TIME - Entertainment

Wandavision Offers Hope That Originality Can Survive the Era of the Ever-Expanding Franchise

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:19:51 GMT

Just a year ago, it was difficult to imagine franchises eating up an even larger chunk of pop culture than they already had. Avengers: Endgame, the final chapter in a decade-long superhero saga, had claimed the title of highest-grossing movie ever made. All 10 of the top movies at the box office in 2019 were franchise films. Franchise fare was even invading the awards race: Joker scored 11 Oscar nominations, the most ever for a superhero movie, and nabbed a win for Joaquin Phoenix.

In the past year, for all its wretchedness, the pandemic’s closure of movie theaters and postponement of blockbusters has offered an unexpected reprieve to anxious cinephiles who fear that superhero franchises are smothering the last vestiges of originality.

But that reprieve won’t last long. Already, the franchise machines are ramping back up. Disney recently announced more than 50 new movies and shows based on existing intellectual property, the bulk of them falling under the Marvel and Star Wars umbrellas. Warner Bros. is expanding its DC superhero content to include not one, but two different superhero universes. (That means two or more Batmen, played by different actors, will be running around parallel-universe Gothams at the same time.) Amazon’s long-anticipated Lord of the Rings show is supposed to debut this year. Heck, even Sex and the City is building a cinematic universe. If you believe that franchise fatigue is destroying capital-C Cinema, the movies and TV due out this year would seem to bear out that theory.

But perhaps not all hope is lost. WandaVision, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first project in a year and a half, debuted on Disney+ today. And though it is the lynchpin for the future of the MCU, it is unlike anything Marvel has done before. The show is unexpectedly, wonderfully weird and seemingly designed to appeal to the very people who have written off superhero antics as low-brow entertainment. Of course, as TIME’s TV critic laments in her review, the show demands that to fully understand what’s going on, the audience really ought to check out the 23 movies that came before. That is the cunning genius of Marvel Studios: its very design is meant to convert superhero agnostics into full-blown MCU fans. But if we’re all doomed to board this train for the long haul—and I admittedly hopped aboard long ago—it’s about time that Marvel shook things up, broke away from the typical hero’s journey and explored some truly bizarre stories.

Here’s how WandaVision fits into the MCU’s history of experimentation with style and form, why it’s unique, and why Marvel devotees and agnostics alike should hope it’s a sign of what’s to come.

And if you need a primer on the Wanda and Vision of it all—and how the superhero couple fits into the MCU—you can find that here before reading on.

WandaVision is both a sitcom satire and a Marvel mystery

Marvel StudiosKathryn Hahn in WandaVision

The first episode of WandaVision is a 30-minute comedy in black and white that sends up ’50s-era shows like I Love Lucy. If you come to the show expecting superhero business and immediately feel confused, well, that’s the point. Trailers for the show suggested that Wanda, in her deep depression following Vision’s death, has created some kind of parallel dimension where she can delude herself into thinking that he is still alive, and where they get to live not as an android and a witch but a “normal” couple with all the trappings of normalcy, down to the white picket fence.

Each episode tackles a new decade of family sitcom, from I Love Lucy in the 1950s to Modern Family in the 2010s. At its core, WandaVision is a send-up of these comedies, and a good one at that. Vision phases through a chair in a nod to Rob Petrie tripping over an ottoman in the opening credits to the Dick Van Dyke show. By the 1970s, Wanda and Vision’s house looks eerily similar to the one once occupied by the Brady Bunch. The whole show seems to nod, meta-textually, to the fact that star Elizabeth Olsen grew up on sitcom sets since her sisters Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen starred in Full House. Kathryn Hahn is an utter delight as the nosy next-door neighbor who seems to be hiding a secret. Each episode has its own theme song, written by Frozen vets Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez in the style of the era.

In this small-screen version of the character, Olsen gets to play emotions other than brave or scared. Her comedic timing is excellent, and she exudes both the determination to build her bubble of happiness as well as the fragility of someone who has experienced trauma, a range that the stuffed Marvel movies rarely have the time to explore.

By the second and third episodes, the show falls into a rhythm, balancing comedic moments with an underlying sense of dread. Wanda’s dream begins to fracture, a la The Truman Show or Pleasantville. Sharp-eyed Marvel fans will spot the allusions to Hydra in the commercial breaks or notice the voice of Randall Park’s character from Ant-Man playing over the radio trying to communicate with Wanda.

Somewhere in Disney’s office probably sits a Venn Diagram that shows how many early family sitcom buffs are also devout Marvel fans. The overlap may be small, but that’s what makes WandaVision Marvel’s most exciting experiment in years. There’s a chance that Marvel agnostics intrigued by the comedic aspects will be turned off by the underlying mystery and Marvel fans will grow impatient with the homages to old Hollywood. The show has to hit just the right balance to pull off both.

Marvel has never actually been all that experimental

©Marvel StudiosRocket, voiced by Bradley Cooper, and Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel in Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2.

The biggest franchise in film history has bizarre origins. The first Iron Man movie is not weird, per se, but it certainly does not have the Disney sheen of the movies that would come after it. Iron Man drinks heavily, beds plenty of women and generally acts fairly unheroic. Aspects of that character remained after Disney acquired Marvel Studios between the first and second Iron Man movies, but his spikiest edges were buffed away until he became a responsible father-like figure in the Avengers and, especially, Spider-Man movies.

What followed was a string of hero origin stories: a hero who is flawed and must be humbled and prove themselves worthy of the cape: Iron Man, Thor and Doctor Strange are hubristic; Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Black Panther and Captain Marvel have their priorities out-of-whack; Captain America isn’t jacked enough. They usually end up fighting someone with their exact same powers. In the sequels, things get personal. The hero must face an AI they themselves created, a rival they ticked off or a sibling/best friend/father who became a villain. Team-up movies would pop up in between.

As time wore on, the heroes got more fantastical—not humans with scientifically-enhanced powers but talking trees and wizards and aliens. The backdrops got cooler—Doctor Strange’s universe beautifully bent in on itself, and a gorgeously-rendered Wakanda inspired millions of moviegoers. But for all the fanfare around Guardians of the Galaxy’s daring decision to feature a talking tree, the stories themselves remained relatively formulaic. (Plus, Lord of the Rings already introduced the world to Ents, so Groot wasn’t a huge stretch.)

To Marvel’s credit, the studio seems to offer its directors more creative bandwidth than, say, LucasFilm, which has earned a reputation for ensuring directors will align with the Star Wars vision (and even firing directors who don’t). The team at Marvel does an excellent job of identifying directors with a unique voice—particularly Ryan Coogler, who built an entirely new and utterly compelling country and culture for Black Panther, and Taika Waititi, who resurrected the deadly boring Thor franchise with the super-fun, psychedelic Thor: Ragnarok.

And the final two Avengers movies certainly surprised fans. Avengers: Infinity War ended with the villain winning, an unprecedented state of affairs in modern superhero films. Not only that, but he snapped his fingers and made half the living creatures on earth—including half of the superheroes we’d come to know and love in the MCU—disappear. Now, nobody over the age of 10 actually thought this was a permanent state of affairs. You don’t reboot the Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland to only make one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie. (And anyone with access to Google could discover that Holland was under contract to film several more movies as Spidey.) Still, few were expecting when they entered the Infinity War sequel, Endgame, for the film franchise to jump five years into the future and spend a good deal of movie time exploring the consequences of a Leftovers-esque tragedy.

But surprise is not quite the same as oddness or experimentation. In the end of the Avengers saga, the good guys won. And they did it using the same tools that they always had: teamwork, sacrifice and inventing a completely new scientific tool (in this case, time travel suits) to save the day. The MCU filmmakers have taken small detours, but never radical departures, from the road laid out by their corporate overlords. Whatever their cosmetic differences, the movies inevitably ended the same way: with one big old CGI fight scene.

The future of the MCU should innovate on the old formula

Marvel StudiosMarvel’s Captain America: Civil War..L to R: Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)..Ph: Zade Rosenthal ..©Marvel 2016

Perhaps WandaVision is headed toward that inevitable CGI battle too. The trailer certainly seems to suggest as much. But fans are going to be forced to sit patiently through a sitcom satire first. And, boy, is this show a slow burn. It’s only in the third episode that fans will begin to get a sense of what the heck is going on. Before then, the show doles out only sporadic clues and easter eggs, like a bright red helicopter with a symbol that will be familiar to those who have read the Marvel comics. It’s the mystery of how on earth this quiet, comedic series is possibly connected to the loud and operatic Marvel universe that drives the show forward. Between jokes, the audience is left wondering: is Wanda an unwitting participant in her delusion, or its creator? Is someone doing this to her or is she doing it to others?

Still, in the three episodes sent to journalists, Wanda never uses her magic for more than cleaning dishes or rectifying a social faux pas. This show could have easily had Scarlet Witch battling baddies with powers like telekinesis in every episode, flying around the picket-fence fantasy hurling energy balls at some mystical villain.

In fact, many of Marvel’s other Disney+ shows seem to be taking that route. Falcon and the Winter Soldier appears to be an action-packed continuation of the Captain America movies. And there’s precedent for simply mimicking big screen blockbusters on streaming services: The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars TV show that just wrapped its second season on Disney+, is a hit exactly because it’s basically indistinguishable from its film counterparts. It commands nearly as big a budget, produces similarly expensive CGI effects and even hits on the same tropes of orphans and fathers as the films. But with WandaVision, Marvel has managed to show restraint. Audiences will just have to wait. And that is great.

In theory, Marvel fans could simply skip WandaVision and wait for one of Marvel’s 10 other shows headed to streaming services in the coming years or movies like Black Widow and Spider-Man: Homecoming 3 when movie theaters open again. But Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has hinted that Wanda is actually central to the next phase (4, in case you’ve lost track) of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The events of WandaVision will have an impact of both Spider-Man: Homecoming 3 and Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness. The latter’s title, and Elizabeth Olsen’s inclusion in that cast, suggests that WandaVision could introduce the concept of a multiverse to the MCU. Some fans have even speculated that Wanda’s immense grief will drive her to become a villain and the main antagonist in the Doctor Strange movie.

