gates, she anchored the design in a timeline and included as many visuals and text from the documentary as possible to offer readers a bird’s-eye view of what happened.“My hope is that the special section can serve as a printed guide to what happened that day, where it started, and the aftermath, Ms. Mifsud said.For the journalists on the Visual Investigations team, it was challenging to shake off the work at the end of the day. Mr. Khavin said images of the riot would often appear in his dreams long after he stepped away from the computer.“You watch it so many times and look at these people and notice every detail and digest the anger,” he said. “It is difficult.” More

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      in Theater

      Review: Building a Better Girl in ‘Honestly Sincere’

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      Liza Birkenmeier’s new play about a shape-shifting teenager makes a fitting contribution to Theater in Quarantine’s revamp of the avant-garde.The gay liberation movement has defined the closet as a smothering, imprisoning space. But it can also be, during moments of transition and danger, a sheltering and even a freeing one.Or so we’ve learned this past year from Theater in Quarantine, the shoestring East Village company that since April 2020 has been producing marvelous live work from the 4-foot-by-8-foot box in which Joshua William Gelb used to store his winter coats. In dozens of plays, performance pieces and dance theater amalgams, Gelb and his collaborators have been repurposing spatial and safety restrictions to build a valuable new outpost of the avant-garde.As it happens, refuge and transformation are the animating ideas behind the company’s latest offering: “Honestly Sincere,” a charming, edgy new play by Liza Birkenmeier that not only streams from a closet but is also set in one. There among her pink and gray tops, 13-year-old Greta Hemberger makes a series of calls on her mother’s cellphone that in their intimacy and awkwardness seem to encompass the whole of early teenage girlhood in one breathless caress.Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, Greta even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”Katie Rose McLaughlin, via Theater in QuarantineIt’s only natural that Greta retreats to her closet; on the cusp of so many kinds of self-discovery, she is also something of a self-embarrassment. She has not, for instance, gotten the role she sought in her school’s production of “Bye Bye Birdie” — the role of Albert, that is, the male lead. But in her private Sweet Apple, she can appear to herself (and to us) as if she had: Played by Gelb, in a gray suit and striped tie, she even tap dances to “Put On a Happy Face.”And when she calls a friend known only as F (Remi Elberg), she can rehearse real-life personalities too. F won’t mock her for saying pretentious, possibly meaningless things like “I am no longer a bodied animal I am only an effect.” She’ll merely continue the conversation as if nothing more than a burp had interrupted it.This is all very strange and adorable, but Birkenmeier, whose terrific full-length play “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” displayed a similar crafty delicacy, isn’t about to waste time even in a 30-minute sketch. Nor is Greta; she soon gets to the point with F, which is to obtain the phone number of Ethan Blum, a boy she hopes to invite to a dance even though he has a quasi-girlfriend and is probably gay.If her conversation with the adenoidal Ethan (Alexander Bello) weren’t so sweet and hilarious, you would probably be annoyed on his behalf when you realize that Greta is really calling to talk to his older sister Sabel (Hailey Lynn Elberg) on the flimsiest of excuses. She now tries on yet a new personality, a sophisticate prone to gibberish like “diligence is deeply tragic and maybe even unjust,” while still thrilling to the possibility of having a 17-year-old help with her makeup if not with her math.This is all so beautifully acted under the direction of Gelb and Katie Rose McLaughlin that I forgot that the characters, except for Greta, are disembodied voices on the other end of her phone. And even Greta, in a way, is disembodied, piped as she is through Gelb’s rather fearless 36-year-old cisgender maleness.Whether Greta is cisgender or gay or something else is unclear — probably to her, as well; she’s 13. But in “Honestly Sincere” (the title is taken from another “Bye Bye Birdie” song), Birkenmeier is less interested in pinning down identity than in tracing the lovely way a girl in the comfort of her chosen safe space (and with the help of her chosen technology and friends) sets out to discover it.Which brings us back to Theater in Quarantine and its own chosen space, technology and friends. I’ve not usually been a fan of the avant-garde, which too often strikes me as intellectualized and chilly, fogged in a machismo musk. But these closet productions, fully odd though they may be, are nearly always warmer, more penetrating and more speculative in exploring gender than the works of the old-school male gurus.It matters that so many of them — including Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” and Madeleine George’s lovely “Mute Swan” — are written by women. Their characters, even when embodied by a man, seem safe enough in the cozy closet to represent and thus honor more than just themselves.Honestly SincereOn the Theater in Quarantine YouTube page More

