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Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Sequel Arrives in a Different America—and Works Even Better Than ...

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 14:36:22 GMT

We think we want humor to be safe, as we want most things in life to be safe. But good humor can sometimes cut. The point is to make us uncomfortable, to make us wonder—in that space of floating time right after we blurt out a laugh—if Funny Person X, whoever that might be, has gone too far this time, has crossed the threshold into terrible taste or, worse, cruelty. Thinking too much about how and whether a joke works is a good way to knead it into right into oblivion. But sometimes, asking after the fact, “Why did I laugh at that?” is the best way to take our own temperature in the here and now, maybe even to see what needs to change in ourselves or the world around us.

I laughed and laughed through every joke of questionable taste and possible rudeness in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. And then I laughed some more. Some of this was bitter laughter at the way our intrepid Kazakhstan reporter Borat Sagdiyev—an alter-ego of Sacha Baron Cohen, returning, after 14 years, with a sequel to Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan—reveals ugly and unruly truths about contemporary American culture. Some was mildly shameful laughter, as I thought of Michelle Obama’s entreaty to go high when others go low: was I going too low by laughing at Cohen’s undercover skewering of fervent QAnon believers, racist alt-righters, moneyed white Southerners enjoying a debutante ball and, last but surely not least, a lascivious Rudy Giuliani? Other times I laughed simply because I was awestruck. A fertility dance executed during a female character’s time of the “moon blood,” as Borat puts it? There is no sequence like this anywhere else on film—the only thing I can think of that comes close in its audaciousness is the tampon teabag in Catherine Breillat’s 2004 Anatomy of Hell. I laughed til I wept.

The 2006 Borat: Cultural Learnings made Cohen—an English-born, Cambridge-educated actor and satirist who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the American Civil Rights Movement—a very famous man. It also caused many to question his techniques. Posing as a hapless yet overconfident reporter from an aggressively underdeveloped country (the nation of Kazakhstan could hardly have been happy about that), Cohen’s Borat, a kind of naïf-bully in an ill-fitting gray suit and cheap loafers, had gained access to his subjects through rather dubious means. By making them think they’d be appearing in a documentary, Cohen lured both regular Americans (many, but not all, from the South or the Midwest) and powerful ones (like former Congressman Bob Barr, of Georgia) into his snare. As Borat, he’d earn his subjects’ confidence and get them to agree with his homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic or otherwise bigoted rhetoric. He exposed Americans at their worst, even beneath their friendly veneer. But even if many of Cohen’s subjects deserved what they got, there were streaks of cruelty in his approach. Some of the people he’d punked had been incredibly kind to him, opening their homes to the awkward, blundering journo from another land, even giving him advice on how to use toilet paper. The 2006 takeaway from Borat: Cultural Learnings was that Americans can be terrible—and yet, even so, sometimes generous.

In the time since, we Americans elected a charismatic, principled statesman as president, twice; he also happened to be the country’s first Black president, breaking a barrier that, some thought, would be the beginning of the end of racism in America. We followed up that eight-year streak by electing a down-at-the-heels television star who’d bamboozled the public into thinking he was a successful billionaire, a man who has failed to denounce white supremacists, instituted policies that put children in cages, used his office to run roughshod over the rule of law, and caused through his negligence and disregard for science the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. Somehow, in 2020, Cohen-as-Borat’s approach—of going out into the world and teasing out threads of bigotry and hypocrisy in ordinary American citizens, as well as some not-so-ordinary ones—seems less cruel than it did in 2006. Which says more about us than it does about Cohen.

So, yes, I laughed, from the very beginning of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. (The film’s director—or perhaps ringleader is a better word—is Jason Woliner.) Borat kicks off the film by explaining, in voiceover, his post-2006 fate: Because he failed in his mission to make benefit once glorious nation of Kazakhstan—a goal that, in retrospect, seems like a futuristic satirical blast at the MAGA slogan—he has spent the last 14 years sentenced to hard labor. But the country’s premier, upset that he’s been left out of the Big Boys’ club of Trump, Putin, Kim Jong-un, Bolsonaro, et al, frees Borat so he can send him on a special mission: to earn the American president’s respect, Borat will deliver a special gift to Vice President Mike Pence. Spoiler: It’s a monkey. Borat, happy to be freed from the gulag, spruces himself up, packs his best tighty-whiteys and heads back to America. But an accident occurs en route: the special gift monkey, who’d been shipped in his own deluxe crate, is DOA. And inside the crate there is also a stowaway: Borat’s 15-year-old daughter, Tutar (played by a marvelous newcomer, Maria Bakalova), a near-feral child who idolizes the woman she calls Princess Melania. Tutar longs to be, like Melania, a princess in a golden cage—which is not such a big dream, considering the movie’s running gag concerning the Kazakhstan Ministry of Agriculture and Wildlife’s recommendation that women be kept in cages most of the time.

Amazon Prime VideoSacha Baron Cohen in ‘Borat Subsequent MovieFilm’

Tutar has been nothing but a disappointment to Borat—back home, he’d berated her, calling her “the oldest unmarried woman in Kazakhstan.” But knowing he’ll be executed if he returns home having failed in his mission, he decides to groom Tutar as a gift to Pence. And as it turns out, she is a much better present than a monkey: Tutar becomes a babe, a manufactured bombshell with harsh blond hair and smoky black eye makeup. Borat takes her shopping, asking the saleswoman to direct them to the “No means yes” section. He escorts her to an old-fashioned southern cotillion, to learn how young women should be properly presented to society. (It is here that the aforementioned fertility dance takes place—consider this a warning.) Soon thereafter, he learns that Pence will be speaking nearby. Dressed as the man he calls McDonald Trump, with requisite fat suit, he sneaks into the Conservative Political Action Conference with his daughter slung over his shoulder, jubilantly announcing his intentions: “Michael Pen-is! I brought the girl for you!”

For this scene, Cohen really did interrupt Pence’s remarks at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland, this past February. (The “woman” slung over his shoulder was in reality a life-size doll, and he was escorted from the venue by security.) In real life, as in the movies, Borat is too famous to walk around in his trademark gray suit, so in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, he dons an array of disguises: dressed in farmer’s overalls and a shaggy fake beard, he shows up at an alt-right rally. (Again, this was a real-life rally, in Olympia, Washington, crashed by Cohen in June. It’s worth noting that much of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was shot during the pandemic, and although Borat is maskless through nearly all of it, the film’s credits do include a COVID-compliance officer.) From the stage, Borat leads the crowd in a song that advocates injecting “the Wuhan flu” into Barack Obama, Anthony Fauci, and anyone who wears a mask to prevent the spread of COVID. He ups the stakes in a subsequent chorus, getting the crowd to laugh and sing along as he advocates that journalists be chopped up, “like the Saudis do.” You could argue that Cohen is riling up the crowd under false pretenses. But if these pretenses are false, what would the proper ones be? This poison is already coursing through these ralliers’ veins; Cohen-as-Borat is just drawing it out.

There’s poison everywhere. Tutar, emboldened by the freedoms on offer to American women, reinvents herself as a television journalist and snags an interview with Rudy Giuliani—the real Rudy Giuliani—who by all appearances seems ready to succumb to her charms. She flirts with him conspicuously, yet also in a rather unschooled way. He laps at the bait, almost literally.

Cohen isn’t solely fixated on ugliness. Borat finds some American generosity too: Dressed as an exaggerated and clearly anti-Semitic idea of Jew—with pointed talons, devil wings and an elaborately crooked and elongated nose—he slips into a synagogue, where two women, despite his clearly wackadoodle appearance, greet him with warmth and kindness. One of these women, Judith Dim Evans, died as the movie was being completed, and Cohen honors her with a mention at the end of the credits. In just one staggering example of how easily Cohen’s intent can be misread—he himself is an observant Jew and an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism and Holocaust deniers—Evans’ family, without having seen the film, has filed a lawsuit against him. They claim that Evans was tricked into participating in a documentary that mocks “the Holocaust and Jewish culture.”

Cohen must know from experience that he’s playing with fire. So why does he again stick his hand right in it, 14 years later? Now isn’t just the right time for a Borat sequel; it may be the only time. In 2006 Cohen’s skewering of Kazakhstan as an economically and socially backwards country seemed like a cheap shot. But now America is itself a country facing backwards, the kind of democratically challenged nation we used to look down upon with pity. That reality isn’t lost on Cohen, and it shouldn’t be lost on us, either. If Borat Subsequent Moviefilm makes you laugh, what does your laughter say about you? My laughter told me—reminded me—how angry I am. As 2020 rounds to a close, I have zero sympathy for white Americans who are happy to show kindness to a stranger—just as long as that stranger, too, is white. I have zero tolerance for a presidential lackey who’d do anything he could to derail an election. And I have zero use for racist thugs whose greatest fear is that their guns will be taken away from them. If Sacha Baron Cohen gets you singing along joyfully to a phony racist, anti-journalist, anti-science anthem, then the joke is on you. And it ought to be.

Bill Murray and Rashida Jones Match Each Other Beat for Beat in Sofia Coppola’s Wistful On ...

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 12:58:09 GMT

Very rarely is there pleasure to be had in anxiety, except, sometimes, in the movies, where a smart filmmaker can brush it with just enough glitter dust to draw us in. In Sofia Coppola’s wistful New York fairytale-caper On the Rocks, Rashida Jones plays Laura, a New Yorker with a problem: she has what appears to be a dream marriage—to Dean, a thoughtful husband and successful businessguy, played by Marlon Wayans—and two audaciously adorable little girls. But she thinks Dean might be cheating on her with one of his co-workers. Everything feels a little out of whack: she’s a writer, but her next book is stuck in nowheresville. And she thinks, maybe, that she’s become boring, a woman pushing 40 who’s left all her dazzle behind her.

Into this picture steps a man whose dazzle just keeps dazzling, unaffected by age, a globe-trotting playboy and semi-retired art dealer who travels with supplies of takeout caviar and thinks nothing of whipping up dinner-spoiling egg creams for his grandkids. That man is Laura’s father, Felix, played by Bill Murray. Felix is overprotective yet emotionally irresponsible; at the merest suggestion that his daughter might need him, he swoops in to help, only to come close to taking over her life.

That’s the essential plot of On the Rocks: There’s no tortured drama, no grand revelation. The movie is funny in the gentlest way, and how could it not be? Coppola’s script is built around Murray’s deadpan savoir faire, with Jones’ forthright radiance as a foil. But with this, as with all of Coppola’s pictures, it’s the layering of details that counts, the accretion of sly but not minor observations that come to form the whole, like the stippled strokes of a Seurat painting. Laura and Dean have money, and Laura also comes from money: Her office is a bare, breezy, loftlike room with floor-to-ceiling windows, almost like an inside-joke version of a writer’s ideal office. Virtually no one who writes for a living could afford this kind of real estate, but that’s precisely the point—Laura doesn’t need to write for a living. Her work is part of her identity, but the movie isn’t about that kind of struggle. Instead, this is a clever and dexterous look at the way modern life, even a cushy modern life, can throw tricky curve balls—and a reminder that having money never protects you from loneliness and confusion.

Apple TV+Marlon Wayans and Rashida Jones in ‘On the Rocks’

Laura knows her husband loves her, but she also feels forgotten. The movie opens with a look back at the couple’s wedding in some exquisite, probably European hotel; they sneak away from the party to find a tucked-away marble swimming pool. Dean is the first one in, and he waits for her. She strips down to her wedding veil and little else and makes the jump, a metaphor for the seductive adventure of marriage if ever there were one. But that scene is only a flashback fragment. Most of the movie takes place in Laura’s here and now. Dean is preoccupied with work, and she’s left, mostly, to chase after the kids, to hustle the older one off to school, to get the two of them tucked into bed. She loves it all, but she feels self-doubt creeping in around the edges, and that uncertainty seeps into her life with Dean.

Laura knows better than to confess that apprehension to Felix, who has just swept into town, his big personality in tow. He and Laura’s mother have been long divorced, and late in the film, we get some sense of the pain he caused when he cracked the family apart. But his love for Laura is never in doubt. When, even against her better judgment, she confides her troubles to him, he peppers her with unwanted advice. “You need to start thinking like a man,” he tells her. She responds with an eye roll that suggests she’s seen it all, though she never lets him off the hook. Her skepticism about his crazy disco-ball worldview is part of their dynamic, and he clearly loves it. Felix specializes in outlandish pronouncements about romantic relationships: as the two sit down for lunch at a fancy gentleman’s club, he offers an especially amusing, if chauvinistic, explanation of how the fair sex came to be attractive to men. (A chief factor is their lack of facial hair.) When he steers the conversation off-course, or toward himself, which is often—“Did I ever tell you about the Rockette I dated?”—Laura tugs him back like an ace shepherd retrieving a wayward sheep. But while Laura only has a vague fear that Dean might be cheating on her, Felix is so protective that he immediately assumes the worst. His best quality is also his worst; he ends up sweeping Laura further into a cobwebby corner of doubt, rather than helping her see her way out.

Apple TV+Rashida Jones and Bill Murray play daughter and father in ‘On the Rocks’

The tension between Felix and Laura is part of their magic together, but it also reminds Laura why she’s made the choices she has. That’s cemented in the movie’s final scene, a marvelous example of Coppola’s delicate touch, and a reminder that the world of a couple’s marriage is theirs alone to create. But Dean—though he’s played by Wayans with affable sensitivity—is largely absent from this story. It belongs mostly to Felix and Laura, and Jones and Murray step into these roles with puddle-jumping agility and grace. Anyone who has seen Coppola’s early signature film Lost in Translation (2003) has some sense of the affinity between Coppola and Murray. His lines come at you sideways, hitting maybe just a little left of center—but they always hit. His indirect directness is a lot like Coppola’s; instead of forcing a movie into shape, she gives the impression that everything has just settled into place of its own accord, even if that’s that’s hardly the reality. Here, Murray is a rogue charmer, a bamboozler extraordinaire. But he also shows us Felix’s ability to enjoy life on a surprisingly granular level: Felix has sent Laura an impossibly lush bouquet of roses for her birthday (Dean is on a business trip and won’t be there to celebrate with her), and when he spots them on her counter, he leans in for a deep whiff, snorting like a contented piglet. And Jones, a vibrant and perceptive actor, matches Murray beat for beat. When he zigs, she zags, challenging him to follow. Their dance has a prickly, electric warmth.

And for the space of this movie, the city of New York is both theirs and ours. Coppola and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd show us a place that’s half real and half dreamy, a kind of early-Woody Allen-style reverie without any of Allen’s bitterness. By day, even the ordinary sights Laura passes as she’s zipping about—drugstores and dry-cleaners, bodegas and shoe-repair shops—glow with workaday vitality. At night, the city lights splash out in Jolly Rancher colors. At one point Felix whisks Laura off to the Bemelmans Bar for a drink: the walls, painted in soft tones with rabbits going about their anthropomorphic business, with schoolchildren lined up for an outing, with well-groomed gents lounging on park benches, form a kind of cozy jewel box, only it’s a jewel box for people. The New York of On the Rocks is a place where you can feel both special and lonely, with no contradiction between the two. It’s a place that always has you stretching toward something just out of reach, until you realize that the life you have in your hands, with all its random bumps and shaggy edges, is the treasure of real value.