Which is to say that MarvelVision isn’t just some one-off experiment. It’s the future of the MCU. At least, fans can hope.

All the Marvel Clues You Missed in WandaVision’s First Two Episodes

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 23:52:10 GMT

At first glance, WandaVision is a playful satire of family sitcoms of yesteryear. Wanda (a.k.a. Scarlet Witch) and Vision play house as a happily married couple dealing with mundane problems like disastrous dinner parties and pregnancy plots, all performed in front of a live studio audience. But there’s a twist: their happily ever after is almost certainly a delusion of Wanda’s, especially given that we know Vision died in Avengers: Infinity War. Wanda, who has mind-control powers, seems to have retreated into a fantasy where she and Vision can live “normal” lives in the most American setting possible: A sitcom. Each episode, set in a different decade, riffs on a beloved show like I Love Lucy or Bewitched.

Don’t be fooled: this is also a show set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And unlikes Jessica Jones or Daredevil, it ties directly into the Marvel movies’ central plot. After all, both Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) have made pivotal appearances in multiple Marvel films. So if you haven’t kept up with the movies, you may get confused. In fact, WandaVision will serve as a launching pad for Marvel’s highly anticipated “Phase 4,” which has been on hold since Disney delayed the releases of Black Widow and The Eternals because of the pandemic. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has said that WandaVision will set up the plots of upcoming Marvel movies like Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: Homecoming 3.

At its heart, WandaVision is actually a mystery series deeply rooted in Marvel lore. Why has Wanda created this world? Is someone making her do it? Why do references to HYDRA and keep popping up? What familiar Marvel character is that calling out to Wanda over the radio? The show is chock-full of easter eggs that hint at what is going on with Wanda and what the ramifications might be on the rest of the remaining Avengers.

Here are all the clues, hints and references that you may have missed.

Episode 1: Agnes as a possible Marvel villain

the number one way we KNOW kathryn hahn's agnes is AGatha harkNESs in wandavision? THAT BROOCH! pic.twitter.com/AIXmFPUqC6

— nick marino (@nickmarino) December 11, 2020

Kathryn Hahn is having a ball playing a nosy neighbor named Agnes in the early episode of WandaVision. But she may be prying for a reason.

In the comics, Wanda has a neighbor named Agatha Harkness. Some Redditors have pointed out that if you squish the names Agatha and Harkness together, you get “Agnes,”—which, at first glance, seems like a stretch. But other sharp-eyed fans have pointed out that Agnes is always wearing a brooch on WandaVision, just like Agatha in the Scarlet Witch comics.

In the comics, Agnes is a witch who trains Wanda. She also helps Wanda get pregnant by her husband Vision, which would be anatomically difficult because he’s an android. That happens, without Agnes’ help, at the end of the second episode of WandaVision—though, again, nobody ever explains whether Vision can have children considering he’s, well, a machine. I suppose that’s not appropriate for a family show.

Bad news for Agnes: Wanda and Agatha’s relationship in the comics does not end happily. Watch out Kathryn Hahn!

Episode 1: The Stark Industries toaster

Zade Rosenthal—Marvel StudiosTony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) in Captain America: Civil War

Each episode of WandaVision is broken up by a fake commercial that contains a Marvel easter egg. In the first episode, a man and a woman advertise a toaster made by Stark Industries (owned and run, of course, by Tony Stark’s family). While the toaster is making toast, it emits a beeping noise and a red light flashes. It’s surprisingly menacing for an appliance commercial.

It’s possible that the commercial is supposed to suggest that Wanda has ambivalent feelings toward Stark. Over the time they have known each other, Stark hasn’t exactly been a great friend. Stark attacked Wanda and her brother, built a genocidal AI program called Ultron that almost destroyed the world and put Wanda under house arrest because he insisted she could not control her powers.

On the other hand, Stark also created her boyfriend, Vision. Could Vision somehow be the toaster? Maybe this particular metaphor will become more clear later on.

Episode 1: “House of M” wine bottle

If you notice closely the wine bottle label translates to the house of misery which is an easter egg for house of m. So, I think they could totally go forward with this storyline pic.twitter.com/a9Ybk6wM97

— Pranav (@pranav_mitan) September 21, 2020

During their disastrous dinner party, Wanda and Vision serve a French bottle of wine called “Maison du Mépris,” which translates to “House of Contempt.” More loosely—okay very loosely—the bottle can translated to mean “House of Misery.” Regardless of the actual translation, the bottle has a large “M” on the label. So, a connection to the “House of M” comic storyline is likely.

In “House of M,” Wanda is reeling from accidentally killing some of her fellow Avengers including Vision. She deludes herself into thinking she has twin boys with Vision. When Magneto (from the X-Men) tells her the babies aren’t real, she essentially uses her mind-control powers on the entire world to trick them into believing they live in an alternate universe where her babies exist (and lots of other parts of reality have been altered as well).

WandaVision appears to be at least loosely based on this comic. As in House of M, the MCU Wanda technically killed Vision, though it was to prevent bad guy Thanos from getting a powerful gem called he Mind Stone in Vision’s head. She’s in mourning and perhaps using her powers to soothe herself. The wine bottle may hint that it is, indeed, Wanda controlling this universe, and that the creation of her dreamland may have real-world consequences.

Episode 2: A helicopter with a SWORD symbol

When that helicopter is absorbed and ends up in Wanda’s reality as a toy. #WandaVision pic.twitter.com/5QYp0SJkpg

— alias (@itsjustanx) January 4, 2021

The colorful helicopter popping up in Wanda’s black-and-white world is the first major indication that someone from the outside is trying to break into Wanda’s fantasy. But to understand the significance of the helicopter, you have to know about SHIELD and SWORD.

In the MCU, SHIELD was an anti-terrorist organization that created the Avengers Initiative, brought all the Avengers together and (usually) gave them their orders. It was run by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) until a Nazi splinter group called HYDRA infiltrated their ranks, and SHIELD had to be disbanded. Since then, Fury has been working on a new governmental body designed specifically to respond to supernatural threats and treats from space. (We see him hanging out on a spaceship doing just that in Spider-Man: Far From Home.)

Based on what we know from the comics, this new initiative will most likely be called SWORD. It’s also logical that the agents of SWORD might use, well, a sword as their symbol. When Wanda picks up the helicopter to examine it, she spots a picture of a sword on its side. It’s likely that an actual SWORD helicopter tried to enter Wanda’s world and was somehow turned into a toy.

Episode 2: Monica Rambeau is in Wanda’s delusion

Marvel Studios

Wanda meets a new friend during the second episode. The woman, played by Teyonah Parris, introduces herself as Geraldine. However we know from IMDb that Parris is actually playing a character named Monica Rambeau.

Viewers who caught Captain Marvel have actually met Monica Rambeau before. She’s the daughter of Captain Marvel’s BFF Maria Rambeau, and the adorable little girl in that movie. Captain Marvel, as you’ll recall from hints like Captain Marvel’s Nine Inch Nails shirt, was set in the 1990s. WandaVision is set in present-ish day, after the events of Avengers: Endgame. It looks like Monica is now all grown up.

It’s likely that Monica is an agent of SWORD or some other do-gooder trying to help Wanda. After all, her godmother is Captain Marvel. It would be very weird if Monica grew up and decided to turn all evil. When Monica and Wanda first meet, Monica admits, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” It’s possible she was either sucked into Wanda’s fantasy or was sent on a mission but doesn’t know how to negotiate Wanda’s predicament. We know from the trailer she will return again in later episodes.

Episode 2: “The devil is in the details”

Marvel StudiosKathryn Hahn in WandaVision

One of Agnes’ tossed off lines may have a deeper meaning. During the Mad Men-esque meeting of the housewives to prepare for the talent show in Episode 2, the Queen Bee of the group quips, “the devil is in the details.” Agnes retorts, “That’s not the only place he is.”

It may be a joke, but many Marvel fans have theorized that the Marvel version of the Devil, Mephisto, will show up in WandaVision. Without spoiling too much, Mephisto is a major villain for Wanda in the early Marvel comics and even uses his magic to enhance her delusions. Agatha Harkness plays a role in the conflict between Wanda and Mephisto too.

If Mephisto doesn’t actually show in WandaVision, it’s likely at least that this line is dropped as a nod to Marvel diehards.

Episode 2: Jimmy Woo on the radio

Ben Rothstein—Marvel StudiosJimmy Woo (Randall Park) in Ant-Man and the Wasp

While Wanda is cleaning up after the talent show meeting, she hears the song “Help Me Rhonda,” which sounds an awful lot like “Help Me Wanda,” come on the radio. A static-y voice interrupts the song calling out to Wanda: “Who is doing this to you?”

Keen-eared fans will recognize the voice of Randall Park, who plays Agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man and the Wasp. In that film, he was responsible for making sure Ant-Man didn’t violate his parole. It seems now that Jimmy is moving on up in the world—it’s likely that he’s an Agent of SWORD or some other organization trying to reach Wanda.

Episode 2: A commercial for a HYDRA watch

Marvel Studios Paul Bettany as Vision and Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda in WandaVision

The same man and woman from the first commercial reappear in a second one, this time advertising a watch called a Strucker with the HYDRA octopus symbol on it. It ticks, well, menacingly. (There’s a lot of menace in these commercials.)

Recall that Wolfgang von Strucker was the name of the HYDRA leader who experimented on Wanda and her twin brother Pietro, torturing them with the Mind Stone—yes that same Mind Stone that’s later put into Vision’s head—until they gained superpowers. Ultron killed Wolfgang, so it’s unlikely that he is the one forcing Wanda into this dreamland or hurting her directly in any way.

But it’s possible that HYDRA is hurting Wanda in some way, perhaps trapping her inside her own mind. (Hence Jimmy Woo asking, “Who is doing this to you?”) Alternatively, the commercials could represent how Wanda is haunted by her past. She’s trying to repress memories of being held captive by HYDRA. The trailer has shown flashback scenes to when Wanda received her powers.