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      in Music

      Camilo’s Hemisphere-Spanning Pop

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCamilo’s Hemisphere-Spanning PopWith indelibly catchy songs, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter from Colombia has conquered an international audience. A new album, “Mis Manos,” may bring him even more fresh ears.Camilo’s new album, “Mis Manos,” is determinedly grateful, trans-nationally eclectic and strategically unadorned.Credit…Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York TimesPublished More

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      in Television

      How This Comedian Came to Embrace Her Deafness

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      How This Comedian Came to Embrace Her Deafnessvia Jessica FloresJessica Flores, a comedian and improv performer, went from hiding her hearing loss to posting YouTube videos about it.I recently spoke with Flores about channelling her lighthearted nature to spread awareness. Here’s what she told me → More

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      in Television

      Lilly Singh’s Week: Pixar’s ‘Soul’ and ’90s Bollywood

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLilly Singh’s Week: Pixar’s ‘Soul’ and ’90s BollywoodThe host of “A Little Late With Lilly Singh” spends her downtime watching movies and trying to be more savvy with news sources.The comedian Lilly Singh on her personal basketball court at home in Los Angeles. Credit…Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesJan. 5, 2021, 10:42 a.m. ETA decade ago, the comedian Lilly Singh started making videos out of her parents’ house in Scarborough, an inner suburb of Toronto. She swiftly attracted viewers with her vibrant, goofy impersonations, many to do with diasporic Punjabi family dynamics, embedded in comedic sketches.Her YouTube channel may boast nearly 15 million subscribers, but these days Singh’s bona fides come from a different space. In 2019, she was the first openly bisexual woman of color to front a late night show (“A Little Late With Lilly Singh”) as well as a first among YouTube phenoms. She’d done the impossible: made it out of the bedrooms of internet-addicted kids and into the bedrooms of their parents. But the late night format isn’t quite right for the D.I.Y. star. Season 2, which premieres Jan. 11 on NBC, leaves behind the standard couch-and-desk setup for a set in a house that will allow her to move and experiment. She released a statement about her hope to get more goofy and authentic. And she’s backed by an all-new staff, after a season that drew mixed reviews.She’s going back, in a sense. These days, she’s shooting her YouTube videos in her own house in Los Angeles. (A byproduct of making millions while being a good Punjabi kid who lives at home is you can eventually move out.) “I have gone full circle,” she said about her latest parody videos — a recent one tracks a woman on a Zoom date. “The pandemic forced me to go back to my roots of shooting by myself, editing the video, doing all the lights and sound and camera stuff that I used to do. Building the tripod on books like I used to do.”Lately Singh has been examining her priorities. At 32, she’s on the cusp of a time in adulthood that might inspire a reconsideration of quick success. The solitude perhaps enhances the moment. This year marked the longest she has gone without seeing her family. “I’m sure people can relate when I say I’ve been in a state of numbness,” she said with a laugh. “And confusion, and being lost. But I also think there has been this kind of sweet silver lining, a little bit. I learned what actually matters. Before, I was on autopilot.”On set, she has been inspired by small hacks: a face mask designed to not smudge her makeup, the know-how of an on-site Covid-19 compliance officer. “He would measure out the dimensions of the house and based on that, on the spot, would be like, ‘OK, four people could be in this room,’” she said. “That we’ve figured out what could be the safest way to do this is really impressive to me. Being like: ‘Hey, we’re not going to stop telling stories. We will somehow adapt.’”In a phone call from Studio City in Los Angeles, Singh tracked her cultural diary for a few days in late December, which included plenty of comfort watching, and Bollywood listening. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.SaturdayI turned on my TV and I saw “Wonder Woman 1984” everywhere. I’m not going to lie: I didn’t even know it was coming out. But I loved it. The first time I saw [the first] Wonder Woman in the theater, I was sitting behind a row of girls who were in tears.“The Lost World: Jurassic Park” is actually trending on Netflix, which is why I watched it, apparently with millions of other people. I love “Jurassic Park,” the entire franchise, so so much.As a person who grew up in an Indian culture, I feel like I watch “Big Mouth” because it seems so far from what I was allowed to be like as a kid. I watch it like, Oh my god, this is so bad. They’re so crude. My parents never had those talks with me, and I never learned about that stuff in school. So for me it’s just like a vicarious redoing of childhood.I really like ’80s and ’90s Bollywood. “Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!” “Pardes.” If you go really, really back — “Ishq” (1997), with Aamir Khan. Old school. I have a very long playlist that I, true story, spent three to four hours making a couple of weeks ago. I have two: Bollywood Chill and Bollywood Dance. I listen, like, if I’m in the shower, if I am cleaning my room, if I’m washing the dishes, if I’m cooking.Singh on “Big Mouth,” Netflix’s animated series about puberty: “For me it’s just like a vicarious redoing of childhood.”Credit…Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesI deleted social media off my phone many many months ago, so I don’t have anywhere to mindlessly scroll. However, if I do have a spare second, I check out the Deadline app — probably every morning and every night. I like to know what’s going on in film and TV.SundayI decided to watch the original “Karate Kid.” Over the holidays, I also rewatched “Home Alone.” When you rewatch these older movies, it’s a whole new experience! There’s so many jokes and scenes and references that I did not understand as a child but when you rewatch them it’s so enjoyable.I haven’t watched it yet — but “Selena” just premiered on Netflix a little while ago. Of course, I knew [her] songs growing up, but I wasn’t too familiar with the Spanish ones, and I’ve just become obsessed. It’s just such feel-good, amazing music.I had no idea what Pixar’s “Soul” was about, and I was blown away. I thought it was so well executed, and visually stunning. The character was just so lovable. It could have very well been a real person that was not animated, someone I would have met on the street.A lot of the reading I’ve done over the past weekend has been related to Season 2 of my show.I have this rule for Season 2, where to the best of my ability, I do not want to talk about things or interview people or discuss projects unless I actually genuinely know them. I have no desire this season to fake knowing things or fake seeing things. I think it’s so inauthentic, and I don’t want to do it anymore. So, to the best of my ability, I’m going to try to watch every single thing I reference, which is why I started watching “The Queen’s Gambit.” I am hooked.I’m a big fan of these days of watching things without any context. I don’t like to watch trailers or anything. I just like to be thrown in, and that’s exactly what happened with this. I know nothing about chess. But I think it’s a cool story, and I think the actress is brilliant. I’m a big believer of supporting stories and projects that feature strong women.I subscribed to The Skimm. My manager right now, Kyle — he introduced me to it. I love the way it’s literally a skim of the news. You can be in the know without feeling all of the stress of the world on your shoulders.Most DaysBecause I’m not the most savvy with news sources, especially coming out of India, I’ve been following @sikhexpo a lot, which is an Instagram account. When you’re not on the ground somewhere it’s easy for misinformation to spread, and especially with things like the farmer protest, where it’s not covered by the media as thoroughly as it could be, they’ve been a great resource for me to learn what’s happening on the ground.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Television