HBO Really Wants Another Big Little Lies. The Undoing Isn’t It

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 12:00:28 GMT

Big Little Lies was the right show at the right time. A glossy, star-packed, surprisingly smart murder mystery, it appeared just as it seemed HBO was devolving into the Game of Thrones channel and proved that the brand The Sopranos built could still spin character-driven drama into a cultural phenomenon. Network executives responded by doing what network executives always do: they tried to replicate it. A miniseries adapted from the novel by Liane Moriarty, it delighted fans with a renewal that was never supposed to happen; Meryl Streep joined the cast for the not-bad but not-necessary 2019 sequel. Meanwhile, between the two seasons, HBO hired Lies season 1 director Jean-Marc Vallée to helm another show based on a best-selling whodunit, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, featuring another A-list, female-led cast. It was a fantastic adaptation, more potent and profound than its predecessor, albeit a bit too dark for viewers craving more Monterey moms.

For a while now, critical and awards darling Succession has filled the role of HBO’s breakout drama. But that doesn’t mean the network is done trying to reverse-engineer another Lies. Its latest attempt, premiering Oct. 25, is The Undoing. Based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel You Should Have Known, the six-part psychological thriller reunites Lies mastermind David E. Kelley—as creator, writer and showrunner—with star Nicole Kidman. Once again, there’s a big-deal cast and a name director (Susanne Bier of The Night Manager and Bird Box fame). The story features rich, gossipy moms and an elite school and a slowly escalating murder investigation. Yet this time, neither the sharp performances nor the lush window dressing can save scripts littered with predictable plot twists, hoary genre clichés, thin supporting characters and relatively little to say.

Kidman plays Grace Fraser, a Manhattan therapist who has everything going for her: a charming pediatric oncologist husband (Hugh Grant), a curly-headed preteen son (Noah Jupe from A Quiet Place), a super-rich financier father (Donald Sutherland), a multimillion-dollar Upper East Side home and a gaggle of similarly fortunate friends in her fellow Reardon School mothers. A notch wealthier, smarter, more attractive and, by virtue of their respective professions, more outwardly virtuous than the other impressive couples in their circle, the Frasers clearly pride themselves on their self-awareness about the snobbery of that cohort. Into this idyll crashes Elena Alves (Italian actor Matilda De Angelis), a new Reardon parent from—gasp—Harlem who quickly becomes the talk of the fundraising committee. Young, sexy and free enough with her body to whip out a breast and feed her infant in the middle of a meeting, she fascinates Grace, the only mom who offers her anything like a warm welcome.

Niko Tavernise/HBOMatilda De Angelis in ‘The Undoing’

Elena is magnetic; the sexual tension between her and Grace is immediate and almost oppressive, as the younger woman’s tempestuous, exhibitionistic behavior appears to activate her new acquaintance’s professional, psychological curiosity as well as her infatuation. Before that story line has a chance to develop, however, Elena’s older child (Edan Alexander) discovers her dead, the victim of a savage murder. To Grace’s shock and horror, the husband with whom she’s built such an enviable life is identified as the prime suspect. Grant’s character Jonathan has, it turns out, been carrying on an affair with Elena since long before the two women met. By the time law enforcement starts searching for him, Jonathan is nowhere to be found. Is it remotely possible that this guy didn’t do it? And, either way, how could a smart therapist so fully misread her own husband?

The setup feels too familiar: Big Little Lies also placed a young mother (Shailene Woodley) in an older, more moneyed female milieu—a plot catalyst rooted in one man’s horrible secret. As she did in that show, Kidman embodies a character who vacillates between insight and self-delusion, porcelain-doll fragility and quiet determination. She plays this kind of role so startlingly well, with such haunted, heartbreaking physicality, that it’s hard to object to what probably, by now, qualifies as typecasting. The same goes for Sutherland, whose refined, patrician yet selectively vicious patriarch, Franklin Reinhardt, represents a minor variation on his portrayals of J. Paul Getty in FX’s Trust and President Snow in The Hunger Games movies.

But it’s Grant who makes the strongest argument for watching what is, outside of the acting and the top-shelf wealth porn (Grace’s outerwear budget alone must rival New York City’s median annual income), a pretty mediocre show. He imbues Jonathan with the same witty, self-deprecating charm that made the actor such a sensation in the romantic comedies of the ’90s—not to mention got Grant off the hook with the public after a deeply unromantic 1995 arrest, in time to make the prototypical rom-com of the era, 1999’s Notting Hill. All the layers of his image are present in this performance, one that understands the effect Grant has on audiences and so seduces us just as it does Grace. Jonathan might be a classic, caddish but ultimately lovable Hugh Grant character, the kind whose flaws are limited to philandering. Then again, he might be a much darker sort of man who’s deceiving his family with an extremely convincing Hugh Grant act.

David Giesbrecht/HBODonald Sutherland and Nicole Kidman in ‘The Undoing’

When he and Kidman are on screen together, The Undoing sometimes achieves the riveting tension that eludes it elsewhere. For the most part, though, the show is weighed down by both lazy writing and an overabundance of similar crime stories in pop culture. Grace and Jonathan aside, the characters are under-developed to an extent that feels, in the context of a murder mystery, almost like cheating. In the five episodes screened for critics, we spend time with a detective (Edgar Ramirez) who has an unexplained chip on his shoulder and a lawyer friend of Grace’s (Lily Rabe) who functions purely to move the plot forward. The Frasers’ son, Henry, is a mature boy who plays violin. And Elena might as well not speak, for all her dialogue tells us. Despite the efforts of talented actors, some characters of color verge on stereotypes: Elena’s husband (Ismael Cruz Córdova) is the angry Latino guy, while Jonathan’s defense attorney (Noma Dumezweni) is the kind of tough, super-competent Black woman who makes white men quake in their loafers. These flat, thoughtless depictions undercut the salient themes of a show that is, in large part, about the distance between the images people project and who they really are.

On a structural level, The Undoing falls into the same trap as many other TV thrillers, planting big twists at the end of each episode while spreading plot points too thin throughout the first 50 minutes. (Now that TV has overtaken film, we’re seeing a lot of miniseries that should’ve been movies.) Kelley touches on intriguing subjects, from the public’s love-hate relationship with the 1% to romance as an act of projection, without offering much insight. We’ve seen a revolution in realistic depictions of mental health on television over the past few years—an overdue and overwhelmingly positive development. But mental illness too often functions as a deus ex machina for crime dramas now, with neat diagnoses such as narcissism or sociopathy or PTSD replacing messily specific characterization; that eventually becomes a problem here, too.

The Undoing is the kind of drama that, in the past, I’ve tended to enjoy regardless of quality. Which is to say, I am its target audience. Unfortunately, TV trends can be a bit like marriages: if they don’t evolve over time, the flaws overtake the pleasures.

I’ve Gotten Used to Not Hugging My Grandkids. That Doesn’t Make It Easier

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:40:15 GMT

Mika, my children’s 16-year-old half-sister, is posting old photos on Instagram, group shots with her best friends standing in close proximity to each other, with the simple caption Take me back. Even 16-year-olds are feeling nostalgic.

Madeline, my 4-year-old granddaughter, has invented imaginary friends. Madeline’s mother—my daughter Anna—has to call Salia’s mother to ask if Salia can come over. Madeline and Salia are not allowed to hug on their playdates. No, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe she and Salia are allowed to hug in the space Madeline has invented for herself in order to have playmates besides her younger brother. I have never been over when Salia was there, but I admire both Anna and Madeline’s ingenuity for stepping up to this game. In this unprecedented time, which is both fractious and fragile, we are all doing what we can to hold onto relationships and stave off loneliness.

My family has always been imaginative. My sister Nora wrote a play called Imaginary Friends. It wasn’t really about imaginary friends, though. It was about a feud between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. Nora imagined the fight escalating and ending up in court.

When I was a kid, my sister Delia invented imaginary friends for me, in a hilarious, terrifying, big-sister way. The little blue man and the little green man lived under my bed, and Delia would tell me stories about them when it was time for me to sleep. I have a distinct image of the little blue man (who was very little and blue), wearing blue shorts with red suspenders and a white T-shirt, popping out from under my wooden bed frame when I was 5 years old and scaring me. I am quite certain they do not live under my bed now. But I would trade the fear and anger I feel about the pandemic, about our politics, about the people I encounter without masks on the street, for any sight of the little blue man. Take me back.

Even though we all live in Los Angeles, my daughters and their respective spouses and children have only seen each other once in seven months. The parents all work, have contact with others and are not able to create a safe “bubble” around them. So, my husband Alan and I see them one pod at a time, with enormous amounts of space between us. They slide in through the garden gate, their kids taking seats on the swings. Occasionally we stand on the sidewalk and watch Roman, Madeline’s 2-year-old brother, speed down the street on a scooter. He has become remarkably coordinated. We missed the beginning of this developmental stage, but are happy to see the result.

The visits are fraught in their own way, sad, because we can’t hug them, push them on the swings or whisper something in one of their ears. But we have become used to them.

My son Ethan, who also lives in L.A., bought a dinosaur costume on Amazon and terrified my other daughter Maia’s 4-year-old son, Zachary, and 2-year-old daughter, Chloe, by popping up outside their window and dancing across the lawn while making dinosaur noises. I know this because there’s a video. At one point, Zachary hid under the table and screamed, “Mom, you told me dinosaurs were extinct!” When Ethan reprieved this performance at the more jaded cousins’ house (in fairness, a lesson learned, he did not appear unannounced outside anyone’s window), Madeline and Roman started laughing hysterically. I know this, too, because there’s a video, and their laughter as well as their parents’ is infectious. A month earlier, we celebrated Madeline’s birthday on Zoom. Aunt Maia bought an Elsa costume and showed up as a surprise guest. Dress-up, apparently, is trending in my family.

Courtesy of Amy EphronEphron’s son, dressed as a dinosaur, with her grandson

Recently Madeline took a walk with her father. She pointed to a tiny cactus and asked if it was a germ. Her father, Kevin, sent me the picture. I see her point. But she’s only 4, and she’s thinking about science, about viruses. She even asked her mom why the healthy people couldn’t give their blood to the sick people and make them better.

Just a while ago, we were hopeful that there might be an end in sight. School would start, the children would be allowed to interact again, it would begin to feel less scary, less breakable, less precarious. In that moment, Madeline had a social-distancing play date with her two best friends at a public park. It was the first time they had seen each other in four months. All of them wore masks. It is no longer clear when they might be able to safely do that again. They are attending school remotely.

Now that the U.S. is well into a third spike in infections, and other countries are also experiencing a surge, we no longer know what to expect or how we are supposed to navigate it. Every day brings a new challenge, a need for further ingenuity to keep our family feeling connected and optimistic. But costumes and games, videos and imaginary friends are no replacement for the easy intimacy we have lost.

I find myself looking at a photograph of Madeline and two of her friends taken at daycare a year ago. In it, they’re playing dress-up in front of a pretend cardboard house. One of them, as if she was prescient, is wearing a bandana as a mask. They are standing right next to each other, close and smiling. I’m thinking about posting it on Instagram with the simple caption, Take me back.

Over 400,000 People Watched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar Play Among Us on Twitch

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:30:12 GMT

Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar shook things up on Twitch on Tuesday with a livestream of the hugely popular video game Among Us that drew over 400,000 viewers at its peak.

In an effort to encourage people to vote in the 2020 election, the two Democratic congresswomen played the online murder mystery game that has risen in popularity alongside Twitch stars like pokimane, HasanAbi and Myth.

Join me, @pokimanelol, @hasanthehun, & more on Twitch TONIGHT as we help folks make a voting plan at https://t.co/TskRLfhCt3 and officially declare orange sus on Among Us 🍊

Tune in 9pm tonight at https://t.co/nZap5fuerN https://t.co/HeKMeDDjXf

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 20, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez’s livestream, her first on Twitch and one of the most-watched streams in the service’s history, lasted for over three hours and garnered nearly 4.8 million total views. It was reportedly the lead referrer to IWillVote.com for at least part of its duration.

there are 405k people watching this livestream, which is currently the #1 driver of traffic to https://t.co/WLqdQA15BJ https://t.co/QhPPPErMCA

— Patrick Stevenson (@stevensonpj) October 21, 2020

On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez put out an open call on Twitter for players to join her in Tuesday’s game. “Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote? (I’ve never played but it looks like a lot of fun),” she wrote, garnering replies from Omar, HasanAbi and thousands of others.

Among Us is a covert multiplayer game, similar to Mafia, that takes places on an alien spaceship and has skyrocketed in popularity amid the pandemic. Although it was originally released in 2018, it wasn’t until the past few months that the multiplayer social deduction game exploded in the charts—as of Oct. 1, it had been downloaded over 100 million times, according to its U.S.-based developer, InnerSloth. In addition to its simple premise, some of the game’s appeal stems from the fact that it supports cross-play across multiple platforms—including Android and iOS—making it easy for groups of friends to play with each other while staying distanced.

Because of the popularity of the stream, Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitch channel now has more than 584,000 followers. Both President Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders also have accounts on the platform, but only have 143,000 and 159,000 followers, respectively.

Twitch has seen marked growth in recent years, and especially since the start of the pandemic. According to TwitchTracker.com, the streaming website boasts an average of over 2 million concurrent viewers in 2020, almost double what it recorded in 2019.

👋🏽

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 19, 2020

today. i was killed by @AOC in among us within the first five minutes. pic.twitter.com/W1Uf17o34K

— maia (@mxmtoon) October 21, 2020

As Ocasio-Cortez mentioned in her tweets, the goal of the livestream was to spur potential voters to register and get to the polls. “I’m so excited by this upcoming election,” she said during the stream. “We can overwhelm the polls, and we can get things back on track.”

When you’re winning: pic.twitter.com/Fu7CMyCQDA

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) October 21, 2020

Following the game, Myth, a Twitch streamer with over 7 million followers, shared on Twitter that he was planning on voting for the first time in the 2020 election. “Remember to vote this election as well,” he wrote. “This election is my first time voting and its super easy to do so do it.”

Thank you so much for joining, Myth! I’m so excited this is your first time voting!

I had a blast. Thanks @IlhanMN, @pokimanelol, @hasanthehun, @DisguisedToast, @mxmtoon, @Jack_Septic_Eye, @Hbomberguy, @DrLupo, @Valkyrae, @Gusbuckets, @Corpse_Husband, @MoistCr1TiKaL & @israhirsi https://t.co/L02lZwWpjz

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 21, 2020

Ocasio-Cortez has often used alternative methods to reach out to potential voters. She has previously made appeals to millennial and Gen Z gamers with a foray into the world of 2020’s hit game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. She has also connected with younger voters by talking politics on Instagram live while doing things like assembling IKEA furniture and cooking dinner.

21 Underrated Horror Movies You Probably Haven’t Seen and Can Stream Right Now

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 16:55:09 GMT

There are plenty of well-known horror movies available to stream, but what do you do if you’ve already seen them all and don’t want to waste your time sorting through the bottom of the barrel? As streaming services become a more confusing labyrinth of quality, the need arises for some dedicated hero to watch as many lesser known horror movies as possible, and find those that are actually worth watching. I strive to be that hero, and the list that follows is the result of rigorous culling.

In the hopes of maximizing the scares-to-snores ratio during spooky season, we present TIME’s 2020 list of the best hidden horror gems to stream this October, or really any time the hankering hits—and where to find them.

Netflix

For more than a decade, Netflix has been a haven for horror fans. And it still has plenty of diamonds to be found in the horrific rough. But as Netflix has continued to shift its focus from licensing deals to original content, that bountiful cornucopia of indie frights has largely dried up. An industrious person can still find fantastic films amid the ruins of the once great empire, but it’s getting increasingly difficult. Here are the handful that stand out.

Session 9

2001’s Session 9 is a great example of why this exercise is worth doing every year. It follows a team of asbestos removal contractors, led by NYPD Blue‘s David Caruso, working to clean up an abandoned mental hospital. Things grow increasingly terrifying as the building seems to contain far more harmful material than the asbestos. So much about this tight, mysterious indie seems not to bode well for its quality, from its generic poster to its D-list cast. Don’t let any of that dissuade you; this is a masterfully constructed movie with a well-modulated tone and sense of increasing dread. Like a frog in a pot, Session 9’s characters don’t know their situation is a dangerous one until it’s far too late.