The clicking tock could either signal that Wanda has a limited amount of time to live in this fantasy or that HYDRA is coming for her.

Episode 2: The beekeeper with a SWORD symbol

The reoccurring ‘BeeKeeper’ in the #WandaVision trailer is sporting an “Agents Of SWORD” logo on their back…. Hmm? 🤔 #MCU #ScarletWitch #Wanda #Vision pic.twitter.com/UCgZgbsSEA

— 𝕽 𝖊 𝖛 𝖊 𝖗 𝖘 𝖊⚡️🎃 𝕲 𝖔 𝖇 𝖑 𝖎 𝖓 (@ReverseGoblin) January 6, 2021

A sword symbol keeps invading Wanda’s reality. First the helicopter. Now a man in a beekeeper costumer at the end of the episode. Let’s go ahead and assume that, like the helicopter, the man did not look like this when he entered Wanda’s reality. Maybe he was wearing a Hazmat suit and her mind changed it to a beekeeper outfit to better fit the suburban milieu.

The man climbs out of a manhole, as if sneaking into her dream. It’s unclear if Wanda recognizes the symbol specifically or is just scared by this weird breech into her subconscious. But she simply responds to his presence with a “no” and somehow rewinds time.

Notably, the man interrupted Wanda’s fantasy just as she had discovered she was suddenly and miraculously around four months pregnant and showing, despite having not been pregnant moments before. (I don’t know how an android and a witch make babies, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.)

Wanda asks Vision, “Is this real?” when they’re interrupted by a bashing sound seemingly created by the beekeeper. After she rejects the beekeeper from her reality, she returns to that moment as if to make sure it plays out perfectly. She asks Vision (again), “Is this real?” And he replies that it is.

One Night in Miami Blends Fact and Fiction to Bring Civil Rights-Era Luminaries to Life

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 22:32:10 GMT

What do famous people talk about behind closed doors? That question is only interesting for about two minutes. But wondering what legends talk about behind closed doors? You can build a whole movie around that, as Regina King does with her directorial debut One Night in Miami, its screenplay adapted by Kemp Powers from his play of the same name.

On February 25, 1964, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali—at the time still going by the name Cassius Clay—gathered in a hotel room in Miami to celebrate Clay’s audacious victory over Sonny Liston earlier that evening. No one knows exactly what they said to one another on that night, but we do know something about what each of them brought to the table before and after. One Night in Miami imagines what that conversation might have been like, interweaving dramatizations of things these four extraordinary men actually said and did. The result is a blend of fact and fiction that adds depth and texture to our understanding of what America was like during the Civil Rights Movement. It also gives us a better sense of what each of these men, with their distinctive strengths, sought to accomplish, and how their ideas might have clashed even though they were united for a common goal. And in that sense, it speaks to the strife our country is suffering today: Differences of opinion are to be expected. It’s what you do with them that counts.

King opens the movie with thumbnail sketches that give us a sense of these men and the challenges and injustices they’d faced: Brown (Aldis Hodge), already a huge and revered football star, drives out to his hometown in Georgia to visit an old family friend (Beau Bridges), who greets him warmly and, seemingly, with respect—only to end up degrading him with that single ugly word. Clay (Eli Goree) suffers defeat at the hands of British boxer Henry Cooper, at London’s Wembley Stadium—he knows he’s the greatest, but can’t yet prove it. Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) takes the stage at New York’s Copacabana night club, only to be greeted by the audience’s boredom and, worse, derision. (A few years later he would return, to great acclaim, though the movie doesn’t depict this.) And Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), at home with his wife Betty (Joaquina Kalukango), shows his deep anxiety over his increasingly strained relationship with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad and his desire to leave the organization and start his own offshoot. It’s not an easy break to make.

All of that happens before the four men get together at Miami’s somewhat modest Hampton House Motel, one of the places where Black performers and luminaries were allowed to stay in the deeply segregated city—although Cooke’s manager, Allen Klein, had pulled strings to secure a room for his client at the much tonier Fontainebleau, which becomes a point of contention between Cooke and Malcolm. In the film, the stressed-out Malcolm is presented as something of a scold, lecturing each of his friends on the ways they’re letting the cause down and enabling white oppression: Brown, despite his championing of Black-owned businesses, is hoping to segue into an acting career, a revelation he doesn’t want to make to Malcolm, sensing—rightly—that his friend will disapprove. Clay is on the cusp of converting to Islam, under Malcolm’s tutelage, yet he’s having some doubts about making this leap. But Malcolm reserves most of his virtuous disapproval for Cooke, claiming that the singer has taken sacred church music and turned it into a vehicle for pandering to white people. At one point he plays Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a taunt. Why can’t Cooke write a song as pure and selfless as that? he demands—without knowing that Cooke had already been thinking long and hard about that song.

One Night in Miami gets off to a somewhat uncertain start, and its mix-and-match approach to the historical timeline may be a little confusing at first if you’re not familiar with all of these men and their contributions to their era, and to our own. But the movie, as shot by Tami Reiker, is rich in visual texture. And the actors, all terrific, serve as able guides through the material. Odom’s Cooke, in particular, is astonishing, especially in a scene where he explains to Malcolm a key tenet of Black ownership that the venerated leader has failed to acknowledge. (Cooke knew that the writers of songs, rather than those who merely performed them, held the keys to the moneymaking kingdom.) In the movie’s final sequence, Cooke—as a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show—performs the song that Dylan’s anthem spurred him to write. Malcolm X would be assassinated roughly a year after the foursome’s meeting at the Hampton House. But the song Cooke gave to the world lives forever, and several generations have continued to reach for it in times of need. When Odom, with his buttery intonation and supple phrasing, performs “A Change Is Gonna Come,” he’s not so much impersonating Cooke as channeling him. And he’s handing the song directly to us, because he knows we need it right now.

11 Audiobooks to Lighten the Mood This Dreary Winter

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 21:48:31 GMT

Just weeks into 2021, the new year already feels uncomfortably similar to the one that came before it. With renewed COVID-19 lockdowns and headlines dominated by news both distressing and sad, let’s face it: in this bleak season, we need a laugh. Enter the upbeat audiobook. As regular audiobook listeners know, and newcomers will be delighted to learn, the immersive format works especially well for funny and uplifting stories, especially when narrated by celebrated comics like Ali Wong and Steve Martin. The following essay collections, memoirs and original audio comedies will bring humor and comfort to the gloomiest of days.

Let’s Never Talk About This Again, Sara Faith Alterman

When Sara Faith Alterman’s father begins experiencing symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, he asks for her help in continuing his secret career as a sex writer. Alterman narrates the story of their evolving relationship, detailing all the mortifying moments that accompany discovering that your father writes pornographic books.

Listen Now: Let’s Never Talk About This Again

My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite

Oyinkan Braithwaite’s satirical thriller, read by Adepero Oduye, tests the bonds of sisterhood as Korede, a nurse, grows increasingly annoyed with her younger, prettier sister Ayoola. But her frustrations have little to do with good looks—Ayoola keeps murdering her boyfriends and calling in Korede to clean up after her.

Listen Now: My Sister, the Serial Killer

A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson

Though he’s not at all an experienced hiker, Bill Bryson decides to walk the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, which he describes in his memoir, read by Rob McQuay. Bryson and an out-of-shape friend embark on a journey where their lack of preparedness leads to frequent moments of hilarity.

Listen Now: A Walk in the Woods

God-Level Knowledge Darts, Desus & Mero

As masters of the podcast medium, it’s no surprise that late-night show hosts Desus & Mero are captivating narrators of their first book. In this unsparing guide to life, the comedians share entertaining analyses of toxic masculinity, raising children, buying sneakers and more.

Listen Now: God-Level Knowledge Darts

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby

In narrating her second essay collection, Samantha Irby is as self-deprecating and snarky as ever as she tackles everything from The Bachelorette to budgeting. Every moment of humor is met with intense honesty, coalescing into a fierce and funny portrait of contemporary Black womanhood.

Listen Now: We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

You’ll Grow Out of It, Jessi Klein

Jessi Klein, the head writer of Inside Amy Schumer, blends observational humor with wry narration in essays that pick apart her experiences as a woman. They involve her being called “ma’am,” her hunt for the perfect wedding dress and her struggles with infertility.

Listen Now: You’ll Grow Out of It

Born Standing Up, Steve Martin

In his 2007 memoir, Steve Martin chronicles the discipline and drive that led to his success in the 1970s stand-up scene, and his decision to walk away from it all. From selling guidebooks at Disneyland as a 10-year-old to appearing on Saturday Night Live decades later, Martin tells fascinating stories about show business and the isolation that comes with performing.

Listen Now: Born Standing Up

Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay, Phoebe Robinson

Listening to Phoebe Robinson narrate her book is like catching up with an old friend. Her energetic voice darts between topics: in one essay she navigates her relationship with her body, in another she describes the impact of meeting Bono twice. Throughout, she packs her commentary on feminism and race with ample references to pop culture.

Listen Now: Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay

Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

The essays in David Sedaris’ celebrated collection showcase the sardonic way he views the world. His self-conscious and cynical narration makes for biting observations about language, whether he’s recounting the speech-therapy classes he attended as a child or describing the mishaps he faced as an adult in Paris, where he didn’t know how to speak French.

Listen Now: Me Talk Pretty One Day

Dear Girls, Ali Wong

Focus FeaturesCarey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in *Promising Young Woman*

We Could Use a Pandemic-Era Romantic Comedy, But Locked Down Isn’t It

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 14:18:15 GMT

Two people who used to be in love but now can’t stand each other are forced to cohabitate because there’s nowhere for them to go. Welcome to the era of COVID romance, and to the first movie to mine it as a subject: in the romantic comedy and heist-movie hybrid Locked Down, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway play Paxton and Linda, a couple living in London in the early days of that city’s first lockdown, circa March 2020. The spark has long gone out of their union; now they’re just counting the days until they can make other arrangements, and their nerves are raw.