      Best Comedy of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBest Comedy of 2020Comedians like Leslie Jones, Chelsea Handler and Hannibal Buress adjusted to the new abnormal, turning to Zoom, YouTube, rooftops and parks.The pandemic halted most live performance but comedians adjusted and adapted. Clockwise from bottom left: Leslie Jones, Eddie Pepitone, John Wilson and Ziwe Fumudoh.Credit…Clockwise from bottom left: Rahim Fortune for The New York Times; Troy Conrad; HBO; Chase Hall for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020, 5:59 p.m. ETThe comedy boom finally busted. Not only did the pandemic shut down comedy institutions, but New York clubs like Dangerfield’s, which was half a century old, and the stalwart The Creek & the Cave closed for good, as did the city’s branches of the improv powerhouse, the Upright Citizens Brigade. At the same time, comedians adjusted to the new abnormal, transitioning to Zoom and Instagram Live, and to shows in parks and on rooftops. It was a period of experimentation and stagnancy, contraction and accessibility, despair and occasional joy. In a low year, here were the highlights:Funniest SpecialDo you find an angry blue-collar guy yelling about being high on molly funny? Does the phrase “Stalin on Spotify” amuse you? Do pivots from ragingly unhinged roars to an NPR voice make you lose your breath in laughter? No? Not to worry: Eddie Pepitone will still delight. An overlooked master of the form, he’s perfected a persona of the silly grump that makes anything funny. Smart comedy that aims for the gut, his new special (available on Amazon Prime) is titled “For the Masses,” but he jokes that is by necessity, in one of several insults of his audience: “I would be doing jokes about Dostoyevsky if it wasn’t for you.”After leaving “Saturday Night Live” in 2019, Leslie Jones had a viral year that included the Netflix special “Time Machine.”Credit…Bill Gray/NetflixBest Complaint About 20-SomethingsLeslie Jones made the most of her first year after “Saturday Night Live.” Not only did she go viral roasting the clothes, furniture and décor of cable news talking heads in social media videos, but she made a dynamite Netflix special, “Time Machine,” where she castigated today’s young people for failing to have fun. “Every 20-year-old’s night,” she preached, “should end with glitter and cocaine.”Best 20-Something CounterAbout six weeks after the release of Jones’s special, the breakout young comic Taylor Tomlinson made an impressive Netflix debut with “Quarter-Life Crisis”; in it, she says she’s sick of people telling her to enjoy her 20s. “They’re not fun,” she said exasperated, in one of many cleverly crafted bits. “They’re 10 years of asking myself: Will I outgrow this or is this a problem?”Best Opening GambitBy describing her special in detail, beat by beat, at the start of Netflix’s “Douglas” — Hannah Gadsby’s follow-up to “Nanette” — she seemed to be eliminating the most important element of comedy: surprise. But like Penn & Teller deconstructing the secrets of magic while hiding some new ones, she just found a new way to fool you.In his YouTube special “Miami Nights,” Hannibal Buress told a story about an encounter with a police officer that led to his arrest.Credit…Isola Man MediaBest Closing StoryIn his funniest and most stylish special, “Miami Nights,” on YouTube, Hannibal Buress ended on a 20-minute story about an unsettling encounter with a police officer in Miami that led to his arrest. It’s a master class in comic storytelling that sent himself up, skewered the police, hit bracingly topical notes with throwaway charm while adding on a coda that provided the visceral pleasures of payback. It’s stand-up with the spirit of a Tarantino movie.Best Silver LiningOne nice side effect of the shutdown for live comedy is that in transitioning to digital, local shows became accessible to everyone with an internet connection. So it was a nostalgic treat that the weekly