The Platform

This dystopian Spanish film, released earlier this year, takes some of the class warfare ideas explored in 2019’s brilliant Parasite, covers them with broken glass and lights them on fire. The Platform (or El Hoya as it is titled in Spain) is set within a very tall and very mysterious building, where strangers are held captive for a variety of reasons on each of the many floors. Twice a day, on the very top floor, a bountiful meal is prepared on a large stone platform. Then, floor by floor, it’s lowered down as people eat their fill, leaving scraps or even less for the people at the bottom. The Platform, directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia in his first feature, wastes no time in exploring the depths of human desperation and greed, even as it strives to highlight efforts at bravery. It’s easy, and accurate, to compare The Platform to 2013’s Snowpiercer, which Bong Joon-ho made before Parasite. But Snowpiercer has a sardonic wit and a fashionably curated aesthetic that does not seem to interest the minds behind The Platform. This dark tale wants to shove you in the shadows. The result is both an excellent and a troubling watch.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter

Because I’m trying to live responsibly during a global pandemic, I’ve watched over 150 movies this year. The Blackcoat’s Daughter is in the top 15. This taut, hushed 2015 film about two girls left behind at their Catholic boarding school during winter break has an extremely small scale, a mystifying story and a deep undercurrent of Satanism. It is further elevated by three fantastic leads: a wicked Emma Roberts, a disquieted Lucy Boynton and the always stellar Kiernan Shipka of Mad Men fame. It was written and directed by Oz Perkins, who went on to make 2016’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (which I featured on a previous hidden gems list for its quiet haunted house story). But between the two movies, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is the superior one. Told in three acts that dance around each other, it settles on you like a dense fog, leaving you enthralled by what might be hidden and anxious about what might be found.

The Girl on the Third Floor

While I will never call 2019’s The Girl on the Third Floor a great watch, this haunted house movie, written and directed by Travis Stevens, contains a level of creepiness and surprise that you wouldn’t expect from its nondescript name. Don Koch has taken it upon himself to renovate his new suburban house so he and his pregnant wife can start a new life away from their troubled past. As mysterious neighbors stop by to greet the new homeowners and marbles start dropping from the walls, it doesn’t take long before Don’s old habits, and the odd house, squander any hope for a happy ending. What follows may not terrify viewers, but it still sufficiently entertains. Pro wrestling fans might recognize former wrestler Phil “CM Punk” Books as the bedeviled lead.

Eli

Don’t underestimate 2019’s Eli. In this film from Irish director Ciarán Foy, the eponymous child suffers from a rare, unspecified condition, leaving him hermetically sealed away from his fretting parents. Their desperation drives them to seek treatment at a mysterious, isolated clinic that touts some specialization in whatever ails Eli. The hope of health buoys the boy, until strange new situations raise new concerns. You may think you know where Eli is going, but it has several tricks up its sleeves. Its scares can be obvious, and it definitely takes its time to offer anything unique, but once it finally reveals its spark of inspiration, the movie lights up like a bonfire. I didn’t leave Eli feeling haunted or unsettled, but as the credits rolled, I definitely had a huge smile on my face.

Cam

2018’s Cam is one of those surreal movies that take one specific, unsettling idea and base an entire story around it. This devious movie follows the fascinating world of camgirls, women who create adult internet content via web cams, and the obsession with influencer fame. Alice Ackerman, hell-bent on ranking first on her site, performs under the stage name Lola_Lola, in shows that contain seduction and mock violence. She has a solid following and even a few specific fans who shower her with gifts. Alice’s life is cast into existential havoc when she gets locked out of her account, only to find that another woman who looks and acts exactly like her has started streaming under her name. Things unravel as Alice fights to understand what exactly is happening and how she can stop it. Co-written and directed by Isa Mazzei, Cam is partly based off of Mazzei’s experiences during her time as an actual camgirl. Those personal details, anxieties and bottomless questions around identity turn this compelling story into a truly gripping movie.

Hulu

As the creepy content crown slips from Netflix’s brow, Hulu has quickly snapped it up. Over the past few years, the streaming service has begun investing heavily in horror, and it shows. Not only has it struck licensing deals to carry some genuinely great films, but it has also worked to establish a rolling tide of original movies through both its anthology series Into the Dark and separately acquired features. If you don’t have Hulu and want access to some great horror movies, pay the $6 monthly fee and set yourself a reminder to cancel it come Nov. 1. It’s extremely worth it.

The Clovehitch Killer

2018’s fantastic The Clovehitch Killer is not your typical serial killer story. Starring an almost unrecognizable Dylan McDermott, who puts his whole heart into playing a goofy, devout dad, the movie is set 10 years after a rash of similarly styled murders hit a small Kentucky town. McDermott’s on-screen teenage son Tyler is a boy scout, both in character and in the story, who just wants to make his dad proud and lead a pious, purposeful life. That plan is shaken one night when he sneaks out with his dad’s truck and a high school crush, who finds a disturbing BDSM polaroid crumpled between the seats. Cold, severe and distressing, The Clovehitch Killer works so well because it is so patient. Just as 10 years have passed between the peak of its past killing spree, so does the evil take its time in showing up onscreen. And when the evil does show, it’s not as a jump scare or a special effect—it’s as obvious and stark as it is disturbing.

The Lodge

Hulu subscribers get access to one of the best indie horror movies released this year. Much like our current, quarantined life and its many awkward encounters, The Lodge centers around people who don’t want to be trapped together. Shortly after the death of their mother (played memorably by Alicia Silverstone), two children accompany their father and their new, peculiar stepmom to a remote cabin for Christmas. The father means it as a trip to bond this new family together, but nature and nurture conspire against that intention as an aggressive snowstorm stands in the way, locking the children and stepmom together. Discomfort turns to panic, which turns to desperation, which turns to madness. The cacophony of those emotions is as muffled as the constantly falling snow, but just as visible. In the end it rapturously blurs the real and imagined, casting doubt on what is happening, but never completely hiding the grim reality. The Lodge may help us work through or deeply worsen our pervasive cabin fever, but either way, it’s a darn good horror movie.

Southbound

Horror anthologies are always more of a treat than a trick. But Southbound, which tells several interlinking stories set in the foreboding Southwestern desert, isn’t just a decent hidden-gem horror anthology. It’s one of the very best out there. As with any collection of scary stories, the quality ebbs and flows, but Southbound, directed by Radio Silence, Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner and Patrick Horvath, has a confidence and creativity that continually demands the watcher’s attention. From a robbery gone wrong, to a bar filled with damned souls, this relentless movie challenges you to look away. And when one character is struck by a car miles away from a hospital, it’s damn near impossible.

Wounds

Wounds! An Amie Hammer and Dakota Johnson-led horror movie might not seem like an instant winner, but beyond being my personal favorite of this year’s hidden horror gems, it’s also one of the best new movies I’ve seen in 2020. Hammer plays Will, a charming, confident bartender who still doesn’t know what he wants out of life, but it may involve a chummy barfly named Alicia, played by the always tremendous Zazie Beetz (Atlanta). Johnson plays Will’s live-in girlfriend, Carrie, barely putting up with a rocky relationship while she finishes her grad school thesis. During a particularly bloody bar fight, a group of fleeing college students leave behind a phone. Will’s attempts to contact them on the phone only receives worrisome replies and even more concerning pictures. Though most veteran horror fans could guess where the story goes, it takes a different path. What follows is an increasingly jarring, unnerving tale as decomposition reigns, both figuratively and literally, and we’re left with a truly horrific last image.

Wounds has a clattering, itchy vibe. Like the legion of roaches crawling under Will’s bar, Wounds throws a sense of persistent chaos at the viewer, though it’s always just out of sight. And the second you spot a hint of the source, away it scurries back into a dark corner, daring you to follow. Wounds was written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari in his first American outing, after the very good, though more traditional Under the Shadow (which featured on a previous list). With Wounds, Anvari wants to hammer on different, deeper fears, while being far less specific about the details. That hazy intent definitely won’t hit everyone as squarely (it only carries a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes), but for those who find it as arresting as I did, Wounds is a true horror gift that will stick in your head for a long time.

Greener Grass

I watched Greener Grass earlier this summer, expecting a decent alt-comedy. And why wouldn’t I? The razor sharp satire was written by and stars great comedians like Jocelyn DeBoer, D’Arcy Carden and Mary Holland. But apparently it doesn’t take much for aping suburban homogeneity to give way to an alarming deconstruction of the barriers of social norms.

The neighbors of Greener Grass, all of whom sport adult braces, take the obsession of social politeness to troubling extremes. When one woman compliments another on her new baby, the mother feels obligated to offer the baby to the other woman. This leads to another friend feeling slighted that she wasn’t offered the newborn. This is one of the opening scenes, and, impressively, the plot devolves from there. It’s part Stepford Wives, part absurdist romp, with a dash of Pleasantville to add some conflict. Not quite a horror comedy, it maneuvers deftly between solid humor and genuinely inspiring discomfort with its characters’ mere decisions and strange leaps of logic.

Midnight Kiss

Midnight Kiss is a competent, if slightly generic slasher picture about an old group of friends celebrating their New Years Eve together in a remote Southern California house. It’s part of Hulu’s Into the Dark series, which can be spotty and a bit cheap at best. But this 2019 installment, directed by Carter Smith, is valuable on its own as an overtly proud queer movie. Horror films have long been queer, though they’ve often hidden it in coded terms, or later been adopted by the LGBTQ community (hello, you beautiful Babadook!). And there are several pointed, dramatic queer horror films like The Perfection or High Tension. It’s the rare horror film that simply exists as queer cinema, and with Midnight Kiss, it was extremely refreshing to see a film that felt no need to hide, code, defend or justify its queerness. Though Midnight Kiss’ plot and story itself were somewhat mediocre, if generally engaging, the overall experience is a positive one. (If you’re looking for more, I’d recommend the Icelandic thriller Rift and the understated What Keeps You Alive, which is also streaming on Netflix.)

31

Rob Zombie has yet to firmly define his place in horror movie history. Though his House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects fit in with the torture-porn-craven aughts, the times have changed and he has been left to experiment. He directed an utterly boring remake of Halloween. He also wrote and directed Lords of Salem, one of my all-time favorite witch films. And 2016’s 31 somehow straddles the whole of his career. A wayward bunch of carnival workers find themselves held captive in a haunted house full of sadistic villains and limited means of escape. It’s a more visually striking Saw movie, while also a real return to Zombie’s 1,000 Corpses roots. 31 doesn’t offer anything super unique or evolve any particular subgenre, but sometimes a movie like this is just what the mad scientist ordered. While far from great, 31 is enthusiastically not bad.

Goodnight Mommy

I’d normally shy away from adding two movies from the same filmmakers on one list, but Goodnight Mommy, made by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, the writer/director team who made The Lodge, is worthy of more attention than it’s received. The Austrian movie didn’t receive a wide U.S. release when it unsettled audiences in 2015, but horror fans deserve to see this soft tale of two young brothers and their mother set on a remote farm. As the mother returns from the hospital with bandages on her head, paranoia begins to grow between the brothers that she might be plotting against them. The film, naturally, escalates from there. While the story follows a somewhat predictable path, Fiala and Fanz’s transfixing, alarming execution will plant this movie in your brain.

Oculus

The cult appreciation that has grown around 2013’s Oculus almost removes it from hidden gem consideration, but for those who have never seen this fantastic film, it is maybe the most universally beloved entry on the whole list. Oculus stars the wonderful Karen Gillan (Dr. Who’s Amy Pond) as Kaylie, who launches a mission to prove that her whole family’s demise was caused by an antique mirror. In a house full of cameras and timers, the desperate woman and her brother spend one last night documenting what she’s sure to be true. What follows is one of the best psychological thrillers of the decade. Not only does reality bend and warp, but time folds in on itself, revealing more about the family Kaylie hopes to heal and the evil at the heart of the story. Oculus was co-written and directed by Mike Flanagan, who would go on to make critically- acclaimed horror like Hush, Doctor Sleep and Netflix’s Haunting of Hill House. This is the best of the bunch. It’s a movie that constantly surprises, in a way that most horror films only hope to achieve.

The Other Lamb

Cult movies are great. Contemplative, pensive cult movies are the absolute best. Though only released a few months ago, The Other Lamb is now streaming on Hulu. Born and raised in a pastoral commune, Selah has begun to attract the attention of the group’s leader, whom they call Shepherd. As puberty begins to disrupt her place in the severe, yet peaceful, group, she also starts to ask questions about the possibilities of outside life. This comes at a pivotal time for the squatting commune, as it is evicted from the land and has to search for a new home. Breathtakingly shot by Polish director Małgorzata Szumowska, The Other Lamb is both beautifully realized and extremely tense. As unease grows against Shepherd (played by a typecast Michiel Huisman), so does his tight grip on the group. The Other Lamb might end a bit too abruptly, but that feeling is largely tied to the great enjoyment of watching it.

HBO Max

As the new kid on the block, HBO Max has a long way to go to shore up its horror bonafides. Most of its offerings this year are either run-of-the-mill mainstream flicks like Annabelle Comes Home and Jeepers Creepers or rando vintage shockers from cinema’s golden age. Still, you can find a few lesser-known gems in the bunch. And it provides some sure bets like Us and 2020’s Invisible Man.

Snatchers

While I hemmed and hawed around Greener Grass’ subgenre, Snatchers is truly a horror comedy. Its primary interest is to have a bloody good time and, lucky for us, it completely succeeds. The 2019 film follows high schooler Sara, who’s in the middle of shifting social groups when she loses her virginity to her boyfriend Skyler. The next day she wakes up a little too pregnant, and things go down a very weird, very visceral path from there. While the script is solid, the movie is made significantly better by the lead performance of Mary Nepi. No part of Snatchers takes itself seriously and the joy that went into making it is obvious on screen. And that joy, just like whatever is wrong with Sara, is very infectious.

Diabolique

If you’re looking for something from further back in horror history to scare you, you can do far worse than the 1955 French film Diabolique. Not only does this early psychological thriller successfully create a stirring, bewildering atmosphere, but in it you can see the seeds of so many movies that came after it. Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, Diabolique follows a boarding school teacher played by Simone Signoret, who nervously plots to kill her abusive husband. As carefully as she plans, nothing can prepare her for the baffling aftermath. Truly, this Hitchockian tale is well worth your time.

House

The 1977 Japanese movie House is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It is a psychedelic cult classic that simply vibrates on another ethereal level, and we are lucky to catch this brief glimpse at its insanity. Seven high school girls venture into a mysterious house and become its victims, one by one. The girls have names like Prof, who is studious, and Kung Fu, who is good at kung fu. It’s evident that director Nobuhiko Obayashi is not out to make a self-serious movie to haunt viewers. Rather, House is a hallucinogenic fever dream, determined to creatively explore and disassemble horror, all while showcasing the unexpected (like, say, someone getting eaten by a piano). Now, over 40 years after its release, House is as relevant and entertaining as ever.

Hair Wolf

It’s unfortunate that 2018’s Hair Wolf, in which the Black staff at a hair salon fight off the cultural appropriation of white people, is a short film. Written and directed by Mariama Diallo, this horror comedy is enormously fun to watch and over far too soon. It’s possible that Hair Wolf’s main idea would be difficult to stretch into a full-length feature, but the deeper issues that it explores deserve as much time as possible. Thankfully, Diallo has a new movie, titled Master, in the works. I, for one, can’t wait to see whatever she wants to create.