They’re already all too familiar with each other’s quirks, but their confinement gives us ample opportunity to get up to speed on their problems: Linda, who’s clearly stressed out and high strung even in the best of times, has a high-powered job with a media company based in the United States. (In our first glimpse of that job, she’s forced to fire a quartet of her local employees via a Zoom meeting.) Paxton has work troubles of another sort: he just can’t get enough of it. A onetime bad boy—the quality that drew Linda to him in the first place—he has a criminal record for a long-ago infraction that, it’s suggested, wasn’t really his fault. He now works as a driver, ferrying stuff from here to there, but even those jobs are scarce. He does, however, have the heart of a poet, and he’s fond of stepping out into the street to serenade his fellow “inmates” with verses from T.S. Eliot and Robert Graves.

Directed by Doug Liman (who gave us the acerbically delightful 2005 Mr. and Mrs. Smith) from a script by Steven Knight (whose credits include the 2019 howler Serenity, but also Eastern Promises and Peaky Blinders), Locked Down (now streaming on HBO Max) is more a novelty of our times than anything else. Written over the summer and shot quickly in the fall, it enfolds as many elements of our pandemic-constricted lives as possible: hushed, underpopulated streets, strained Zoom calls with family members, the wearing of nice tops with PJ bottoms for virtual work meetings. (It also includes a bunch of mildly amusing cameos from the likes of Ben Stiller, Ben Kingsley and Danish heartthrob Claes Bang.) Yet the movie’s first two-thirds are hopelessly shapeless—perhaps a bit like our lives?—further stretched out of whack by reams of annoying, skittering dialogue. Hathaway is often a charming actor, and Ejiofor can be a great one—he’s lovely here, giving shape and depth to his character’s anxieties, and to his unspoken anguish over losing Linda. But Hathaway appears to be trying, desperately, to mimic the timing of Katharine Hepburn in screwball mode. Nothing works; she’s wound too tight. Her lines have no give, no bounce. You wonder why Paxton hasn’t hightailed it out of that house sooner.

Susie AllnuttNothing like a little diamond heist to spice things up

But somewhere in the last half hour, the movie finally gets around to having something like a plot, involving the theft, from super-posh department store Harrods, of a big-ass diamond worth 3 million pounds. Suddenly, Hathaway becomes slightly less exhausting and Ejiofor more dazzling. You get some sense of what drew these two together in the first place. At one point they hop on a motorbike and speed off into the London night. At last, Locked Down gives us at least a little bit of what we’d hoped for all along, some pandemic glamour, if such a thing is possible. You can hardly go wrong with two beautiful actors on a nighttime motorcycle ride. And in this moment, ever so briefly, Locked Down finally takes flight.

WandaVision Deserves the Hype. But It Penalizes Casual Marvel Viewers With Confusion

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 17:02:43 GMT

“Who’s doing this to you, Wanda?” The first time we hear this question in Marvel Studios’ debut Disney+ series, WandaVision, it emerges from the static of a 1960s radio that was just playing the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda.” Viewers who keep up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe will likely recognize the voice of Randall Park’s character, FBI agent Jimmy Woo. If you already know all about him—as well as the show’s stars, Wanda Maximoff and her beloved, Vision—the mystery that emerges in this moment is: what’s really happening beneath the surface of what is, by most appearances, a black-and-white, mid-century sitcom? As an MCU novice, I also found myself wondering: how many movies would I have to watch to make this show make sense?

This is the paradox of WandaVision, whose first two (of nine) episodes will arrive on Disney+ on Friday, Jan. 15, with subsequent half-hours dropping weekly. Though it gets off to a slow start, the show has plenty going for it, from gorgeous, extremely expensive-looking production design and breathtaking special effects to punchy performances, a trippy mood and a plot that does eventually become quite absorbing. More meta-comedy than action spectacle, it’s the rare superhero story that could potentially appeal to viewers, like me, whose eyes glaze over when battle scenes run longer than a few minutes. Which makes it especially unfortunate that it’s one of the hardest Marvel series to follow if you haven’t visited the MCU since Black Panther.

When we meet Wanda, a.k.a. Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen, well cast as a woman both sweet and haunted), and android-with-emotions Vision (Paul Bettany, likable as ever), they’re newlyweds who’ve just moved to an immaculate postwar suburb called Westview. In a premiere that lovingly spoofs Golden Age of Television classics like I Love Lucy, director Matt Shakman (Game of Thrones) and head writer Jac Schaefer (of Marvel’s COVID-delayed Black Widow) layer on the ’50s sitcom tropes. Busybody neighbor Agnes (Kathryn Hahn, having a ball) befriends magic-wielding housewife Wanda. Disguised as, well, Paul Bettany, Vision works a vague desk job, excelling at “computational services.” Thanks to a silly misunderstanding, Wanda must impress his boss (Fred Melamed) and his wife (That ‘70s Show’s Debra Jo Rupp) by whipping up dinner with no advance notice. The episode was shot in front of a live studio audience.

The cast is delightful, the show looks great and the framing is clever—down to period-appropriate theme music by Oscar-winning Frozen and Coco songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. But the premiere falls flat. Pop culture so often revisits ’50s TV, from Pleasantville to Will & Grace’s episode-long I Love Lucy tribute last year, that Wandavision initially comes off as a copy of a copy, filled with old, tired jokes about slightly older, slightly more tired jokes.

Marvel Studios Paul Bettany as Vision and Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda in WandaVision

Only when the nostalgic veneer cracks and the more urgent story taking shape beyond that artificial TV world starts to shine through, in the second episode, does the series come into its own. Each new chapter pushes the pastiche forward roughly a decade in television history, and you feel that momentum. Wanda fits the mold of the supernatural ’60s wives she embodies in a tribute to I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, but it’s the bright red toy helicopter that she’s alarmed to discover in her yard—a tiny, vivid speck of color—that gives the black-and-white backdrop purpose. And when the TV world finally goes Technicolor, it’s at just the right moment.

By that point, I had a sense that WandaVision’s 20th-century sitcom world was some kind of alternate reality, one that Wanda seems to control, at least in part, and one that forces from a parallel realm are trying to penetrate in order to contact her. (“Who’s doing this to you, Wanda?”) But I would have reached that conclusion—and probably many other relevant ones—far earlier had I known, before watching, that Vision died in 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War. If the show gets more intriguing with each episode, its easter eggs and character teases and references to HYDRA also become harder for a casual MCU viewer to parse. Are any larger themes going to develop here, beyond the well-worn evocations of mid-century misogyny and Cold War communist paranoia, I wondered, or are we just setting up the next volume of Doctor Strange?

There are millions, maybe billions, of people who will happily consume every morsel of content that Marvel Studios (and Star Wars and the rest of the Disney assembly line) sees fit to produce. And that’s fine. I don’t avoid Marvel. When a release interests me—like Netflix’s Jessica Jones or FX’s Legion, two shows made before the MCU swallowed Marvel Television—I watch it. That should be enough for a franchise that already dominates the box office, with three of the five highest-grossing movies of 2019 to its name. It’s not even sufficient, anymore, to see every feature on the big screen; you also have to keep up with Disney+, where WandaVision will kick off a slate of 10 shows due out in the next few years that will sync up Marvel’s film and TV output for the first time. There’s something kind of unsettling about an entertainment monolith demanding such fierce loyalty of fans across all media. It’s practically an ultimatum. Marvel Cinematic Universe: you’re either with us or against us. Or else, I suppose, you’re confused.

Siegfried Fischbacher from Illusion Duo Siegfried & Roy Dies at 81

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 15:21:58 GMT

(BERLIN) — German news agency dpa is reporting that illusionist Siegfried Fischbacher, the surviving member of the duo Siegfried & Roy, has died in Las Vegas at age 81.

The news agency said Thursday that Fischbacher’s sister, a nun who lives in Munich, confirmed his death of cancer.

“He was at home in Las Vegas,” Sister Dolore told dpa. She said she talked to her brother on the phone before he died and they prayed together.

“I could pray with him and tell him that I will always be with him in my heart,” she said.

After the call, he lay down and fell asleep, she added.

Fischbacher’s long-time show business partner, Roy Horn, died last year of complications from COVID-19 at a Las Vegas hospital. He was 75.

The duo astonished millions with their extraordinary magic tricks until Horn was critically injured in 2003 by one of the act’s famed white tigers.

In a statement announcing Horn’s death in May, Fischbacher said, “From the moment we met, I knew Roy and I, together, would change the world. There could be no Siegfried without Roy, and no Roy without Siegfried.”

He later told Germany’s weekly Bild am Sonntag newspaper his best friend would always stay by his side.

“For dinner, I will continue to have the table set for him, too. Like it always was the case. I’m not alone,” dpa quoted Fischbacher as telling the newspaper.

For years, Siegfried & Roy was an institution in Las Vegas, where Fischbacher and Horn’s magic and artistry consistently attracted sellout crowds. The pair performed six shows a week, 44 weeks per year.

Horn and Fischbacher, both natives of Germany, first teamed up in 1957 and made their Las Vegas debut a decade later. Siegfried & Roy began performing at the Mirage in 1990.

The pair gained international recognition for helping to save rare white tigers and white lions from extinction. Their $10 million compound was home to dozens of rare animals over the years. The white lions and white tigers were the result of a preservation program that began in the 1980s.

The Siegfried & Roy show incorporated animal antics and magic tricks, featuring 20 white tigers and lions, the number varying depending on the night. The show also had other exotic animals, including an elephant.

Born on June 13, 1939 in Rosenheim in Bavaria, Fischbacher learned his first magic tricks as a young boy, dpa reported.

Horn and Fischbacher met on a cruise ship in 1957. Fischbacher performed the magic tricks, while Horn became his assistant, eventually suggesting using the cheetah in the act.