Los Angeles showcase Hot Tub, which pioneered weird comedy in New York before moving to the West Coast, once again became part of my comedy diet, via Twitch. While there were many new faces, much hadn’t changed, like the eclectic and adventurous booking and the dynamite chemistry of its hosts Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler.Best Alfresco SpecialStreet comedy, a subgenre of some legend, was all but dead when the pandemic pushed stand-up outdoors. By the fall, several comics, like Chelsea Handler and Colin Quinn, even made specials there, working crowds whose laughter did not echo against walls. The sharpest was “Up on the Roof” by the workhorse comic Sam Morril (it’s his second punchline-dense special of the year), the rare person to translate New York club comedy to rooftops (with the help of cameras on drones).Cole Escola portrays a cabaret performer in his YouTube special, “Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola.”Credit…Cole EscolaBest Sketch ComicWhen comedic dynamo Cole Escola produced his own special featuring deliriously bizarre characters wrapped in pitch-perfect genre spoofs, and released it on YouTube under the title “Help! I’m Stuck! With Cole Escola,” he was surely not trying to embarrass networks and streaming services for never placing him at the center of his own show. But that’s what he did.Best New Talk ShowThe charismatic Ziwe Fumudoh has long been comfortable creating and sitting in the tension between the comedian and the audience in small alt rooms, but in her interview show on Instagram, she repurposed this gift for cringe and applied it to probing conversations on racism with guests like Caroline Calloway and Alison Roman. It made for essential viewing during a protest-filled summer.Best Siblings“I Hate Suzie” provided serious competition, but the best British comic import this year was “Stath Lets Flats,” which found a home on HBO Max. This brilliantly observed office comedy focuses on the mundane travails of an awful real estate agent and his sister. Jamie Demetriou (who created the show) starred, along with his real-life sister Natasia, better known in the United States because of her dynamite deadpan in the FX vampire comedy “What We Do in the Shadows.” The show is cringe comedy whose beating heart comes from their relationship. Look out Sedaris siblings. A new talent family has arrived.The stand-up comic Beth Stelling released a special on HBO Max titled “Girl Daddy.”Credit…HBO MaxBest Debut SpecialThe stand-up comic Beth Stelling’s pinned tweet is from 2015: “I’ve been called a ‘female comic’ so many times, I’ll probably only be able to answer to ‘girl daddy’ when I have children.” This year, she released a knockout special on HBO Max titled “Girl Daddy.” It’s a virtuosic performance, conversational while dense with jokes — with a portrait of her father, an actor who works as a pirate at an Orlando mini-golf course, that manages to be scathing, loving and sort of over it, all at the same time.Best Experimental ComedyIt’s a good sign for adventurous work that last year’s winner (Natalie Palamides’s solo shocker “Nate”) is now a Netflix special. But the revelation this year was HBO’s “How To With John Wilson,” a kind of reality show about New York City that pushed formal boundaries while unearthing the hidden and the overlooked in poignant, funny new ways.Best DirectionIn one of her final projects, Lynn Shelton masterfully shot the latest Marc Maron special “End Times Fun,” on Netflix, demonstrating that great direction doesn’t need to be about showy camera movements. Her shot sequences emphasized and played against Maron’s jokes, working together effortlessly, like dancing partners that intimately know each other’s moves. Two months later, in May, she died of a blood disorder. Memorializing her movingly on his podcast, Maron, her boyfriend, said: “I was better in Lynn Shelton’s gaze.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More