Ready or Not

Ready or Not slipped into theaters (remember those?) last year. Its initial trailer, showing Samara Weaving’s Grace forced into a deadly game of hide and seek with her brand new in-laws, felt somewhat trite and uninteresting— another basic horror movie released into the world. But when whispers rose that it was more than what its trailer suggested, I took the plunge. Ready or Not is not just good. It is great.

With the help of a wonderful script, perfect pacing and impressive tonal shifts, this movie takes viewers on a fantastic ride. And at its core is Weaving, who is nothing short of a revelation. Don’t expect Ready or Not to scare you, but don’t expect it to let you off the hook, either. It has plenty of laughs, plenty of reasons to squirm and plenty of surprises. If you’ve never heard of it, or were unimpressed by its trailer, do yourself a favor and let this movie improve your spooky season.

A New Rebecca Strives for Gothic Romance But Comes Up Short

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 20:20:21 GMT

You don’t have to revere Alfred Hitchcock’s trimly tailored 1940 gothic romance Rebecca to dislike, or even just be confused by, Ben Wheatley’s self-consciously kooky 2020 version, a movie whose “Look at me!” style takes the story’s inherent, tasteful steaminess and pastes googly eyes on it. Both spring from the same source material, Daphne Du Maurier’s dashingly popular 1938 novel, and the new movie’s casting—Lily James plays the young woman of lowly birth who becomes the second wife of Armie Hammer’s brooding blueblood with a secret—isn’t its main problem. You can stammer all you want about the irreplaceability of Hitchcock’s Rebeccalicious duo, Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, and their understated tweed-and-cashmere symphonics, but James and Hammer also could have made something of these roles. James has the requisite dreaminess wrapped around a core of iron; Hammer’s stalwart elegance can be a malevolent force, when required. With the right movie wrapped around them, they could have been something.

But Wheatley—who specializes in thrillers with a macabre vibe, like Kill List (2011) and High-Rise (2015)—overhandles and overworks the dough of Du Maurier’s basic story. His movie is sometimes dumb, sometimes dull and sometimes entertaining; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that lack of vision drains its potential power. We first meet James’ character, the future Mrs. de Winter, while she’s working as a lady’s companion, accompanying her boss (Ann Dowd’s rich, bossy and crass Mrs. Van Hopper) on a trip to Monte Carlo. (Rather famously, the future Mrs. de Winter has no first name: it’s as if, as a young, unmarried woman, her identity as a human were being erased even as it was trying to take shape—she can’t reach full selfhood until she becomes a “Mrs.”) This guileless young woman doesn’t so much fall for Hammer’s rich, sad widower Maxim de Winter as prop him up with her naïve cheerfulness. She’s just the picker-upper he needs, and he knows it. They marry impulsively, and he whisks her off to his English costal family estate, Manderley, but it’s a house that doesn’t welcome her. Everywhere she looks, she sees ghosts of Maxim’s first wife, the Rebecca of the title. The dead woman—whom Maxim refuses to talk about—lives everywhere, in the collection of prissy, costly Dresden figurines that populate her study, in the swooping R adorning her leftover stationery, and, most menacingly of all, in the memory of Manderley’s chilly head housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas). The anxiety of the young Mrs. de Winter is the story of every woman who has ever been riddled with insecurity and jealousy over a new lover’s ex, imagining herself to be inferior in every way.

Kerry Brown / Netflix—2020 © Netflix, Inc.Lily James and Armie Hammer are a newly married couple haunted by the ghost of his late wife

Meanwhile, Mrs. Danvers eyes the new Mrs. de Winter as a snake sizes up a white mouse. How the new Mrs. de Winter adapts to, and triumphs over, this new reality is the backbone of Rebecca. Wheatley does O.K. with the movie’s early courtship scenes: You get some sense of both the tender carnality between this fledgling couple and their yearning for a shared adventure, as Maxim squires his new young friend around the Riviera in his racy convertible, or as the two lounge on the beach, Maxim building tiny towers of sand on the future Mrs. de Winter’s bare, tanned back.

But it’s not long before the story whirls out of Wheatley’s grasp. He tries to jazz things up with counterintuitive cutting and cool shots, but none of it serves the story’s mood. There’s one problem that isn’t his fault. Even Hitchcock’s version loses some steam in the plot’s shift from shivery atmospherics to the requisite mechanics of explaining all the characters’ secrets—but Hitchcock knew how to hold the storyline taut no matter what, while Wheatley fails to build on its initial, tingly aura of dread. His movie is glazed with a florid flush, but it refuses to get its fingernails dirty with any of the story’s subterranean secrets.

Kerry Brown / Netflix—2020 © Netflix, Inc.James and Hammer in a movie that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be

Yet there are two good reasons to watch Rebecca. The first is the work of costumer Julian Day, who moves the fashions back a few notches from 1938—they look more early-1930s—even as he stays true to the charms and insecurities of the story’s characters. Maxim makes his entrance in a marigold linen suit that’s somehow both drapey and pristine—a look that says, Come closer, my dear, but not too close. The future Mrs. de Winter tools around Monte Carlo in simple sports clothes that a girl of her station would wear—voluminous, high-rise sailor pants and trim ruffled blouses—but that still speak of a desire to burst out into the world. No matter what, the clothes in Rebecca are always fun to look at.

That goes for Kristin Scott Thomas, too, whose majestic, malevolent Mrs. Danvers stands tall even next to the astonishing performer who played the role in Hitchcock’s version, Judith Anderson. Her fox-cool smile never denotes joy, only withering disapproval; her glittering eyes bore right through to the new Mrs. de Winter’s soul and find it wanting. She’s a figure of unerring taste and icy eroticism, and unless you happen to be a perfect woman—and a perfectly dead one—there’s no pleasing her. She’s the real ghost spirit of this Rebecca, strange and enticing and scary, a woman who, despite her seemingly invulnerable sense of self, is still a slave to a woman who no longer exists. Maybe she has simply found her way into the wrong movie: she’s the doomed heroine of her own Vertigo.

Netflix’s Marvelous The Queen’s Gambit Is the Kind of Prestige Drama TV Doesn’t Make Anymore

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 16:50:35 GMT

Are TV dramas OK? I ask because, sometime during the past decade, a format once rooted in the daily struggles of more-or-less normal human beings came a bit unglued. So-called prestige drama got darker, stranger, flashier, pulpier, scarier or simply more intense. Forced by a surplus of original content to find a gimmick, many TV creators have turned away from realistic stories, to embrace fantasy, sci-fi, superheroes, melodrama. Maybe the tipping point was Game of Thrones. Maybe it was American Horror Story or The Walking Dead or even Downton Abbey’s metamorphosis from stodgy period piece to self-aware soap. Now, pay TV platforms such as HBO and Amazon are loading up on genre fare—some but not all of it great. Emotional dramas like Six Feet Under and Friday Night Lights have given way to the mawkish This Is Us. Procedurals are getting weird; The Good Wife team begat Evil. And the most authentic, vividly wrought characters of the last several years have mostly come from half-hour dramedies: Fleabag, Atlanta, Enlightened, BoJack Horseman, Better Things, Insecure, Catastrophe, Vida.

At this point, any hour-long drama that forsakes intellectual property, narrative histrionics and expensive special effects in favor of psychological realism represents a welcome change of pace. And one as excellent as The Queen’s Gambit feels very rare indeed. An adaptation of the novel by Walter Tevis (The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth) that comes to Netflix on Oct. 23, the absorbing seven-part miniseries is first and foremost a character study. Its hero, orphaned chess prodigy Beth Harmon, may not be the typical mid-20th-century girl. But hers is essentially a coming-of-age story—one that asks what awaits a brilliant, precocious loner in adulthood. The show’s suspense comes less from the question of whether she’ll grow up to become the world champion than from the question of whether she’ll grow up to be reasonably stable and happy.

Played as a child by Isla Johnston and later, in a transcendent performance, by Anya Taylor-Joy, Beth arrives at a Kentucky orphanage after surviving a car crash that kills her mother. It’s the late 1950s, and instead of getting the opportunity to talk through the precariousness of growing up without a family, wards of the state have their trauma managed by two-toned green tranquilizer capsules. Jolene (sharp newcomer Moses Ingram), a kind, resilient older girl who has been repeatedly passed over for adoption—probably because she’s Black—becomes a surrogate big sister to the taciturn, self-possessed Beth. Her advice: save those fun green pills for bedtime.

NetflixMoses Ingram (left) and Anya Taylor-Joy in ‘The Queen’s Gambit’

Sent to clap out erasers in the basement by a math teacher with nothing left to teach her, Beth meets the closest person she’ll ever have to a father figure: Mr. Shaibel (the wonderful Bill Camp), a grumpy janitor who spends idle moments gaming out chess moves. She’s obsessed with the game before she even knows what it’s called. High on meds she’s taken to hoarding, she envisions chessboards on the shadowy ceiling of her dormitory and loses hours playing through imaginary matches. It doesn’t take long for her to start beating Shaibel, then the head of his chess club and the star of the local high school team. By the time a couple in suburban Lexington adopts her, after four or five years at the orphanage, Beth knows chess is her destiny.

But she’s painfully out of place in her new home—a worst-case-scenario implementation of the Dorothy Draper aesthetic, all heavy curtains and plush carpeting and floral wallpaper in shades of fuchsia and turquoise. Like the doll she receives as a gift while at the orphanage and deposits directly into the trash, her pink bedroom assumes an affinity for the trappings of traditional femininity that she never developed. At school, teenybopper girls in identical sweaters and circle skirts make fun of her stiff pinafores and short, blunt, institutional bob. (The Anna Wintour look doesn’t quite work on a teenager.) But with her adoptive father always away, supposedly on business, and her new mom (played with astonishing sensitivity by Can You Ever Forgive Me? director Marielle Heller) perennially beer-drunk at home, 15-year-old Beth finds her way back to chess.

By episode three, the sports arc has kicked in, as Beth rises from local curiosity—a teen girl who handily defeats men more than twice her age—to international star. Though they eventually started to feel a bit repetitive to this novice, the chess matches are mostly exciting and, as far as I could tell, realistic. (Russian chess eminence Garry Kasparov consulted on the show.) German production designer Uli Hanisch, of Babylon Berlin, imports that series’ glamour and scrupulous historical detail to create immersive renderings of Paris, Moscow and Mexico City in the ’60s. In his Pop Art Las Vegas, a stack of huge, glittery dice are the centerpiece of the glassy hotel lobby, with smaller versions carved into the wooden room dividers.

Yet it’s Beth and her relationships that remain the focal point. A lesser adaptation might reduce her to an antihero of Don Draper or Olivia Pope proportions—a genius at work but selfish, manipulative, destructive and sometimes plain nasty in her personal life. Instead, writer-director Scott Frank (Godless) uses Beth’s interactions to draw out this strange girl’s unacknowledged longing to connect. In Heller’s Alma, a pianist who chose marriage over career, she finds an unlikely kindred spirit: a woman who seeks excitement, and who too often finds it at the bottom of a cocktail glass or a pill bottle. Their partnership could easily be depicted as mutually exploitative, with the underaged Beth taking advantage of Alma’s restlessness to keep entering tournaments and Alma using Beth for prize money and an excuse to leave her ugly living room. Though it starts out that way, what develops later is a surprisingly tender familial bond.

NetflixAnya Taylor-Joy and Thomas Brodie-Sangster in ‘The Queen’s Gambit’

Meanwhile, chess brings men into Beth’s life. Hotshot players Beltik (Harry Melling, a Harry Potter alum most recently seen in The Old Guard) and then Benny (Thomas Brodie-Sangster of Godless and the Maze Runner movies), a pipsqueak whose bohemian leatherwear reads as a doth-protest-too-much rejection of the chess nerd stereotype, fall under a spell she’s unaware of casting. Just as you feel a familiar dynamic forming, in which a talented woman ends up intimidating her suitors, The Queen’s Gambit swerves; it’s probably no coincidence that a story about chess thrives on confounding audience expectations. For her part, Beth carries a torch for a man (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) she trounces in her first-ever tournament.

For actors as well as writers, it’s hard to portray a character like Beth without falling prey to what is sometimes called the “not like other girls” trope—in this case, the implication that it’s her divergence from gender norms that make this blunt, confident, poker-faced young woman extraordinary. Frank avoids this trap by giving her a love of fashion (costume designer Gabriele Binder uses exquisite period costumes to capture an increasingly sophisticated character whose self-image never stops evolving) and by centering her heartfelt friendships with other women.

Taylor-Joy is the final, most crucial piece in the Beth Harmon puzzle. A 24-year-old who broke out in 2015’s terrifying The Witch when she was still in her teens, the actor has since genre-hopped from horror to black comedy (Thoroughbreds) to Jane Austen (the most recent Emma adaptation) in a series of stunning performances. It isn’t so much an alternate take on the ingénue that she brings to each of these roles, although she has a rare, arresting beauty. What radiates from her unfeasibly large, ultra-alert eyes is an intensity that verges on otherworldly. If she’s not like other girls, it’s because she might be the remarkably expressive prototype for a new and improved model of human. That, more than anything, is Beth. “Her deep passion for chess is the passion that I have for my art,” Taylor-Joy has said. “It felt easy to transfer the emotion.” Watching one of the year’s most fascinating TV characters ascend to the mid-century chess firmament, you believe her.

A 1973 Hostage Crisis Changed Police Methods—And a Film About It Just Won a Prize From the ...

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 14:50:24 GMT

In the winter of 1973, a fatal, tense 47 hours at John and Al’s Sporting Goods store on the border of the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods of Brooklyn, N.Y., would forever change how the New York Police Department (NYPD) dealt with hostage situations.

On Friday, Jan. 19, of that year, four Black men in their 20s were stealing guns and ammunition at the shop when the police arrived. A shootout occurred, leaving one police officer dead and two wounded. The gunmen held 11 hostages inside the store. The 47-hour crisis was one of the longest hostage sieges in NYPD history.

With dozens of New Yorkers in the surrounding blocks unable to move while the situation was ongoing and thousands of subway commuters stopped as two train lines were halted, hundreds of police officers flooded the borough in preparation to carry out a brute-force attack. The move would risk the lives of the hostages trapped inside, but it was then standard procedure. It would also risk inflaming tensions between the police and the community.

Then Harvey Schlossberg, an NYPD officer with a doctorate in psychology, entered the picture. Using psychological tactics and patience, instead of endangering more lives through an attack, the siege was ended. “It takes time, but time is important only as an ego thing,” Schlossberg later said of his method of dealing with hostage crises. Later that year, the NYPD’s hostage-negotiation team was founded, and the tactics used at John and Al’s would become guiding principles.

“A two-day ordeal of blazing gunfights, death and terror at a Brooklyn sporting-goods store ended dramatically yesterday afternoon with a daring roof escape by nine remaining hostages and, several hours later, the peaceful surrender of four trapped gunmen,” the New York Times reported after the incident.

The story of what happened in 1973 at John and Al’s is the subject of a new documentary by director Stefan Forbes called Hold Your Fire. On Tuesday, the feature-length documentary was named as the winner of the second annual Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize. It will receive a $200,000 grant for post-production costs.

“Ken and I were both awed by this documentary,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, in a statement. “Hold Your Fire is a searing and powerful look into a little-known moment in history that has profound repercussions for how we understand policing today.”

HOLD YOUR FIRE excerpt from InterPositive Media on Vimeo.

The film was selected out of a total of 150 submissions, and is especially timely, says Ken Burns.

“No matter how much we think things change, human nature doesn’t,” the filmmaker tells TIME. “What you have in the midst of all that we’re going through now, with regard to policing and race and the whole history of that, here is something taking place many decades ago that nonetheless speaks directly to our moment.”