They honed their animal-magic show in small clubs in Germany and Switzerland in the mid-1960s. Their break came in a Monte Carlo casino when an agent in the audience invited them to Las Vegas. The pair made their debut at the Tropicana hotel-casino in the late 1960s.

The illusionists became popular in the 1970s, receiving their first star billing in 1978 as headliners of the Stardust’s “Lido de Paris.” Their show “Beyond Belief” opened in 1981 at the Frontier and played to thousands over seven years.

When they signed a lifetime contract with the Mirage in 2001, it was estimated they had performed 5,000 shows at the casino for 10 million fans since 1990 and had grossed more than $1 billion.

“Throughout the history of Las Vegas, no artists have meant more to the development of Las Vegas’ global reputation as the entertainment capital of the world than Siegfried and Roy,” Terry Lanni, chairman of MGM Mirage, the casino’s parent company, said after the 2003 attack that injured Horn.

Everything You Need to Know Before Watching WandaVision

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:00:49 GMT

WandaVision, the first Marvel project to hit our screens in a year and half, stands out from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. On its face, the show, which debuts on Disney+ on Jan. 15, is a send-up of family sitcoms throughout the years. The main character, Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, has mind-control superpowers. After suffering great trauma in the MCU films, she seems to have retreated into a fantasy of her own creation, specifically living with her paramour, an android named Vision (Paul Bettany), in a suburban home with a white picket fence.

In each episode, the two characters play a married couple in a different decade of television: in the first, Wanda and Vision play a married ’50s couple a la I Love Lucy; the second pays homage to the 1960s’ I Dream of Jeanie; the third references the mostly ’70s-set The Brady Bunch, and so on.

The series appears tailor-made for TV buffs. But beware: the MCU-averse should not enter WandaVision cold. At its heart, WandaVision is actually a mystery. The first episodes beg many questions: How did Wanda create this world? Is someone forcing her to do it? What are the real-world ramifications of Wanda escaping into a dreamland, and possibly taking real-world characters with her? As Wanda’s delusion begins to crack, hints of the outside world begin to sneak in, a la The Truman Show.

Sharp-eyed Marvel fans will recognize characters, references and easter eggs from the Marvel movies popping up in Wanda’s fantasy world, like a bright red helicopter that flies into her black-and-white universe. Understanding Wanda and Vision’s story in the MCU is not only essential to comprehending what, exactly, is happening in the show, but it’s essential to following the future of the Marvel story on film. Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has said that WandaVision will set up the events of movies to come, particularly Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man Homecoming 3.

So for those who have not obsessively followed the travails of Wanda and Vision—or simply need a refresher—here’s everything you need to know before diving into the new series.

Who are Wanda and Vision and what are their powers?

Marvel Studios

Wanda and Vision are two key superheroes on the Avengers team. They fight evil and protect innocent lives, as superheroes do.

They both have weirdly ill-defined powers in the movies. Wanda can control things with her mind—via telekenesis, telepathy, mind control. She can shoot energy balls out of her hands and create protective barriers around herself and others and hover in the air. But there’s also a scene in which she seems to use her mind to torture a bad guy.

Vision is an android created by Tony Stark (Iron Man). He can pass through walls, which is more unsettling than useful. He can fly. He can shoot energy from a gem in his head (more on that gem later). He kind of has precognition: he uses super-logic to determine what will happen in the future.

They both have superhuman stamina, speed, strength, etc. You know, run-of-the-mill superhero stuff. Or, in Wanda’s case, mutant stuff.

Wait, I thought Wanda was an Avenger. She’s one of the X-Men?

Marvel StudiosMarvel’s Captain America: Civil War..L to R: Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans)..Ph: Zade Rosenthal ..©Marvel 2016

Technically, yes, in the comics Wanda is a mutant, which is defined as a human born with a specific gene that gives them powers. Most of the Avengers are humans who gained their powers later in life, like Captain America did when the military injected him with super-soldier serum or Spider-Man did when that pesky Spider took a bite out of him.

That difference is significant in the comics because mutants tend to be treated worse than other humans: they’re feared and discriminated against and hunted down. It’s unclear whether the movie version of Wanda is a mutant. She was experimented upon, but it’s ambiguous whether those experiments gave her her powers or just awoke powers that already existed. It’s a truly nerdy debate.

Why does the distinction matter in the context of WandaVision? Well, Disney didn’t own the rights to the X-Men until they acquired Fox in 2019. Wanda (Scarlet Witch) and her brother Pietro (Quicksilver) were border cases, so both Fox and Disney were allowed to use the characters. Now that Disney owns both the Avengers and X-Men properties, some fans have speculated that Disney will use WandaVision and some crazy parallel universe logic to usher the X-Men into the MCU.

What are the origins of the WandaVision story in the comics?

Marvel Studios Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda and Paul Bettany as Vision in WandaVision

The show seems to be very loosely based on several comic book stories in which either Wanda or Vision tries to “fit in” to life in suburbia with disastrous results. In the comics, Vision and Wanda married in 1975’s Avengers #4 and even got their own spinoff comic, Vision and the Scarlet Witch, in 1982. They fought alongside the Avengers and had twin boys named William and Thomas.

In the 1989 comic storyline “Vision Quest,” Vision is destroyed by an international network of spies who decide he’s a threat to the world. Though Hank Pym reassembles him, the Vision that emerges has no emotional connection to his wife or children. Wanda’s world begins to fall apart. She is even told by her neighbor and mentor, a witch named Agatha Harkness, that her children aren’t real but rather an illusion conjured by a combination of her own powers and those of Maphisto, the devil of the Marvel Universe.

The influential 2008 comic event series House of M revisits a similar plot. This time, Wanda accidentally kills several Avengers. In her grief, she toys with the fabric of reality to bring back her husband Vision and create non-existent children for them. The effects of Wanda’s delusions reverberate into the real world. Wanda’s powers are so strong that when, at the end of the series, she wishes there were no more mutants, tens of thousands of mutants, including some X-Men, lose their powers.

Another comic series, 2016’s The Vision, riff on the theme of superheroes trying to blend in. In that comic, Vision creates an android wife and two kids for himself and moves them all to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Their white picket fence lifestyle ends in tragedy when a Vision’s android wife kills a human viciously trying to attack the couple’s android daughter.

So, yeah, all of this points to the likelihood that WandaVision won’t end with a pretty little bow on it.

What has happened to Wanda and Vision in the MCU?

Marvel StudiosVision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch/Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen)

Wanda and Vision both enter the MCU in the second Avengers film, Avengers: Age of Ultron. A Nazi splinter group called HYDRA gets its hands on an Infinity Stone called the Mind Stone. If you have no idea what the Infinity Stones are, stick with me! Just know that they’re powerful gems that, if collected together, can be used to destroy the universe. No biggie. The mind stone, in particular, can be used to control people’s minds.

HYDRA uses the mind stone to experiment on a bunch of people and try to build a super army. The only ones who survive are Wanda and her twin brother Pietro. Wanda gains telephathy, telekenesis and a mishmash of other abilities. Pietro gets super speed, which is cool, but not nearly as cool as Wanda’s powers. Such is life. At some point they name themselves Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

Eventually the Avengers acquire the Mind Stone from Hydra, and Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, uses it to create a defense program called Ultron because Tony is an egomaniac who can’t see how that plan might go horribly wrong. Predictably, Ultron goes berserk and tries to kill the Avengers. Ultron recruits Wanda and Pietro to his cause.

Tony then uses the Mind Stone to create an android who can fight Ultron. Shockingly, that plan actually turns out fine, and Vision is born. The Mind Stone is embedded in Vision’s head and is powered by it. Meanwhile, Wanda and Pietro figure out that Ultron actually wants to destroy all of humanity and decide that maybe they shouldn’t be fighting alongside this genocidal AI program after all. They team up with the Avengers, but Pietro dies in battle.

In a future movie, Captain America: Civil War, Wanda accidentally kills a bunch of innocent citizens while saving Captain America’s life. She’s put under house arrest, and she and Vision begin a flirtation while she’s stuck in the Avengers’ compound, and he’s sent there to guard her. (It sounds like a Stockholm Syndrome situation, but somehow it doesn’t play out that way.)

There’s an implication that the two are bound in some way by their relationship to the Mind Stone: Both of their sets of powers are derived from its essence. By Avengers: Infinity War, the two run off to Scotland to get away from their superhero duties and explore their romantic potential.

Where did we leave Wanda and Vision in the Avengers movies?

Marvel StudiosElizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch in “Avengers: Infinity War”

In Avengers: Infinity War, this big purple evil alien named Thanos wants to destroy half of the universe’s population for somewhat admirable environmental reasons. Still, murdering half the planet is bad, so the Avengers fight him.

Bad news for the robot-witch couple: Thanos needs all the Infinity Stones to accomplish his goal, and Vision’s got one in his head. Wanda and the other Avengers spend most of the movie fending off Thanos, but at the end, Vision asks Wanda to destroy the Mind Stone and kill him to keep Thanos from attaining the stone. Wanda does, but Thanos turns back time. Thanos manages to kill Vision, rip the Mind Stone from his head and snap his fingers. Poof—half of humanity disappears, including Wanda! (That, in case you missed it, is what most of the moviegoing world was freaking out about in the summer of 2018.)

Five years go by before, in Avengers: Endgame, the Avengers dream up some time-hopping shenanigans to undo The Snap (TM). The disappeared people return—though there’s now an awkward five-year age gap between those who did fade away and those who didn’t. Sadly because Vision was killed, not Snapped, the Avengers can’t bring him back. (Spoilers: Iron Man and Black Widow die too.)

Wanda mourns Vision’s death. At this point she’s had a rough go of things. She’s lost her brother and her boyfriend. She’s lost two mentors. She has no family. It’s unclear what she will do. Who can blame her if she decides to go create an alternate, happier universe for herself?

What other MCU characters and stories may come into play in WandaVision?

A number of supporting characters from various MCU films are set to appear in WandaVision. Here are their backstories:

Monica Rambeau

Marvel Studios

In the 1990s-set Captain Marvel, we meet Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), a fighter pilot and Captain Marvel’s best friend. Maria has a daughter named Monica, who appears as a little girl in that film. In the present day, when WandaVision is set, Monica is a full-grown adult played by Dear White People and Mad Men‘s Teyonah Parris. Presumably, she has followed in the footsteps of her godmother, Captain Marvel, and become some sort of do-gooder.

Jimmy Woo

Ben Rothstein—Marvel StudiosJimmy Woo (Randall Park) in Ant-Man and the Wasp

Randall Park plays Jimmy Woo, an FBI agent attempting to apprehend Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang in Ant-Man and the Wasp. He eventually learns that Scott Lang, despite technically being a criminal, is actually a pretty great guy. Woo appears to still be with the FBI or some other law enforcement agency in the trailers for this show.

Darcy Lewis

Marvel Studios Kat Dennings in Thor: The Dark World

Kat Dennings appeared in the first two Thor movies as Darcy, an intern to scientists Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) and Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård). Jane and Erik are the ones who discover Thor when he first comes to earth, and Darcy is the one who nicknames Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir, “meow meow,” which is honestly the best part of either of those so-so movies. It’s unclear what Darcy has been doing since the second Thor film, but likely continuing her study of weird inter-planetary and superheroic phenomena.

HYDRA

Marvel StudiosRed Skull in Captain America: The First Avenger

HYDRA plays a big part in Wanda’s past. The Nazi splinter group is behind many of the terrible things that have happened in the MCU. They kidnapped Captain America’s best friend and brainwashed him. They infiltrated the American government. Their leader during World War II, who called himself Red Skull, tried to use an Infinity Stone to rule the world.

One of HYRDRA’s leaders, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, was the one who experimented on Wanda and her twin brother. (Ultron eventually murdered Strucker.) There are hints in the trailers that either Wanda’s memories of HYDRA are seeping into her created reality or that HYDRA is, in fact, manipulating Wanda in some way.

SHIELD and SWORD

Jay Maidment—Sony PicturesSamuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders in Spider-Man: Far From Home

SHIELD was a government counterterrorism organization run by Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury. Fury brought together the Avengers and gave the Avengers their orders, for the most part. But in Captain America: Winter Soldier, Captain America discovers that SHIELD has been infiltrated by HYDRA, and SHIELD is disbanded.

Since that movie, however, Fury has popped up in various Marvel properties talking about starting a new government organization, one that is designed to fight threats from space. (Probably a good call considering half a dozen aliens have tried to build armies to destroy earth in these movies.) In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Fury is hanging out on a space ship overseeing the creation of some new defense system. Fans have speculated that this is SWORD, SHIELD’s space-based counterpart in the comic books.

It’s worth noting that in the trailers for WandaVision, Wanda sees something truly bizarre: a menacing beekeeper emerging from a manhole. Assuming that Wanda isn’t literally attacked by bees, we can assume that this person is a figment or her imagination or a real person trying to break into her fantasy. On the back of his suit is a symbol that looks like a sword.

Is Wanda the most powerful Avenger?

Angie Thomas’ New Prequel to The Hate U Give Challenges the Cult of Masculinity

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 15:51:55 GMT

Is our cult of masculinity destroying us? Concrete Rose, Angie Thomas’ latest young adult novel, is a meditation on just that: the problem of boys pretending to be men. The book, out Jan. 12, is a prequel to Thomas’ smash bestseller The Hate U Give, which followed teenager Starr Carter after she witnessed her friend get shot and killed by police. Maverick was her father, and a standout character in the acclaimed 2018 movie adaptation, which turned Angie Thomas into a household name. Concrete Rose tells the story of Maverick as a 17-year-old high school senior and a member of the King Lords gang in Garden Heights, the fictional Black neighborhood where Thomas set both of her previous novels.

When we meet him in Concrete Rose, Maverick is the son of a mother who is working-class poor and a father who is serving a lengthy prison sentence. The teenager has inherited a gang affiliation from his father, and Maverick accepts the opportunity to make money on the side by selling hard drugs. He keeps his mom blind to his activities by doing odd jobs around the neighborhood, and because she works all the time.

From the get, Thomas imbues Maverick with innocence, humor and street smarts. He lives by the code of Garden Heights, where behavior is dictated by a fraternity of violence and aggression, but isn’t blind to the hypocrisy of gang life. Members are protected from rival gangs and the risks of their lifestyle, but the only way out is equally dangerous: to leave a gang, a member must risk his freedom or his life. When Maverick finds out he’s become a father, he’s forced to decide whether or not to take that risk.

Here, a familiar story of violence and poverty takes an important turn. On finding out about her son’s new situation, Maverick’s mother is tough but supportive. When he is faced with the financial pressures that come with giving up dealing, the neighborhood market owner, Mr. Wyatt, offers him a job, a different way to live. And when old friends try to pressure him into an unthinkable act, his father in prison—locked away but not absent—counsels the teenager on how a “real” man comes to a decision: not by succumbing into the demands of the street but instead by weighing the cost to those he loves most.

But what does it mean to be a man? For my brother Lindo, back in the ’90s, it meant throwing a fist to protect Mami against our stepfather, only to find himself flung to the streets. It meant renting a room in our Harlem neighborhood, wearing the flyest kicks around, and, thanks to his new occupation as a 17-year-old drug dealer, offering me the single best clothing item I owned as a teenager. My bomber jacket came off the shoulders of an addict who couldn’t buy what she needed with money. I was there that day—the woman asked me if I wanted it. Lindo was annoyed, but he smirked. He seemed to swell with newfound power. Now a man for real, he could gift his nerdy sister a jacket we’d never afford otherwise, embrace danger by way of a transactional hug and floss and sway all the way to prison, where he’d end up in a matter of months.

Concrete Rose, one of the most eagerly anticipated books of 2021, is being ushered into the world just as Donald Trump’s presidency ends—a presidency that has been defined, among other things, by the weaponization of toxic masculinity. Thomas’ genius is her ability to craft one man’s history in a way that illuminates the forces that brought us to this critical juncture. She thrusts Maverick into loss after loss after loss, the stakes higher each time. Manhood becomes the confining praxis toward resolution: Is he a man? How big of a man? How brave of a man? We come to understand that loss ushers Maverick to redefine himself beyond the confines of gender norms: he must see himself not as doomed to the legacy of his father’s actions, but as a parent and a human being focused on the future.

The cult of masculinity centers survival and the ability to thrive as a battle wrought between individual agency and the constraints of society. It has manifested over the past four years as a battleground of arrogance against science and entitlement over everything else. In Concrete Rose, Thomas demonstrates that a person’s ability to blossom is determined in part by his own choices, but that ultimately, just as it can lead a young man astray, it is the collective—the actions of his community—that can steer him through obstacles during times of need. In Thomas’ construct, community nourishes its most vulnerable member so he may redefine himself for good.

My brother faced many of these same life-altering circumstances. But unlike Maverick, he withered without the infrastructure of true community at each level—family, school, government. Halfway through his prison sentence, he was deported back to our birthplace of the Dominican Republic after an altercation, for violating the rules of his green card. The government did not even notify Mami that her son had been sent away. And in isolation, he has wilted beneath bedrock.

Thomas’ book holds a universal truth: Regardless of mistakes made, there is a way to break through concrete, to bloom wildly with freedom. It is possible to take all that is hard, cold, grey and transform it to a thing of unexpected beauty. But it requires all those around us to tend and cultivate.

How America’s ‘First Female Cryptanalyst’ Cracked the Code of Nazi Spies in World War ...

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:31:12 GMT

In October 1957, American cryptologist and codebreaker Elizebeth S. Friedman and her husband, William F. Friedman, were the subjects of a short article in TIME magazine about their new book debunking a long-held theory that William Shakespeare wasn’t the true author of his plays, and that a cipher was hidden within his texts pointing to the “real” author’s identity. “The Friedmans’ credentials are impressive,” commented TIME, adding that William led the team that broke the Japanese “PURPLE” code a few months before Pearl Harbor.

While William was considered during his lifetime to be America’s leading cryptologist, and is remembered today as the godfather of the National Security Agency, Elizebeth’s achievements have only received greater recognition in recent years, after World War II records detailing her role were declassified. In fact, the Shakespeare project, which Elizebeth had first encountered as a young woman in 1916, now seems like a minor side project compared to her other achievements. Widely known as “America’s first female cryptanalyst,” in World War I, Elizebeth and William directed an unofficial code-breaking team employed by the national government. During the Prohibition era, she was responsible for breaking codes used by narcotics and alcohol smugglers, incriminating high-profile mob-run rum rings, including that of Al Capone in New Orleans. But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943—a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.

“She was a hero and she never got her due,” says journalist Jason Fagone, author of the 2017 book The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies. “She was this amazing, hidden woman behind so many important secret battles of the 20th century.” Fagone’s book serves as the basis for a new PBS documentary, The Codebreaker, which uses archival letters and photographs to provide an inside look at Friedman’s life and work. It’s part of a renewed interest in Friedman’s legacy in recent years; in April 2019, a Senate Resolution was passed in her honor, and in July 2020, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that a new ship will be named after her. “She got written out of the history books,” says Fagone. “Now, that injustice is starting to be reversed.”

An intuitive gift for breaking codes

Born in 1892 in Indiana, the young Elizebeth Smith was a keen linguist from an early age, and graduated from college in 1915 as an English Literature major. She enjoyed reading and poetry, writing some of her own work. Her start in codebreaking was prompted by an encounter with the millionaire businessman George Fabyan, owner of Riverbank Laboratories, one of the first facilities in the U.S. founded for the study of cryptography. It was at Riverbank where Smith honed her skills in cryptography, and where she met William Friedman, whom she married in 1917.