What Hold Your Fire accomplishes, according to Burns, is that it allows the viewer to think outside the binary when judging the range of characters presented. “It introduces you to a bunch of characters that are fitting a pattern of who we think they are. And then as the film progresses, it does a wonderful thing. It permits everyone to escape being siloed by our conventional ideas about them,” Burns explains. That kind of complex, well-formed character is often lacking from our conversations, says Burns.

And today, looking back at those long 47 hours from nearly half a century ago might help us once again understand something new.

“In the case of history, you get far enough away from the event that you can begin to gain some insight through perspective,” says Burns. “That’s what I try to do with my work, and I know that’s what Forbes has done here.”

A Viral Tweet Compared Joe Biden to Mister Rogers. ...

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 22:10:06 GMT

When senior Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp made a Twitter joke about Joe Biden’s town hall on Thursday night, she unwittingly gave the Democratic Presidential nominee what many considered to be a compliment. “Feels like I am watching an episode of Mister Rodgers [sic] Neighborhood,” she wrote in a now-viral tweet, sparking a dialogue on social media about the legacy of Fred Rogers, the late host of the long-running children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

“Pretty telling that this crew thinks Mr. Rogers is the bad guy,” wrote Democratic strategist and former Hillary Clinton adviser Zac Petkanas in response to Schlapp’s tweet, while writer April Reign called Schlapp’s comment “the worst self-own I’ve seen this political season.”

Pretty telling that this crew thinks Mr. Rogers is the bad guy. https://t.co/g9aFK7qV6V

— Zac Petkanas (@Zac_Petkanas) October 16, 2020

This may be the worst self-own I’ve seen this political season, especially since the universally beloved Mr. Rogers was from Pennsylvania, where Biden was tonight. #BidenTownHall https://t.co/dHpCA5S1nA

— April (@ReignOfApril) October 16, 2020

But, though one might not expect it, this isn’t the first time that Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister who was staunchly apolitical in his public persona, has been caught in the middle of a political dispute—or the first time American polarization has manifested in competing opinions about his show.

Rogers, a quiet lifelong Republican, wasn’t vocal about his political beliefs, instead allowing his actions to speak to his belief system, which emphasized the values he encouraged for his young viewers on the show: being kind, accepting people as they are, and being able to express your feelings in a healthy way.

This credo manifested itself multiple times in subtly radical ways throughout the course of the 33 years that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was on the air. Rogers, a longtime pacifist, used the mercurial King Friday character in his program’s puppet show to express his antiwar sentiment during the Vietnam war. Another puppet, Lady Elaine Fairchild, embodied feminist values by pioneering space travel and anchoring her own news show in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. And following the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Rogers cast François Clemmons on the show, making Clemmons the first Black man to have a recurring role on an American children’s television show; the year following, Rogers and Clemmons washed their feet together in a foot bath, a delicate nod to the national dialogue about integration. (In his recent memoir, Clemmons described Rogers as a mentor and “surrogate father,” even though Rogers encouraged Clemmons, who is gay, to remain in the closet.)

Rogers died in 2003, two years after the final episode of his show, but in recent years, he has once again become a lightning rod for political controversy.

Even though Rogers was a Republican, some conservative commentators have seized on his persona as an illustration of the values they oppose. For example, in 2007, Fox & Friends aired a segment that called Rogers an “evil, evil man” for telling children that they were special, thus instilling a generation with an undeserved sense of entitlement. In 2019, Andrew Klavan, a Daily Wire host, also took issue with Rogers by criticizing his gentle demeanor, describing it as “metrosexual wimpiness.” At the same time, Rogers has enjoyed something of a posthumous renaissance, with a 2018 documentary and 2019 feature film stoking nostalgia for his time on the air—and emphasizing exactly the qualities that drew dismissive responses from his critics.

So, though Schlapp’s viral tweet may have seemed like a “self-own” to Biden supporters, it was in fact part of a long history of divisiveness surrounding Rogers. And there’s a good chance that if Rogers were alive today, he wouldn’t have aligned with the values of his longtime political party. In a 2018 Nightline interview, his widow Joanne Rogers said that President Donald Trump’s values are “almost completely opposite” from those of her late husband’s—and that the differences are so extreme, Rogers might have been driven to speak out politically.

“We have somebody leading us right now who is not a forgiver,” she said. “His values are very, very different from Fred’s values.”

Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You Has a Lot Invested in the Springsteen Legend—But It’s ...

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 21:18:25 GMT

Hagiography is a dirty word in the documentary-filmmaking world. But it’s hard to know how anyone could make a documentary featuring Bruce Springsteen that doesn’t present him in burnished, reverent tones. His legend as a man who sings Songs of the People has already been fully shellacked—there’s not much we can do about that. It doesn’t hurt that, at 71, he might be more handsome—or at least more distinguished-looking—than he was 40 years ago. With the right lighting he looks like a 1930s magazine illustration of a cowboy, highly idealized yet—in his rough denim jacket, its fleecy collar turned up as a hedge against the cold—just scruffy enough.

Thom Zimny’s Letter to You documents the making of Springsteen’s album of the same name, with the full E Street Band, in dreamy, matinee-idol black-and-white. Now and then Zimny’s camera travels overhead, giving us a view of snowy New Jersey woods, before bringing us back to Springsteen’s home studio, the recording barn or shack or whatever it is where he and his band are laying down a series of 10 tracks over five days. Early on, there’s a shot of Patti Scialfa, longtime E Street member and also Springsteen’s wife, beaming beatifically. We see Springsteen himself, lean and groomed just carefully enough, bathed in muted, salt-of-the-earth lighting, and we hear his voice floating over the movie’s images, musing about his yearning to connect with people through music, and about his 45-year conversation with the E Street Band in particular. Even if you love Springsteen—even if you full-on adore him, as so many do—it’s all a bit much. And yet, the more you watch Letter to You, the more you may find yourself creeping closer to this little figurative campfire, hugging your spackleware mugful of coffee close, adjusting your bandana if you’ve tied it too tightly. You’ve fully bought into the lore of the cowboy poet from Freehold. To resist is futile.

Rock ‘n’ roll is still a young art form, which means we’re only now reckoning with what it means to grow old within the genre. Springsteen has already lost two members of his most cherished and legendary band—saxophonist Clarence Clemons and keyboard player Danny Federici—and much of Letter to You focuses on the notion of loss. Springsteen reflects on his introduction to rock, playing in a local band called the Castiles from 1965 to 1968. He’s the last surviving member of that band, and he takes his status as a keeper of memories seriously. He reflects with mournful electric energy on the magic of the 45-RPM, and how a great 180 seconds’ worth of music can be a way of praying. As a person old enough to remember, and love, 45s, I rolled my eyes when I heard him say that, but only because I know how right he is. And if anyone should be allowed to wax poetic on the power of a pop single, it’s Springsteen.

And when you think about it, the concept of the 45—a discrete burst of inspiration confined to one rocket-blast of a song—might have more meaning in the age of Spotify than it did in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, when albums, even those with multiple hit singles, reigned supreme. And it’s in the individual songs, as performed here by Springsteen and his band—including all the surviving regulars, among them Steven Van Zandt, Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg—that the real meaning of Letter to You emerges, as a document of both a mood and a creation. The single that gives the album its title is itself a shimmering mystery, a song more about the urge to connect than the actual connection. In other words, it’s really the envelope containing the letter, and as Bruce reaches out to hand it to us, we instinctively reach back. Many of the songs are somber and ruminative: “Last Man Standing” (“Snakeskin vest and a sharkskin suit/Cuban heels on your boots”) is a long sigh folded into a compact group of stanzas, a reflection on what it means to have been born as a performer a long time ago, even if it seems like yesterday. In “Ghosts,” Springsteen assures us that those who have left us behind can still communicate through sound. Springsteen’s voice may be easy to mimic, but its fingerprint, a mark made in honey-and-sawdust, belongs only to him. It’s as captivating as ever.

Apple TV+Springsteen and Scialfa

Zimny, who has also collaborated with Springsteen on the documentaries Western Stars and Springsteen on Broadway, clearly knows how much Springsteen has invested in his own iconography. But part of what Letter to You is marketing is the most unpalatable product imaginable: the act of growing old, stubbornly or gracefully or both. With seamless grace, Zimny matches vintage footage of Springsteen and the band with their current-day versions; we see how the young faces have blended into the old. Aging, because it means surviving, is the best. It’s also, because it entails a gradual transformation into a physically creakier, weaker self, the worst. We don’t want to be reminded of what we looked like then, but we also don’t want to forget. Letter to You blurs the distance between then and now. Its alternate title could be The Song of the Last Castile. Springsteen is telling us about all he’s seen in the years since he first picked up a guitar, and how fast it has all gone by. It’s at least 180 seconds’ worth of material, a prayer spread over a lifetime.

The Compassionate Documentary Time Looks at the Fight for Prison Abolition Through One ...

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 19:53:36 GMT

When filmmaker Garrett Bradley wrapped shooting on her documentary Time in 2018, her main subject, prison abolitionist Sibil “Fox Rich” Richardson, gave her a bag that changed the course of the film. Inside the bag were two decades’ worth of home footage that Rich had made of herself and her six sons for her husband, Rob, during the 21 years she fought to free him from a 60-year prison sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Bradley had originally planned for Time, which debuts on Amazon Prime on Friday and for which she became the first Black woman to win Best Director for U.S. documentary at Sundance back in January, to be a sister film to Alone, her 2017 short documentary about a woman whose fiancé is incarcerated. But after receiving the tapes, the 34-year-old director realized that she now had a way to show the long-term and deeply personal effects of the prison system—and more than enough material for a full-length feature. Splicing together her footage from the present day with the home videos, Bradley takes a compassionate, compelling look at one family’s fight not just for prison abolition, but for the hope of reuniting with their husband and father.

“I wanted to show the ripple effect of what it means to incarcerate 2.3 million people,” Bradley tells TIME. “We think about the magnitude of people that are incarcerated, but we have no optics, no sort of visual examples of what that looks like. We’re dealing with an invisible community. In a way, the only way we can bear witness to their experience is through the people who are on the outside.”

The result is a gorgeously expansive, experimental 81-minute feature, with the aesthetics of an art film and a lyrical pacing not often seen in documentaries about the carceral state. Bradley’s velvety footage of Fox follows her tireless work to free her husband from prison, as well as her activism in the prison abolition space and sweet moments with her sons, some of whom are adults now themselves. Bradley chose to focus the film on her subjects’ humanity rather than the details behind the prison sentence. She also presents her footage in black and white, to help it blend with the grainy home videos, which illuminate the personal losses experienced because of incarceration—none of which is felt more than when Fox reflects on how her children have grown during her son Remington’s dental school graduation.

“Time is when you look at pictures of when your babies were small and then you look at them and you see that they have mustaches and beards,” she says, as she looks at her son, now a full-grown man striding across a stage. “And that the biggest hope that you had was that before they turned into men, they would have a chance to be with their father.”

Larry Busacca—Getty ImagesDirector Garrett Bradley at the Tribeca Film Festival Getty Images Studio.

Through the home footage, viewers get a window into the Richardson family’s life over the past 21 years, a glimpse of what Fox preserved for Rob. There are big milestones like birthdays, but the most precious moments to watch are the seemingly banal events of everyday life: Fox as a young woman, hugging her swollen belly, pregnant with their twin sons; their tiny sons screaming with glee on a carnival ride; the boys putting on their socks in the morning; Fox driving the kids to school with the seat beside her empty until Rob can join them. It’s the bittersweet record of a woman and a family who adapted to the absence of their beloved, but who have never stopped longing for his presence.

“Without that archive, we really wouldn’t be able to understand the armor that developed around Fox and around the family,” Bradley says. “Or to see the holistic nature and the revolution that happened within her and the family over the course of 21 years.”

The film’s close focus on the personal moments in Fox’s family’s life, from helping her sons with their homework to her joyful reunion with Rob when he is released early, is a measured decision on Bradley’s part, as is the minimal attention on Rob’s sentence. Viewers learn that Fox and Rob were high school sweethearts-turned-young business owners who resorted to robbing a credit union during tough times, a crime for which they were punished (Fox served 3.5 years in prison, while Rob got sentenced to 60 years without parole). However, the details of the crime come second to the lived experience of the subjects; the documentary is as much the epic love story of Fox and Rob as it is an indictment of a broken system. This was a deliberate choice for Bradley, whose careful consideration can be felt in the intimacy of the current footage and the nuanced approach she takes to framing the Richardsons’ story.

Bradley felt that attempting to explain the reason behind Rob’s harsh sentence would require a full accounting of the role of racism in the U.S. and Louisiana specifically, which then prompted questions about for whom she was making the film. “The film is truly for everybody, in the sense that it’s about love, it’s about the right to intimacy and access to our loved ones, it’s about how love can be a form of resistance. But it is for people who are also directly and immediately experiencing what it means to be an incarcerated family in this country. That’s different than focusing on the trauma and the violence of our history, which is also important, but I find speaks more to people who need to know versus those who already know and don’t want to see that.”

It’s hard not to feel that Time is prescient in this moment, as a national reckoning with race brings issues like prison abolition and racial injustice to the forefront. But Bradley, whose films (including 2019’s America, a dreamy short that reexamines how visual history is told by sampling clips from Lime Kiln Club Field Day, a 1913 film that’s widely believed to be the oldest movie with an all-Black cast) meditate on Blackness and the importance of perspective and reframing history, points out that the need for justice that the film calls for has always been relevant, if not mainstream.

“There’s always been a time for this film. We’ve never experienced a moment in American history where it hasn’t been relevant, where there hasn’t been a call for justice,” Bradley says. “I say that to be optimistic about the future. We are at a major turning point of real radical change and being able to see allyship for the movement in a way that we’ve never seen it before.”

Bradley credits her honor at Sundance to the work of women of color filmmakers before her, and she hopes it is an indicator of the industry moving forward. Next, she’s been tapped to direct a Netflix docuseries about tennis champ Naomi Osaka, and she has a solo exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art debuting next month featuring her film America. When speaking about her upcoming projects, Bradley’s thoughts are often punctuated by her hope for the future during an uncertain time. It’s a continual element running through Time, something she hopes viewers can connect with.

“I think hope can seem really general, but I can’t emphasize enough that there are examples in the film of what resistance can look like, which anybody can achieve—and that is to hold onto your individuality, to hold onto each other as a family and to believe that love is just as powerful as anything else.”

‘I Put the Black Body in the Work.’ Artist Howardena Pindell on Her New Exhibit Shedding ...

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 19:22:32 GMT

In 1979, Howardena Pindell quit her job in the curatorial department of The Museum of Modern Art to start teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Months into her new profession, she was a passenger in a car accident that left her with a hip injury and a dent in her head, causing memory loss. The near-death situation inspired an epiphany for Pindell, already an artist outside of her working hours: she needed to voice her opinion, she needed to do it now, and her art was the perfect way to do it.

The accident propelled Pindell, then in her mid-30s, into a career making work that overtly touches on subjects others often feared were too political for the art gallery, in groundbreaking pieces like Free, White and 21 and Separate But Equal Genocide: AIDS. Now, Pindell will have a solo exhibition of her work as The Shed, a cultural center in New York City’s Hudson Yards, reopens its doors after seven months. Pindell has had her work regularly exhibited since the ‘70s, and this new exhibition, Rope/Fire/Water, comes just two years after her first major museum retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Curated by Adeze Wilford, Rope/Fire/Water will be on view from Oct. 16 through April of next year, with its centerpieces focused on the violent, barbarous nature of racism, while additional works juxtapose those themes with an eye toward healing.