Science History Images/AlamyWilliam Friedman and Elizebeth Smith Friedman

While William had excellent intuition for breaking ciphers, Elizabeth had a different kind of intuitive gift for codes that no one else could see, says historian Amy Butler Greenfield. “She was extraordinarily good at recognizing patterns, and she would make what looked like guesses that turned out to be right,” says Butler Greenfield, who is featured in the documentary and is working on an upcoming biography of Friedman, titled The Woman All Spies Fear. The field of cryptography at this time was still young, and Elizebeth was one of very few women working within it. “Gender roles had not become a barrier because there was hardly anyone in code breaking at all,” says Fagone.

Just before Elizebeth and William wed, the U.S. entered World War I. The prominence of radio transmission meant that codebreaking was now a valuable skill, but the U.S. did not have a dedicated code-breaking unit at that time and was unprepared to gather intelligence by those means. Fabyan volunteered the services and expertise of the staff at Riverbank, establishing the first code-breaking unit in America, headed up by the Friedmans. The couple trained army personnel in deciphering messages, and also built their own sophisticated code systems. After the war ended, the Friedmans left Riverbank to work for the U.S. government, and in the 1920s, Elizebeth ran a cryptanalytic unit under the U.S. Coast Guard to monitor illicit smuggling rings—the first woman to ever lead such an initiative. She would intercept and solve the coded messages of mobsters and criminal gangs, delivering them to the Coast Guard. Elizebeth and her assistant’s work resulted in 650 criminal prosecutions, and she testified as an expert witness in 33 cases against narcotics smugglers.

Triumph and frustration in World War II

While Friedman ran her own code-breaking unit in the ‘20s and ‘30s, she felt frustrated by her position during World War II. She was assigned to monitor clandestine communications between German operatives in South America and their overseers in Berlin, yet she did not have the kind of control she was used to, as her unit was transferred to Navy control, which did not allow civilians to be in charge of a unit. “She had to take orders from a male officer, who she felt partly for career reasons, wanted to make South America a career story,” says Butler Greenfield. She was irritated too by the sloppiness of the FBI in interfering in code-breaking work, and felt that the agency had always looked at her with disdain and in a sexist light, yet still demanded her help because of her indispensable talents. It was a continuation of how she had been treated for much of her career, says Fagone. “She was always fixing messes men had created or solving problems they could not solve.”

But her contribution was singular. As the Americans were fighting in one theater of war in the Pacific, fears were also growing about the threat of Nazi-backed coups and insurrections in South America, home to several resource-rich countries that were strategically important for the U.S. to keep onside. Friedman decrypted messages that had been sent using the infamous German Enigma machines, uncovering an entire spy network across South America, and discovering the identity, codename and codes of its ringmaster, Johannes Siegfried Becker. “Elizebeth was his nemesis. She successfully tracked him where every other law enforcement agency and intelligence agencies failed. She did what the FBI could not do,” says Fagone. After the spy ring was crushed, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile definitively broke with Axis powers and sided with Allied powers, eliminating the threat that the western hemisphere would fall.

The lie that ended up in history books

Although the FBI turned to Friedman for her help, she didn’t receive any credit for her role in smashing the Axis spy ring throughout South America. Instead, the achievement was claimed by J. Edgar Hoover, who claimed that the FBI had led the code-breaking effort and thus erased the contribution of Friedman and her team. “It was a lie, but it was a lie that worked, and it was the lie that ended up getting written into the history books,” says Fagone. Friedman signed a Navy oath promising her silence until her death, which was in 1980, and stayed true to it for all those decades.

“I think a lot of professional women today can relate to her experiences—she did all this important work and got very little credit,” says Fagone. A quick look back through TIME’s own archives shows how little was known about her contribution to World War II in particular, owing to Hoover’s taking credit and Friedman’s loyalty to her oath. A 1956 profile of William in TIME listed his “lofty honors” and awards for his contributions to break the cipher of the “PURPLE” machine, and referred to Elizebeth as an “assistant cipher clerk.”

Decades after her death, in 2008, documents about Friedman’s involvement were finally declassified; the couple also left an extensive archive, including letters and photographs, to the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington, Va., some of which are featured in The Codebreaker. “We’re in an era when we realize that there are so many stories that were not told historically,” says filmmaker Chana Gazit. “If we missed Elizebeth’s story, who else are we missing?”

Sex and the City Is Nothing Without Samantha Jones

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:22:10 GMT

And just like that, Sex and the City is back. In separate Instagram posts Sunday—ones that raised the dreary question of how the show’s characters would deal with the rise of social media—Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis unveiled an extremely short teaser for the revival, pairing generic footage of New York with the unmistakable clickety-clack of a turn-of-the-millennium laptop keyboard. Reports followed that the HBO Max project, set to begin production this spring, would be a 10-episode limited series titled And Just Like That and featuring the original gal pals in their 50s. Well, all of them except for Kim Cattrall‘s Samantha Jones; in recent years, as rumors swirled of discord between the actor and her cast mates, Cattrall has said she’s done with the franchise. On Twitter following the announcement, Parker told a fan that she doesn’t dislike her former co-star, but “Samantha isn’t part of this story. But she will always be part of us. No matter where we are or what we do.”

Whoever you chose to believe about Cattrall’s departure, as the bard Carrie Bradshaw might put it: I couldn’t help but wonder… what would Sex and the City look like without Samantha? And I was hardly alone in that. Along with the inevitable jokes about TV-revival fatigue and the havoc SATC mania may or may not have wrought on its beloved Manhattan, people wanted to know what would become of Samantha. Would she be killed off? Replaced? (Suggestions ranged from the dilettante purse designer played by Jennifer Coolidge in the original series to Leslie Jones, who seemed to have Samantha confused with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My pick: 30 Rock resident ham Jenna Maroney. No, not Jane Krakowski, the actor who played Jenna—Jenna, the character.) All of which makes for fun speculation. But trust that I am dead serious when I insist that—whether you call it And Just Like That or 2 Sex 2 City or Governor Miranda Hobbes—there’s no classic show to resurrect without Samantha.

SATC premiered, in 1998, with a question that sounds quaint now but was revolutionary for TV at the time: what if women had sex like men? That is, recreationally and selfishly, with no need for emotional connection, zero expectations of commitment and little regard for the feelings of their partner. For the majority of the show’s six seasons (it seems polite to exclude the two terrible movies that followed from this narrative), it was Samantha who kept this experiment alive. As corporate lawyer Miranda chased success, Rules Girl Charlotte chased marital bliss and Carrie the ever-inquisitive sex columnist chased unavailable men, Cattrall’s character was the unapologetic hedonist, chasing pleasure and novelty before all else. In scandalizing the brunch crew, she pushed the national conversation around women and sex forward a generation. Perhaps her most valuable contribution was to remind us that, when it comes to dating, every woman is a discrete person with individual preferences.

TV had seen its share of great romantic comedies by the time SATC debuted. There were plenty of popular sitcoms about female friendship, too, from The Golden Girls to Kate & Allie to Living Single; there is certainly no dearth of them now, either. But there had never been a show in which women spoke so openly about sex. And along with being the most adventurous of the SATC clique—compare her brief yet steamy same-sex love affair with that time Carrie played an anxious game of Spin the Bottle with Alanis Morissette—Samantha was the bluntest, funniest and least judgmental in discussing it. “I will not be judged by you or society. I will wear whatever I want and blow whomever I want as long as I can breathe and kneel”—so sayeth the divine Ms. Jones. A self-identified “try-sexual,” down to try anything once, she talked her incredulous friends through her one-night stands, her utter lack of interest in becoming a mother, the sex tape she purposely shot and distributed and, on a more serious note, her history with abortion. When she regained her libido after a heartbreaking brush with breast cancer (that felt weirdly punitive on the writers’ part, but I digress) and jumped back into bed with her 20-something model/actor boyfriend, you wanted to stand up and cheer.

When the writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner asked her Twitter followers, on Sunday, to “respond below with your suggested plotline that explains Samantha’s absence,” Parker jumped in with a reply of her own: “Pen and paper at ready.” Such is her right as the show’s executive producer and star. But, as someone who enjoyed SATC immensely as a college student before growing up to find it more groundbreaking than, well, actually good as television, I don’t really see the point. This is not a great moment for a series about three upper-middle-class, white, post-feminist women partying their way through a city even they shouldn’t be able afford—amid an economic climate where the conspicuous consumption of thousand-dollar shoes calls to mind the excesses of Marie Antoinette, to say nothing of the damage our current global health crisis has done to the sex lives of single New Yorkers. To have any chance of relevance in 2021, Sex and the City would need to lean hard on 60-year-old Samantha Jones as she navigated the increasingly app-based, gender-fluid, kink-savvy dating scene she helped to bring about. Better still, the show’s producers could have heeded some of their character’s wisest words: “What happened was in the past. Leave it there.”

The Dissident Brings a Human Touch to the Story of Murdered Journalist Jamal Khashoggi

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 20:22:06 GMT

In a world that reveals new horrors nearly every day, the last event most of us want to revisit is the 2018 assassination of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But in an era when journalism has become dangerously undervalued—and is often dangerous by itself—Bryan Fogel’s documentary The Dissident feels essential. This is a somber piece of work; it’s not likely to cheer anyone up. But if the details of the Khashoggi case aren’t for the faint of heart, facing the facts squarely is at least somewhat cleansing. And as the story of a man who put his life on the line for his ideals, it’s as bracing a narrative as any novelist could invent.

Central to Khashoggi’s fate, as Fogel frames it, is the story of a young Saudi dissident, video blogger and activist named Omar Abdulaziz, living in exile in Montreal. Fogel’s movie opens with an introduction to Abdulaziz, who admits that he feels responsible for what happened to Khashoggi. It’s not clear until near the movie’s end exactly why that is, an approach that gives Fogel’s film its sense of urgency and momentum.

Khashoggi began his career as a journalist in the mid-1980s and would become something of an insider, with friendly ties to the Saudi monarchy. But as he grew more critical of the country’s government—particularly with the ascent of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, an alleged progressive whose actions have shown him to be anything but—Khashoggi sought freedom of speech elsewhere. He relocated to the United States in 2017, and began writing for the Washington Post that same year. On October 2, 2018, he entered the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, to obtain a document necessary for his upcoming wedding to Hatice Cengiz, a 36-year-old scholar. Hatice waited outside, but Khashoggi never exited the building. It would later be revealed that he was killed inside, his body dismembered and disposed of. The Turkish government launched an investigation; audio recordings of the killing strongly suggested that it was carried out on orders of the Saudi Royal Family. Saudi Arabia has blamed the killing on rogue agents acting on their own authority.