At the heart of the show is a new film of the same name, which is the artist’s first video work in 25 years. As Pindell, now 77, explains in her own voice in the film, the work was inspired by a traumatic childhood memory: she was at the home of a friend, whose mother was cooking meat for dinner, when she opened an issue of LIFE magazine to find a graphic image of a lynched Black man. Pindell could not eat meat for a year.

She first pitched the idea for Rope/Fire/Water in the early 1970s as a performance piece to a group of female artists, all of whom were white, at A.I.R. Gallery, where Pindell was a founding member. A.I.R., which stands for Artists in Residence, is the first non-profit, artist-run gallery for women in the U.S. Pindell’s idea was turned down—an example, as she explains it, of the unwillingness of white feminists at the time to engage with issues of race. Now, as part of The Shed’s mission to help artists bring to life works that they have not yet been able to realize, Pindell was able to turn that painful memory into an informative, shocking and cathartic experience for viewers.

Getty Images—1974 David AttieNEW YORK – 1974: Founding members of the first women’s cooperative art gallery, A.I.R., from left to right, bottom to top: Howardena Pindell, Daria Dorosh, Maude Boltz, Rosemary Mayer, Mary Grigoriadis, Agnes Denes, Louise Kramer, Loretta Dunkelman, Barbara Zucker, Patsy Norvell, Sari Dienes, Judith Bernstein, Laurace James, Nancy Spero, Pat Lasch, Anne Healy, Dotty Attie. Taken at Daria Dorosh’s loft, 370 Broadway, in 1974, in New York City, New York. (Photo by David Attie/Getty Images)

The complex mix of “the accident, the sense of being isolated by living in lofts for years, and the sense of not really being welcomed in the art world,” says Pindell, have all influenced her approach and the resulting works. And though she has been making work for over half a century, with the new opening at The Shed and the current racial climate, she’s felt that there are more eyes on her work now than ever before. “The killing of George Floyd moved many people who were not on the street in the 1960s with the civil rights movement, so we have a multicultural uprising against police violence and racism in general,” says Pindell. “Then, the light was shone on artists and myself in particular.”

“I put myself—the Black body—in the work”

Howardena PindellInstallation view of Free, White and 21, in Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, in 1980.

Pindell was trained as a painter and started to solidify her career in art working with experimental methods and materials. In the 1970s, she created “video drawings,” in which she would place clear sheets of acetate over her television, mark them up with numbers and arrows as the movements on the screen interested her, then photograph them. The scenes she would draw over were often of sports events—swimming, hockey, baseball. After the accident, she would continue this practice, but the drawings became political. She made one of George H.W. Bush with the text “LIAR” placed over his image in 1988, and in 2007 made one about news coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

Pindell’s first seminal work arrived eight months after the accident. “When you have something like that, you get the fear that you might die and you have not expressed your opinion or tried to make anything better in the world, so that’s why my work became issue-related,” Pindell tells TIME. In 1980, she made Free, White and 21, a 12-minute, 15-second, plain-spoken video about her experiences facing racism and sexism. The film was shot in Pindell’s top-floor loft during what she called “one of the hottest summers in New York.” In the piece, she speaks directly to the camera, telling the viewer about a range of sexist and racist instances in her life, including when a high school teacher refused to place her in an accelerated course, saying that a white student with lower grades would do better. In addition to playing herself in the video, Pindell also acts as a white woman, who interjects throughout to call Pindell “ungrateful” and “paranoid.”

The performance video created waves in the art world when it was first shown at A.I.R. Gallery’s Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States exhibition. Pindell made it, in part, as a reaction to the white feminism she felt was prevalent in her industry and in everyday life. “A lot of well-known women artists, white women artists, whenever I brought up issues of race, they said they didn’t want to talk about them, that that was just politics,” says Pindell, describing her disenchantment with the art world. It was this kind of criticism that her reflections after the accident prompted her to incorporate more explicitly into her work.

“The white voice was the dominant voice. What the white male’s voice was to the white female’s voice, the white female’s voice was to the woman of color’s voice,” Pindell wrote about the making of the Free, White and 21. That dynamic-—the white female’s voice suppressing the woman of color’s voice—is exactly what Free, White and 21 simultaneously exposes and dismantles. In the piece, Pindell uses her voice as an artist to overcome attempts at silencing her.

Howardena PindellStill from Free, White and 21, 1980.

Though the piece garnered much attention, it received its share of criticism alongside the praise. When it was later exhibited in a solo show of Pindell’s, one of the exhibition’s catalog writers asked Pindell to take the video down. When she refused, the complaint was raised with the curator, who also shut it down. Pindell’s mission of using art as an autobiographical tool to expose racism was attacked by critics and students. “I got slack for it, I also got awards for it, but some people just didn’t want to deal with it, either because I put myself—the Black body—in the work, or they just felt that they wanted more mystery,” she explains.

Undeterred, Pindell continued working in a similar vein, further exploring how she could draw upon her own lived experiences to shed light on social injustice. Her 1988 work Autobiography: Water (Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts) is made up of an outline of her body, engulfed in blue and surrounded by various body parts and the words “SEPARATE BUT EQUAL” in the lower right corner. She went on to have works in the permanent collections of museums around the world, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. In 1987, Pindell received a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting, and just last year, she was awarded the Archives of American Art Medal by the Smithsonian Institute.

“It’s taken a long time to break into the system”

Courtesy of The Artist, Commissioned by The Shed.Howardena Pindell, Rope/Fire/Water, (still) 2020.

This year, Pindell has created another video piece with the potential to agitate. And she says it’s a good thing that the piece is a film instead of a performance, as she originally pitched it to A.I.R., because “film has legs.” It can reach more people and, thus, create more impact. “I was disappointed that A.I.R turned it down, but now I feel it is a stronger statement,” she says. Though she is pleased with the piece finally coming to fruition, she says she feels desensitized toward the surge in attention toward her work. “I’ve been in New York 50 years, it’s taken a long time to break into the system … I just kind of am used to numbing myself and charging ahead,” Pindell explains.

The film, which is 19 minutes long, presents the viewer with blunt, macabre anecdotes and facts—ones viewers can’t argue with. The more than 4,000 men, women, and children lynched between 1877 and 1950. Details of the brutal murder of a pregnant Black woman. And so much more. Though her critics who argue that her works lack “mystery” could lodge the same complaints about the frankness of Rope/Fire/Water, that might just be the point. The data and stories of racial violence Pindell presents are gruesome on their own, needing little decoration to startle.

Pindell isn’t new to using data to get a point across; in the 1980s, the artist conducted a series of surveys of the art world, diving into the demographics of artists represented in museums and galleries. The results were presented in two papers, Statistics, Testimony, and Supporting Documentation and Commentary and Update of Gallery and Museum Statistics.

Courtesy the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, and Victoria Miro Gallery.Howardena Pindell, Four Little Girls, 2020. Mixed media on canvas.108 x 120 inches.

For the new opening, Pindell also created two black paintings spun off from the film, both ten feet wide and nine feet tall. Four Little Girls, a remembrance of Black churches that were burned between 1956 and 2015, and whose name is a reference to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963, is placed behind a shrine of burned objects, including a teddy bear and children’s books. The other painting, Columbus, is paired with black, silicone hands, bringing attention to Christopher Columbus’ practice of cutting off Indigenous people’s hands.

Other works in the exhibition include Pindell’s highly textured, glimmering paintings, such as Ko’s Snow Day and Songlines: Glacier. Pindell creates these works through a lengthy process of cutting canvases, sewing them back together, painting and drawing on paper, punching dots out of the paper and layering them onto her canvas. The result is a thick, multidimensional work of art that glows. Pindell’s aim is that these lightly colored, abstract works can be healing to viewers who have just witnessed the trauma presented plainly in her film.

Courtesy the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery, and Victoria Miro Gallery.Howardena Pindell, Ko’s Snow Day, 2020. Mixed media on canvas. 67 x 72 inches.

Pindell, who lives and works in New York, can’t make it to see her work on display at The Shed in person, per her doctor’s request. But she’s well occupied anyway, hard at work on two other paintings, which are at the stage of being cut and sewn, and recovering from the intensity of creating the pieces for this latest show.

“As a Black American woman, I draw on my experience as I have lived it and not as others wish to perceive my living it as fictionalized in the media and so-called ‘history’ books,” Pindell wrote in an artist statement for a 1980 show at A.I.R. Gallery. Forty years later, it’s still an apt way to describe her work, and the way she literally deconstructs and reconstructs her canvases. She doesn’t merely take the canvas as it was given to her—she completely tears it down and builds it back up in her own way.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 Is a Riveting Movie. But the True Story Is Even More Dramatic

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 15:28:51 GMT

The verbal fireworks that dance through Aaron Sorkin’s newest movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, seem too explosive to be true. The film depicts the 1969 Chicago Seven trial, in which President Nixon’s federal government charged eight anti-Vietnam war activists with conspiring to incite a riot at the previous year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Sorkin, who has staged many tense confrontations across his career (The West Wing, The Social Network), depicts a corrupt and unreasonable judge; a parade of undercover operatives; impassioned soliloquies from lawyers; and the horrific binding and gagging of defendant Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. TIME’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek, in her review, called it “as simultaneously entertaining and galvanizing as anything you’ll see this year.”

But while those elements may sound like inventions for Hollywood drama, they were all present, and in some cases even more exaggerated, in the real trial. In fact, the trial, which took place over five months, was far wilder than the 130-minute film, rife with scathing rebuttals, shocking courtroom violence and cameos from countercultural legends like Allen Ginsburg and Judy Collins. Here are the craziest moments from the trial that didn’t entirely make it into Sorkin’s script—or, if they did, played out with even more drama in real life than onscreen.

The incompetence of Judge Julius Hoffman

In The Trial of the Chicago 7, Frank Langella plays Judge Julius Hoffman, who presides over the trials with a gruff rigidity offset by spells of forgetfulness. At the time of the trial, Hoffman was 74 and had developed a reputation for crankiness: in Joseph Goulden’s 1974 book about federal judges, The Benchwarmers, he was described as “impetuous and rude.”

The film suggests that Judge Hoffman presided with a heavy bias toward the U.S. government, and court transcripts seem to confirm this. Time and time again, Hoffman went out of his way to constrict or alienate the defense. On the trial’s first day, Hoffman issued arrest warrants for four defense attorneys who had worked on the defense’s pretrial motions but had since dropped out of the case; he only withdrew the order after a firestorm from the legal community.

During the trial he refused to let the jury see several key pieces of evidence that would help the defendants, including a planning document in which Tom Hayden wrote that the Chicago campaign should be nonviolent. He admonished defense attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), for leaning on the lectern. As in the film, he struggled with names, repeatedly getting Leonard Weinglass’ (Ben Shenkman) name wrong, calling him “Feinglass,” “Weinruss,” and “whatever your name is.”

He chided defendants for their posture; he assigned Abbie Hoffman an additional seven days in jail for laughing in court. (All in all, he assigned a staggering 175 counts of contempt, a number of which are depicted in the movie.) He told the jury to disregard Rennie Davis’ nickname “Rennie Baby,” saying, “Crowd the baby out of your minds. We are not dealing with babies here.”

Hoffman’s treatment of race

Hoffman’s flaws were perhaps most pronounced in his dealings with race and with regard to the defendant Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a Black Panther co-founder who had little to no connection at all to the other defendants. Whenever anyone in the courtroom referenced race, Hoffman bristled: “I don’t think it is proper for a lawyer to refer to a person’s race,” he told Kunstler when the lawyer observed that only Black spectators were being thrown out of the courtroom.

Early on, Hoffman refused to let Seale either have his preferred lawyer or represent himself, and then admonished and silenced him when Seale said his constitutional rights were being violated. On Oct. 29, when Seale lost his temper and called him a “rotten racist pig racist liar,” Hoffman responded: “Let the record show the tone of Mr. Seale’s voice was one of shrieking and pounding on the table and shouting.” When Kunstler pointed out that the prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) had also shouted, Hoffman defended him, saying, “If what he said was the truth, I can’t blame him for raising his voice.”

Niko Tavernise/Netflix 2020From left, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Mark Rylance in “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

Shortly thereafter, Seale was dragged out of the courtroom by half a dozen marshals and came back bound and gagged. “His eyes and the veins in his neck and temples were bulging with the strain of maintaining his breath,” Tom Hayden is quoted as writing in Jon Weiner’s book Conspiracy in the Streets. “As shocking as the chains and gag were, even more unbelievable was the attempt to return the courtroom for normalcy.”

While the film depicts Schultz immediately calling for a mistrial for Seale after his shackling, Seale would in reality remain bound and gagged in court for three days. During that time, Hoffman lashed out after being accused of discrimination, saying to Kunstler, “I lived a long time and you are the first person who has ever suggested that I have discriminated against a Black man.” Seale’s trial was eventually declared a mistrial. He was convicted of 16 counts of contempt of court, leading to a four-year prison sentence, but the charges were later dismissed.

As for the other seven defendants, five were convicted for inciting riots. However, a different judge overturned all convictions partially based on Judge Hoffman’s biases, and the Justice Department decided not to retry the case.

The Chicago Seven’s courtroom antics

While Judge Hoffman’s professionalism during the trial was extremely questionable, the defendants also gleefully undermined the decorum of the courtroom at every turn. The Trial of the Chicago 7 depicts Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) showing up to court in judicial robes, which they actually did. That day, Abbie also swore at the judge, who was also Jewish, in Yiddish: “You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim, huh? [You stinker, fronting for the gentiles]… Tell him to stick it up his bowling ball.”

The two Hoffmans were constantly playing a game of cat and mouse. Abbie blew the jury a kiss; the judge told the jury to “disregard the kiss.” When Abbie said he resided in “Woodstock Nation,” the judge demanded he give a “place of residence…Nothing about philosophy or India, sir.” At one point, Abbie even renounced his last name. And when he was finally sentenced and given a $5,000 fine, he called out to the judge, “Could you make that three-fifty?”

Jerry Rubin, who along with Abbie co-founded the countercultural movement Youth International Party, whose members were known as Yippies, tried to give Judge Hoffman a copy of his book during his sentencing. Reading aloud, he told the judge that he had inscribed it with, “Julius, you radicalized more young people than we ever could. You’re the country’s top Yippie.”

Reading the names of the dead

In the film’s climactic finale, Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) rebuffs Judge Hoffman’s insinuation that he will receive a lighter sentence if he shows remorse, and instead starts reading the names of the thousands of Vietnam War soldiers who have died since the trial began. While soldiers’ names were read by the defendants, it happened earlier in the trial: on Oct. 15, 1969, when Vietnam Moratorium Day was being observed by millions of Americans across the country. That day, when the defendants attempted to place American and South Vietnamese flags side by side on the defense table, Judge Hoffman unsurprisingly demanded they take them down. “Whatever decoration there is the courtroom will be furnished by the government and I think things look alright in this courtroom,” he said. Very few of soldiers’ names were said aloud before the judge cut off the endeavor.

Spitballs from the galley

Bettmann ArchiveAbbie Hoffman adjusts his headband during a news conference about the trial

Throughout the trial, the courtroom was always packed to the brim with supporters of the Chicago 7, who were more than happy to add their own commentary to the proceedings. The court transcripts include plenty of oinking, including when the judge refused to admit a cake into the courtroom for Bobby Seale’s birthday. Late in the trial, Hoffman said, “I have never presided at a trial where there was so much physical affection demonstrated in the courtroom”—to which spectators responded, “RIGHT ON!” When Hoffman ordered that all spectators leave the courtroom for the reading of the verdicts, one spectator called out, “They will dance on your grave, Julie, and the graves of the pig empire.”

Celebrity parade

The trial also included testimony from a long line of 1960s cultural icons, who were brought by the defense to describe their movement and the protests that unfolded outside the convention. The poet Allen Ginsberg, who is portrayed in the movie during the convention protests but not the trial, chanted “Hare Krishna” and demonstrated the way he chanted “o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m” during the protests, much to Hoffman’s chagrin: “The language of the United States district court is English,” he said. When Ginsberg was prodded to continue his testimony, he said, “I am afraid I will be in contempt if I continue to Om.” Ginsberg was also subject to a homophobic line of questioning from prosecutor Thomas Foran (J.C. MacKenzie), who made him read his poems that alluded to gay sex.

Phil Ochs, Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie were all brought to the stand but silenced when they started singing. (“We don’t allow any singing in this court,” Hoffman told Collins.) The writer Norman Mailer showed up to offer some poetic descriptions of the police’s aggression during the protests: “They cut through them like sheets of rain, like a sword cutting down grass,” he said.

And when the Black comedian Dick Gregory was called to testify, Hoffman hastily tried to dispel rumors of his own racism: “I would want this very nice witness to know that I am not [racist], that he has made me laugh often and heartily.”

A Sorkin-worthy monologue

Aaron Sorkin is known for writing epic, idealistic monologues for his protagonists that can sometimes verge on sanctimony. But he didn’t have to write such a speech for William Kunstler: the source material was already sterling. It’s perhaps a bit surprising, then, that Sorkin didn’t use Kunstler’s epic Feb. 2 tirade, in which he berated Hoffman for refusing to let either the activist Ralph Abernathy or Ramsay Clark, the attorney general for Lyndon B. Johnson, take the stand:

“I am outraged to be in this Court before you. I discovered on Saturday that Ralph Abernathy, who is the chairman of the Mobilization, is in town, and can be here, and because you took the whole day from us on Thursday by listening to this ridiculous argument about whether Ramsey Clark could take that stand in front of the jury, I am trembling because I am so outraged…I want you to put me in jail if you want to. You can do anything you want with me, if you want to, because I feel disgraced to be here…

I have sat here for four and a half months and watched the objections denied and sustained by your Honor, and I know that this is not a fair trial. I know it in my heart. If I have to lose my license to practice law and if I have to go to jail, I can’t think of a better cause to go to jail for and to lose my license for than to tell your Honor that you are doing a disservice to the law in saying we can’t have Ralph Abernathy on the stand…

I am going to turn back to my seat with the realization that everything I have learned throughout my life has come to naught, that there is no meaning in this Court, and there is now law in this Court.”

Sorkin skillfully replaces this dramatic climax with another narrative arc that is centered on flashbacks to when police viciously beat protesters on the streets of Chicago. It’s a far neater resolution, with the bloody visuals giving the film real-world stakes. But the court transcripts of the Chicago Seven Trial prove that sometimes history hardly needs embellishing when it comes to onscreen drama.

David Byrne’s American Utopia Is a Grand and Glorious Plea for Human Connection

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:39:48 GMT

Sometimes to make art, you’ve got to build art, to layer ideas, colors, values and textures until you’ve shaped the thing that says what you want to say. David Byrne’s American Utopia, Spike Lee’s grand and glorious filmed record of the hit Broadway show of the same name coming to HBO Oct. 17, is art that has been built, a work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody. The music—some numbers drawn from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia, others from his body of work with Talking Heads, and one a cover (of Janelle Monáe’s 2015 protest anthem “Hell You Talmbout”)—feels fresh and familiar at once, inclusive but also mildly explosive. There’s an urgency to it, as if Byrne and his troupe of 11 musicians and dancers were staking their ground in a battle we shouldn’t even have to fight. The idea is that to survive—to live in any meaningful way—we must stay connected. It’s a principle so glaringly simple that it’s radical.

Byrne is an admittedly weird ambassador for the idea of connection: he isn’t what you’d call a naturally warm presence, at least not in Earth terms. Even at age 68, he’s still like an alien learning the rules of the planet. His awkwardness is his brand. But his desire to connect is robust, and it vitalizes everything that happens onstage during American Utopia. No one in this show has just one job. The musicians are also dancers and singers: their instruments are strapped to their bodies, untethered to any bulky sound equipment, which leaves them free to move and dance around the stage in a series of elegantly orchestrated numbers, with Byrne often at the center—though sometimes lurking at the edges, like living fringe—of the proceedings. (The choreography is by dance veteran Annie-B Parson.) All the performers, including Byrne, wear identical lunar-gray suits, and all are barefoot; the stage is bordered on three sides by a shimmery chain-link curtain. The grand scheme is elegantly simple, yet never chilly. This is a setting, a world, where certain essential problems have been worked out, creating the space and freedom to play.

And so even the songs every longtime Byrne or Talking Heads fan knows well—like “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody),” a moonlit cottage in ballad form, or the wriggly-waggly noodle dance “Slippery People”—take on new shapes and new life. Between numbers Byrne addresses the audience directly, spinning amusing tales about where these songs came from (he wrote “I Zimbra,” with its lyrics by German Dada poet Hugo Ball, to respond to a challenge thrown down by his friend and collaborator Brian Eno), or urging us to fulfill our civic responsibilities (he uses a lighting trick to show how badly the citizenry is represented when only 20 percent of the population votes). And as a prelude to the show’s shiver-inducing version of “Hell You Talmbout,” he explains that he asked Monáe’s permission before venturing to cover the song. Byrne’s band here is racially mixed, but he himself is very, very white; no wonder he approached with caution. But he and his band present the song—an invocation, written in 2015, for all of us to remember the names of murdered Black citizens, among them Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till—with the synthesis of respect and bristling anger it demands. This number also represents one of the few times Lee cuts away from the show, to flash larger-than-life portraits of the victims, often held by a family member, on the screen. It’s an act of boldness that works.

As for Byrne, he is, as ever, a wily and captivating showman. Though his hair is now snowcap-white, his dance moves haven’t changed over the years—he still favors angular, herky-jerky movements, like the folding and unfolding of a carpenter’s ruler, which are often mimicked, to grand effect, by the dancers around him. But as dazzling as he is, you can take your eyes off him: rather than receding, his fellow performers become dazzling planets in their own right. Sometimes they’ll face one another, playing to each other even as they play to us. Other times they march toward us, resolutely, in groups or pairs, as if to say, “Look at any of us individually, or all of us at once—you can’t go wrong!” Each performer’s style is as distinctive as a fingerprint: there’s the cool tomboy swagger of guitarist Angie Swan, the kid-next-door jubilance of bassist Bobby Wooten. As “Once in a Lifetime” rounds to its sublime peak, percussionist Jacquelene Acevedo bursts through the shimmery chain curtain with a clash of cymbals, a human celebratory announcement. Lee, working with one of this regular collaborators, cinematographer Ellen Kuras, doesn’t just show us the action; he too is part of its embrace. He’s our stand-in, our fellow observer-in-awe, though he has the advantage of wielding a camera.

At the close of the show, as the performers snake through the crowd during a rapturous version of “Road to Nowhere,” Lee turns his camera on the audience—American Utopia ran from October 2019 to February 2020, at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre and is set to return to Broadway next September—and we see it for what it is: this is a group of largely white, middle-aged people who came of age listening to Talking Heads. As a bunch, they’re far less diverse than the performers we’ve been watching onstage. You could argue that with American Utopia, Byrne is preaching to the choir, that this is all just an exercise in self-congratulatory white liberalism. But that would be missing the point. In one of his between-song riffs, Byrne muses that there are lots of interesting things to look at in the world: there are bicycles (which he famously likes very much—Lee even shows him riding away from the show on one) and beautiful sunsets, and even a bag of potato chips can be visually beguiling. But somehow we always come back to human faces: “Looking at people?” Byrne says. “That’s the best.” American Utopia is about facing the person in front of you, or next to you, or standing behind you, and doing the work of seeing. To truly see a person is a kind of song, and a world filled with those songs is the ideal. To get us started, Byrne and his troupe have hummed a few bars. The rest is up to us.

‘It Needs to Stop.’ Harrison Ford Speaks Out Against Leaders Who Politicize Climate Change

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 12:00:08 GMT

Harrison Ford is imploring voters to elect leaders who will take action on climate change rather than make it a divisive issue.

The 78-year-old actor, who is a long-time environmental activist, tells TIME that it’s imperative for those in power to view climate change as a scientific reality. “The climate crisis is real—the weight of scientific evidence is overwhelming…but evidence can be ignored, it can be manipulated,” he says. “Leaders who choose to make climate change a divisive issue do it to protect the entrenched economic interests who profit from behavior that destroys our planet. It’s selfish. It’s short-sighted. It needs to stop…This s— is going to kill us.”

In a new short film released by Conservation International on Thursday, Ford, who is vice chairman of the environmental nonprofit’s board, delivers a voiceover in which he discusses why prioritizing nature and science is more critical than ever. “The necessary foundation of our lives is a vital healthy natural world—our source of clean water, food and a stable climate,” he says. “We’re watching that foundation crumble.”

He goes on to urge people to support companies that value human lives over short-term profit, hold businesses that fund the destruction of nature accountable and vote for candidates who not only recognize what’s at stake, but are willing to face environmental challenges head-on.

“We have people in leadership positions who refuse to accept objective science,” he says. “They’re robbing us of the ability to collaborate, to compromise, to move forward.”

Ford previously spoke out against leaders who deny or refuse to address climate change during a speech at the 2019 World Government Summit in Dubai. “Around the world, elements of leadership, including in my own country, to preserve their stake in the status quo, deny or denigrate science,” he said. “They are on the wrong side of history.”

Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s Dueling Town Halls Showed Us Exactly What Happens When We Treat ...

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 03:29:10 GMT

You couldn’t invent a better metaphor for American politics in 2020 than the one that played out on TV Thursday, as the two men vying for the White House faced voters simultaneously but on competing networks. With the night’s planned debate canceled because the President—who was hospitalized with COVID-19 less than 72 hours after the first debate—refused to participate in a remote telecast, former Vice President Joe Biden had arranged a solo town hall on ABC News. Days later, NBC News announced a town hall with President Trump airing at the same time. It was the logical next step toward self-destruction for a politically polarized country where every attempt at dialogue between right and left has come to feel futile. Instead, viewers got to choose whether to watch Biden or Trump, old-school professionalism or new-school braggadocio, facts or “alternative facts”—and whether to have their biases confirmed or their blood pressure elevated.

Especially for partisans, as almost all of us are nowadays, it’s tempting to look for some way to blame this minor yet telling failure on one candidate or the other—or even just the constant squabbling between their campaigns. In truth, though the conflict started this way, the networks are responsible for resolving it in such preposterous fashion. This, it turns out, is what happens when you treat the democratic process like primetime entertainment.

ABC via Getty Images—2020 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Oct. 15, 2020 in Philadelphia, during ABC’s “The Vice President and the People”

Not that the dueling events were entirely gratuitous, in themselves. Biden benefited from the opportunity to speak calmly on the issues with a sparse, socially distanced crowd and host George Stephanopoulos without constant interruptions from his opponent. The 90-minute town hall opened with an extensive discussion of the pandemic, with the former VP painting a picture of greater preparedness, mask mandates and funding to keep schools and business open safely, as well as clear, science-based messaging from the executive branch: “It is the presidential responsibility to lead,” said Biden. He gave detailed, thoughtfully articulated, humble, if frequently longwinded responses to questions about tax policy, racist policing, the Supreme Court battle and transgender rights. And he was gracious when Stephanopoulos pressed him on controversial topics like court packing (though his answer to that particular query remained frustratingly ambiguous).

Trump, who on Thursday afternoon thanked NBC for its controversial decision to host him by quipping to a North Carolina crowd that “I’m being set up tonight” by “Concast” (a play on the name of NBC’s parent company, Comcast), struck a more aggressive tone with host Savannah Guthrie—who didn’t pull punches. He endeavored to frame his response to the pandemic as a best-case scenario, and promised good news for the economy and healthcare reform, while volunteering few details. He trotted out his usual cast of supposed villains: Biden, Nancy Pelosi, China, Antifa, the New York Times. In what was probably the most notable exchange of the hourlong program, Guthrie did manage to get the President, whose comments on the Proud Boys in the first debate fell far short of condemnation, to say the words “I denounce white supremacy.” Not so QAnon; Trump professed to know nothing about the conspiracy theory except that its adherents are “very much against pedophilia.”

None of this could have come as a shock to anyone who’s been following the election in good faith. More worrisome is the extent to which NBC’s thirst for ratings—which in 2015 led the network to book then-candidate Trump as an SNL host—was allowed to take precedence over voters’ right to hear both candidates take questions from regular people. Major political events are broadcast live and unedited for obvious reasons, even if DVR and streaming video give many the option to watch them after they air.

NBC has faced plenty of high-profile criticism for scheduling Trump opposite Biden—some of it solemn (“I am dismayed—more like disgusted,” wrote former NBC News executive Cheryl Gould, on Facebook) and some hilarious. “I can’t remember when I was this shocked by an NBC programming decision,” joked Conan O’Brien, who left the network in 2010 after a notoriously nasty battle with Jay Leno over The Tonight Show. Some of MSNBC’s left-leaning personalities, including Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, have appeared similarly bemused. An open letter to Comcast and NBCUniversal executives signed by such entertainment-industry giants as J.J. Abrams, Ryan Murphy, Ava DuVernay and Greg Berlanti argued: “By agreeing to air his town hall as counterprogramming opposite Vice President Biden’s town hall on ABC, you are enabling the President’s bad behavior while undercutting the Presidential Debate Commission and doing a disservice to the American public.”

That’s certainly true. But the larger takeaway from Thursday’s mess isn’t that ABC/Disney is the good guy and NBC/Comcast the villain. NBC News’ scheduling decision didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened within the extremely competitive business of primetime television—one that has been floundering for years amid the rise of streaming, and one that has become desperate for content following months of COVID-related production delays. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that network execs don’t see the choice to host town halls as “primarily profit- or ratings-driven,” along with a reminder that they do run ads against these telecasts, unlike official debates. But it still seems worth noting that the series premiere of quarantine sitcom Connecting…, a timely upstart which filled the same time slot for NBC last Thursday, drew an inauspicious audience of just 1.6 million.

We may never get corporate agendas out of American elections (see also: Citizens United). Even so, in such a chaotic political and media landscape, where the cancellation of a bipartisan debate can lead to competing primetime spectacles, broadcasters’ power over voters poses novel dangers. Maybe we need a specific rule preventing simultaneous televised events. Maybe we need tighter regulations on candidates’ TV appearances in general. That’s a question for political analysts, not TV critics. But one thing is certain: to repeat a common 2020 refrain, we can’t go on like this.

Jagged Little Pill Leads Tony Awards Nominations With 15

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 16:50:34 GMT

(NEW YORK) — The sobering musical “Jagged Little Pill,” which plumbs Alanis Morissette’s 1995 breakthrough album to tell a story of an American family spiraling out of control, earned a leading 15 Tony Award nominations Thursday, as the Broadway community took the first steps to celebrate a pandemic-shortened season that upended the theater world.

The nominations were pulled from just 18 eligible plays and musicals, a fraction of the 34 shows the season before. During most years, there are 26 competitive categories; this year there are 25 with several depleted ones. The category for best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical had just one actor—Aaron Tveit.

Broadway theaters abruptly closed on March 12, knocking out all shows—including 16 that were still scheduled to open in the spring. The cutoff for eligibility for all shows was set at Feb. 19.

The nominations came from 10 new plays, four new musicals and four play revivals. Two high profile shows—Freestyle Love Supreme and David Byrne’s American Utopia—did not accommodate Tony voters and weren’t eligible.

The 2020 Tony Awards ceremony will be broadcast digitally and take place later this year, at a date still to be announced. It’s one of few bright spots for theater fans—Broadway will be shut down until at least May 30.

“Theater will survive,” James Monroe Iglehart, the nominations host, said during Thursday’s announcement.

‘I Have a Lot of Ideas for Amendments.’ Playwright Heidi Schreck on Her Hit Play About the ...

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 15:59:46 GMT

Heidi Schreck used to be an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. Constitution. As a teenager, the actor and playwright would travel the country reciting its amendments and defending its virtues as part of the American Legion Oratorical Contest. The prize money that she took home from these contests helped her pay for college.

But Schreck’s views on the founding document began to shift as she got older, and especially as she saw how it failed to protect women, including members of her own family, from violence. More than 10 years ago, she began writing a mostly one-woman play called What the Constitution Means to Me, in which she wrestled with these evolving views and proclaimed, “Our bodies had been left out of the document from the beginning.”

When the play arrived on Broadway last year, it was met with ecstatic reviews: Tony Kushner, the playwright of Angels in America, called it “one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen.” The play won Obie and New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards for best new American play, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for two Tony Awards. TIME named it the fifth best play of the year.

On Friday, a taped performance of the Broadway production from last summer will arrive on Amazon Prime Video at a particularly potent moment to be grappling with the Constitution’s merits and flaws. Statues of the men who ratified it are being toppled; hearings are underway for a Supreme Court Justice nominee who some say is the antithesis of the justice whose seat she is poised to fill; and experts wonder if the results of next month’s election could set off a constitutional crisis.

In a phone interview earlier this week, Schreck took in the weight of the moment, talking about her encounter with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ways in which the theater community needs to change. These are excerpts from the conversation.

TIME: In the play, you talk about your penchant for “Greek tragedy sobbing,” saying that it’s “maybe the appropriate response to everything happening right now.” Compared to last year, what has your 2020 been like?

Schreck: I gave birth to twin girls in April of this year and I love them more than I thought it was possible to love anyone. Beyond that, this year has felt like a hallucinatory nightmare. Because I was pregnant or a new mother for almost all of it and in quarantine, I’ve been getting news of the outside world by staying up at night reading Twitter while nursing my daughters. There’s a deep sense of unreality about all of it.

Do you feel like your show has taken on increased urgency over the last year due to everything that’s happened in the world?

I started writing the show over 10 years ago and performed it almost daily for nearly 3 years. Though the show is designed to feel spontaneous, it’s very carefully constructed and hasn’t really changed much, because everything that’s happening right now is a result of decisions that were made 400 years ago. The big reckonings we’re having in terms of race and the original crimes of slavery; of women’s bodies and the law; of the co-equal branches of government and whether those are functioning well right now—these are all current, topical issues, but they were all set into motion so long ago.

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an avid theatergoer, and last June, she saw What the Constitution Means to Me on Broadway. What do you remember about that experience?

We all were speechless. Thursday Williams, one of our great debaters [who is featured in the final segment of the show], always had an RBG pencil tucked behind her ear when she performed. That night, she thought the audience was very out of control, making noises she hadn’t heard before. When we told her that Justice Ginsburg was in the audience, she collapsed to the floor. Justice Ginsburg then came backstage, which was delightful. She was sitting down and stood up to hug Thursday—I remember being incredibly moved by that.

She sent a nice letter to us afterward and asked us for a copy of the script. I told my stage manager I was nervous to send it to her, because I was sure she would find errors in it. He said, “Oh, Heidi, stop it. She doesn’t have time to read your play. This is just a symbolic act.”

A few days later, I got a Fedex package that had a copy of one of the cases that I discussed flagged with some things to look at, and then a letter thanking me for the script and giving me two notes. One had to do with changing a piece of language from “would have” to “might have.” She wanted me to be more precise with my language. The other one had to do with how to talk about the Equal Rights Amendment.

At the end of the play, a recording of Ginsburg plays, with the late justice asking the question, “When will there be enough women on the court?” and answering with: “My answer is, when there are 9.” Why did you decide to include her voice?

Like many of us, I am so grateful to her for the work she did, both on the court and maybe especially as a lawyer. Starting in 1971, when she argued that the Equal Protection Clause ought to include equality based on sex or gender. Then the series of cases she brought in front of the Supreme Court that completely transformed my life and the lives of so many women in this country. Because of her, I can have a credit card, I can have property in my own name.

But also on a more personal note, I had been listening to her voice for 10 years: I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Supreme Court cases online on Oyez. I really fell in love with her voice. Sometimes you listen to [Supreme Court recordings], it feels like the law can become really divorced from the lives of human beings. But whenever I heard her speak, both the things she was saying and the amount of feeling and emotion in her voice made me feel like she was holding space for the real human life at the center of the case at all times.

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett considers herself an originalist and a textualist in the mold of her mentor, Justice Antonin Scalia, who interpreted the Constitution according to what he thought was the framers’ intent. What do you think of originalism?

The play answers what I think about originalism more cogently than I can do right now. The only thing I’ll say about it: I’ll return to Justice Ginsburg and say that any approach to law that doesn’t put the human being at the center, I’m suspicious of.

Your play ends with a mock debate between you and a high schooler, alternating in different performances between Williams and Rosdely Ciprian, about whether to keep or abolish the Constitution. Where do you stand on that at the moment?

I think we should keep the Constitution. I have a lot of ideas for amendments. But really, the purpose of the debate is to allow the audience and performers to make time and space to imagine something else: to say, “What if we were in charge of creating America today? If we were the framers, what would we do differently? What kind of future do we want for ourselves?”

There are many others right now who are engaging in similar acts of reimagination, over policing, prisons and more. Are you inspired by these efforts?

It seems like more and more people in the mainstream are able to say that the structures of this country are racist and are perpetuating racism. That idea has moved much more to the center than I can remember in my lifetime. I do think there is hope in that. I think reimagining our prison system is a hopeful idea, and that acknowledging that it is an extension of slavery is important. The next step is an act of imagination. What might we create instead?

I’m part of the American theater, which, like everything else, is an institution that needs rethinking. The pandemic has shut everything down, which is really painful and hard on so many of us. But the one kernel of hope in there is, could we imagine, when we come back, a theater that is more inclusive, that pays its workers better? That provides a better safety net? I do think we’re having to rethink everything—and I think there’s something optimistic in there.

What did you think of the “We See You, White American Theater” letter written in July that condemns racism in the theater industry?

I think the letter is a great act of generosity. The rest of us, especially white artists in the theater, white artistic directors and board members in positions of power, need to accept the gift of it.

In the future I will think much harder about how I’m finding my collaborators and who I’m choosing for certain positions. If you’ve been an artist in a theater that’s exclusionary for a long time, it probably means you’ve worked with a majority of white artists. If you keep saying, “I’ll keep working with the people I know really well,” you’re going to be perpetuating a racist system. It’s challenged me to think about how I write plays, who I write for, and who I choose as my directors, designers and more.

In addition to seeking out BIPOC artists to collaborate with, I want to do better at advocating for change and calling out bullsh-t. For example, pushing theaters I work with harder to make sure their staffs are diverse, refusing to work with theaters or companies who aren’t. Also, I have been thinking about what it might mean to step aside at moments and to recommend artists who are being overlooked because of racism for opportunities I am offered.

The audience of a Broadway play is more self-selective, whereas on Amazon Prime, you’re now competing with a massive catalog of familiar favorites. How might you convince an audience to watch something they might perceive as challenging?

Luckily, that’s not my job. That’s what a whole marketing team is for. But my hope is it will work as it did in the theater: I started performing the show for an audience of 30 people and didn’t think it would have much appeal beyond that. The fact that more and more people kept wanting to see it, and we kept moving to bigger theaters, makes me think that the show will find the audience that’s meant to watch it.

What are the main things you wish the general public knew about the Constitution?

I think many people don’t read the Constitution or actually know what it says. I would include myself in that number except for the fact that my mom made me do the contest. It’s a beautifully written little document. You can get a pocket size one and carry it around. I would love for more people to read it and think about it.

All These Terrible Quarantine Shows Are Giving Me Zoom Fatigue

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 14:38:32 GMT

A home health aide with no childcare and limited funds must decide whether to neglect her ailing patient or her young daughter. An overworked man neglects to mute a video chat with his colleague, accidentally forcing her to overhear him bicker with his newly unemployed boyfriend. With school canceled, a teen gamer uses every digital tool available to court her crush: Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, VRChat. A dad racked with worry over his COVID-stricken wife struggles to distract their son, who desperately wants to see her and is too little to understand how gravely ill she is.

Sounds familiar, right? If you’ve been sentient in the developed world this past year, you’ve surely heard about—and quite possibly lived through—an experience similar to at least one of these scenarios. And you can revisit them starting Oct. 15 with Social Distance, an eight-episode Netflix anthology series from creator Hilary Weisman Graham and executive producer Jenji Kohan that chronicles our current, seemingly endless coronavirus quarantine through the all-seeing lenses of the devices we’ve used to stay connected. But I have to admit, as someone who has turned to TV (and movies, and books) since March for a sorely needed mental vacation from the present, I’m not sure why you would want to do that.

Television executives don’t seem to share my confusion. Since August, the small screen has been producing a stream of hastily put-together quarantine shows. Freeform’s Love in the Time of Corona—a four-episode miniseries whose title seems likely to have preceded its premise—came first, enlisting real-life actor couples and families in an ensemble dramedy that was less impressive for its content than as a feat of technology. Once intended for the stage, the HBO special Coastal Elites cast brand-name stars Bette Midler, Dan Levy, Issa Rae, Sarah Paulson and Kaitlyn Dever as fed-up cosmopolitan liberals in a series of monologues that take place during the winter and spring of 2020. And earlier this month, quarantine TV (should we call it quaranTV?) came to broadcast primetime with the premiere of NBC’s Connecting… A sort of virtual hangout comedy, the remotely shot series consists of video chats among a group of friends in L.A.

The shows aren’t quite carbon copies of each other. While most stories are mediated by technology, Love distinguishes itself by playing out mostly offline. If Coastal Elites is swimming in 21st-century prestige-TV signifiers, down to its title, then Connecting… belongs to the decades-old tradition of broad, jokey network sitcoms. The best of a uniformly disappointing bunch, Social Distance switches up its cast, tone and app of choice with every mercifully brief, 20-minute vignette: Oscar Nuñez leads a Zoom funeral, Danielle Brooks uses Wyze smart-home devices to be in two places at once, Ring observes a couple of retired physicians (played by Dylan and Becky Ann Baker) bickering over their pandemic public-health obligations. (The show can feel like either an accidental ad for surveillance capitalism or a PSA against it, depending on your perspective.)

NBCThe cast of ‘Connecting’

Yet the many similarities between these projects seem more telling than their minor differences. Each cast features a wide range of personal identities, and not just in terms of race. They all include at least one major queer character, while Connecting… has Difficult People scene stealer Shakina Nayfack giving voice to what it’s like to be trans in a health crisis and Love casts the non-binary actor Tommy Dorfman as a non-binary young adult torn between their female roommate (Rainey Qualley) and a man they’ve been chatting with online (Jordan Gavaris). Though people in their 20s through 40s are egregiously overrepresented, all of the series except Connecting… find space for a brooding teen and a vulnerable boomer or two. Healthcare workers pop up every now and then but only provide brief reminders that the real COVID crisis is far more grim than the daily lives of healthy folks stuck at home.

It’s no surprise that Coastal Elites wears its exclusivity as a badge of honor. Midler’s ostensibly heroic Miriam is an Upper West Side theater lover who picks a fight with a stranger in a MAGA hat; in the special’s final monologue, a generic young nurse (Dever) from flyover country who came to New York during its devastating first wave tearfully recounts Miriam’s death from COVID. But the other shows aren’t much more democratic—and what we don’t see speaks volumes. With the exception of the rare Social Distance episode, the leads mirror the creators and stars: wealthy (or at least middle-class) city dwellers with white-collar jobs and left-leaning politics. The farther from that experience a story line is, the more hollow it rings, as if synthesized from newspaper headlines. A few characters are situationally broke, but none are poor. Nonwhite characters may be present, but they’re not situated within the low-income communities of color that have been hardest hit by the coronavirus.

As a result, the shows exist on a continuum from uncanny to unreal. They make shallow plays for universal resonance: who can’t relate to this couple who are driving each other nuts now that they’re together 24/7? Or this woman who started shopping online for necessities and can’t stop adding to her cart? Sure, many of us have had similar experiences. That doesn’t mean they cut deep enough to carry emotional weight onscreen. Connecting… bills itself as “a new comedy that’s sick of quarantine—just like the rest of us.” But it tries so hard to achieve broad representation that it forgets to convince viewers that a bougie gay dad in his 40s (Parvesh Cheena), a 20-something conspiracy theorist (Ely Henry) who wears a gas mask indoors, a pair of cute singles (Preacher Lawson and Otmara Marrero) engaged in a classic sitcom will-they-or-won’t-they and a doctor across the country in New York (Cassie Beck) would really all be part of the same friend group.

FreeformTommy Dorfman and Rainey Qualley in ‘Love in the Time of Corona’

Some of the most disappointing scenes are responses to the Black Lives Matter movement’s resurgence in late spring that, though well intentioned, too often come off as trivializing. Love, Social Distance and Connecting… all depict characters processing videos of the George Floyd or Ahmaud Arbery killings. Yet in no instance, after a few minutes or a few episodes in their company, do we know those characters well enough to understand the nuances of what police violence means to them. Their shocked, then heartbroken, then angry reactions seem monolithic, designed to echo sympathetic viewers’ own responses, as if antiracist Americans (the only kind of Americans we see up close in these shows) all suffered the same pain in unison. Have we not learned by now that “we’re all in this together,” a sentiment repeated on a loop in the early months of the pandemic, is a way of shrugging off the disproportionate suffering of the most vulnerable? A more uncomfortable question: is it appropriate to keep replaying these real tragedies, just months after they happened, in the context of bittersweet comedies? Can’t we let the victims’ families and the activists fighting for their cause own these stories for a while longer?

I imagine that many people are living with too much grief and trauma to even consider tuning in to a lighter take on the pandemic. Indeed, if executives running out of new content to air have embraced quaranTV, audiences seem to be doing the opposite. Connecting… premiered on Oct. 8 to an audience of just 1.6 million—miserable ratings for a network show—while Love’s viewership topped out at around 200,000. More people may give Social Distance a shot, thanks to its strong cast, short episodes, Kohan’s built-in fan base and the heightened visibility that Netflix series tend to enjoy. That doesn’t mean the sketchy vignettes that make up this scattered anthology seem especially likely to linger in the restless 2020 zeitgeist.

Their shoddy construction, narrative blandness and sociopolitical myopia aside, what rankles about these shows is the gratuitousness of their very existence. Why would we want to listen in on a Zoom call between underwritten, stock-character strangers who are just as bored as we are when we could be participating in a Zoom call with actual friends or family? (This probably explains why remotely shot reunion specials from shows such as Parks and Recreation and Mythic Quest worked so much better: to fans, the characters already feel like old friends.) Why would we choose simplified, saccharine, faux-universal depictions of life in our dizzyingly complicated present when there are so many real, vital, specific stories that deserve our attention, from Jesmyn Ward’s annihilating Vanity Fair account of her husband’s illness and death not long before the coronavirus began to spread rapidly across the the U.S., and the George Floyd protests that followed, to the inspiring, infuriating pandemic episode of the Netflix docuseries Lenox Hill? There will be plenty of time—decades, probably, if past cataclysms like 9/11 are any indication—to apply the techniques of screenwriting to themes that have emerged over the past seven months. And that’s important work. But why turn to fiction when the truth is still unfolding?