Fogel carefully traces the details leading up to the grisly murder, and spends even more care outlining what happened afterward, interweaving the story of Abdulaziz’s affiliation with Khashoggi. And he doesn’t shy away from the harrowing particulars: a transcript of the recordings indicates that one of Khashoggi’s killers, wanting to know if their target had entered the consulate, asked one of his accomplices, “Has the sacrificial animal arrived?” The details of this killing, and the Saudi government’s denial of any involvement, are even more enraging when viewed in light of the Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge that any crime had occurred.

And yet, the most valuable element of The Dissident is what it tells us about Khashoggi the man, outlining how lonely he had become in the United States, and how happy he was that he’d found new love. (He and his first wife were forced to divorce, and he was unable to see his family in Saudi Arabia.) Shortly before his death, Khashoggi purchased a home for himself and Hatice. One of the first pieces of furniture he bought for the new place was a La-Z-Boy recliner. Fogel includes footage of Khashoggi sinking into this big, puffy chair, his face radiant with contentment he feels he has finally earned, just within reach. It’s a wrenching detail, though Fogel goes on to milk it a little too freely—a later shot of the chair, sitting forlorn and empty, probably should have been cut. Still, when Hatice returns to the apartment after her fiancé’s murder, she settles into the chair herself, as if, with her own body, she were trying to memorize the imprint of the man she loved. In The Dissident, Khashoggi’s story unfolds like a political thriller. But it’s a tragic love story, too, one in which an optimistic bride-to-be is plunged into a nightmare. No wonder, as she sits in that chair, she looks as if she wishes she could stay in it forever.

The Hollywood Escape Economy Is Just Around the Corner

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 17:04:40 GMT

In the dark days after 9/11, dire pronouncements about our nation’s new cultural identity rained down like the acrid particles floating over lower Manhattan. It would be the end of irony. The end of comedy. Our sense of innocence, particularly for Gen X and millennials, who largely had known lives of peace and security, was gone. Hello fear. RIP fun.

Yet six months later, The Bachelor debuted on ABC. Shortly after came American Idol. Then Joe Millionaire, a preposterous real-life acid test to shame gold-digging women. (The show garnered 35 million viewers for its finale.) Cynicism didn’t end; it took steroids. Nowhere was that more manifest than in an obsession with celebrity that would come to define the decade. I was the young editor in chief of Us Weekly from 2002 to 2009 as that publication covered the frothy zeitgeist, as the soap-operatic lives of young stars who needed only one name—Britney! Lindsay! Jessica!—became American obsessions. At its peak, Us Weekly was read by 14 million young, educated people a week, and I often thought about why we lusted for that escape. If 9/11 taught us anything, it was to be suspicious, unsettled: danger lurks everywhere. An anxious public fled into alternate realities of no actual consequence. (The Hills, anyone?)

Hollywood shows like The Simple Life made it easy. Americans cultivated a metallic taste for zero-sum equations, a world of winners and losers in politics, foreign policy and, yes, entertainment. Loving to hate Heidi and Spencer (“Speidi”), it turned out, was a lot more fun than trashing Rumsfeld and Cheney. (“Chumsfeld,” anyone?) Should J. Lo and Ben get married? Ask CNN, whose anchors devoted whole segments to the couple. Our escapism was apolitical and banal. But the effect, in some ways, was not. The aughts may have been the last time wide swaths of Americans shared a communal language, chugging from the same watercooler. Soon, social media and algorithms would splinter us into a million pieces.

Today, the teens and 20-somethings who binged Gossip Girl and Survivor are in their 30s and 40s. Having matured in the shadow of one trauma, many will craft the aftermath of another (or multiple ones as the events of last week would indicate). The 1918 flu, the Depression, the world wars and 9/11 all resulted in entertainment booms. The difference today is that Hollywood is in chaos, some say decline. As production ground to a halt and advertisers fled in 2020, corporate overlords “right-sized” organizations to streaming-first orientations. The pandemic has resulted in hundreds of thousands of jobs lost; box office revenue is at a 40-year low. Content is now in the hands of streaming services, not the studios.

But Hollywood’s endemic woes haven’t altered people’s appetite for TV. Our televisions are today’s constant companion, bringing us Tiger King and eerie fan-free sporting events. Sure, we fantasize about post-vaccine trips we’ll take, parties we’ll attend. Yet the truth is, the bulk of our free time on the other side will be spent right where our lockdowns began—on a sofa in front of a screen.

But what will that entertainment look like this time around?

First, our escapist fantasies are different now. President-elect Biden talks about one America—not blue states and red states. In another era, this might sound corny. But conflict has depleted us. We used to cancel subscriptions and TV shows; now it’s people. No surprise, many of the new shows that resonated last year—Emily in Paris, Ted Lasso, The Queen’s Gambit—represented a new modern fantasy, where essential goodness is celebrated and rewarded. (Think anti-antiheroes to the previous decade’s Don Draper and Walter White.) Watching these shows last year delivered temporary inoculation against toxicity. Look for more of this kind of escapist programming—from high art to treacle, feeling good will be the new Breaking Bad.

Second, Hollywood’s executive purges will change content. Old Holly-wood is a club of largely white men who, like the U.S. Senate, serve continuous terms stretching into decades. Millennials and Gen Z, diverse and woke, are the Bernie Sanders–AOC spoilers, forcing a reckoning with uncomfortable truths: Pretty Woman romanticizes sex trafficking; Indiana Jones employs racist stereotypes. Plenty of Hollywood’s legacy product hasn’t aged well, and neither have its executives, whether ousted amid clouds of sexual impropriety (NBCUniversal vice chairman Ron Meyer) or alleged racism (NBC Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy). Fortune 500 companies employed basic diversity and inclusion initiatives for years, for consumer optics and also because better profitability resulted as American demographics shifted. Uncomfortably, Hollywood always resisted doing the same, even if it hurt its own interests. (One recent study revealed that diverse casts in movies significantly improved box office receipts.) Now with a gun to its head (namely Twitter) and social movements too powerful to ignore, entertainment’s corporate behemoths finally got the memo. In 2020, Netflix put Indian American Bela Bajaria as head of Global TV. Channing Dungey, a Black female executive, brought much needed representation when she was named chairman of Warner Bros. Television. C-suites finally are cracking open beyond white guys named Alan and Bob.

Third, the A-list is endangered. Hollywood recently erupted in outrage when WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar announced he would be putting the studio’s biggest tentpoles concurrently in theaters and on its own HBO Max, breaking the tradition of “windowing”—where movies first get a theatrical run. Kilar is betting on two key truths: that technology almost always wins, as does the buyer holding the purse. The powerful talent agents at CAA and Endeavor have lashed out against the move—but the emotion is more fear than anger. The entire business model of stars whose eight-figure paychecks are funded by $100 million to $150 million productions (with theatrical back ends for top talent) is threatened. TikTok’s top creator, Charli D’Amelio, just scored a family reality series on Hulu. Open a different app and you have Oscar winner Nicole Kidman on HBO. As streamers make even more shows to compete, the star power of any one actor is naturally diluted, and TV paychecks for most are nowhere in the same stratosphere. Expect the same stars who preach equity on their social media to feel it firsthand as the notion of a top-down A-list continues to erode.

Fourth, plurality is the new mass. While the old ad model of cable and broadcast TV supported (mostly white) family-in-front-of-the-TV hits—76 million watched Seinfeld’s finale—Netflix, with infinite cloud data and ambitions, programs 24/7 to every demographic nook and cranny. A Black 30-year-old, an Asian teen and a white boomer all have equivalent market value because everyone is a prospect who might pay $17.99 a month, all without heed paid to the idea of “prime time” for an advertiser-selected demographic. Disparate audiences are identified and served via algorithm and then stitched together for scale. A global marketplace also has taken subtitles out of the art house, as Nordic crime dramas, Korean soap operas and Spanish bank heists enter our living rooms. Whatever your fancy, there is a show for that.

Illustration by Nicolás Ortega for TIME

Last, carpe diem time is coming. The French dubbed the decade after the 1918 flu the années folles—the crazy years. Radio, movies, parties, fashion, dance and jazz flourished. Now, a full century later, the quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast expects a similar redux. “With a vaccine and the release of pent-up demand, the next few years will be roaring as the economy accelerates,” wrote Leo Feler, a senior economist with the forecast. Live entertainment and Broadway were already on the upswing pre-COVID, as people craved IRL experience amid onscreen culture. The adage “You can’t download an experience” will be especially apt as we emerge like restless horses in the gate from our almost Amish existence of baking bread and playing board games. Pre-COVID, live music was growing year over year, with $24 billion in ticket sales expected in 2022. Music festivals like Coachella already were the currency of Instagram and are only likely to come back bigger. In other words, expect the flex to keep going.

Entertainment is always a bellwether. Three years after 9/11, “The Apprentice” debuted on NBC. Donald Trump “fired” people within an organization that had filed for multiple bankruptcies. The show celebrated villains (Omarosa Manigault), contestants vowed to “destroy” one another and humiliation was the game. In season one, Trump declared, “Don’t give the disloyal a second chance.” Twelve years later, Trump was elected president. The sine qua non of an era.

What will be the Biden influence? The West Wing reflected an idealistic Clinton White House that maybe never was. 24 capitalized on George W. Bush-era anti-terrorism fears and government mistrust. Our president-elect, meanwhile comes from a clan that hugs and cries, and he love and respects his wife, even off camera. “Decent” is a descriptor both sides use to describe him. Could he be a Band-Aid that puts us back together? It’s possible the entertainment he might inspire will be another.

Upon writing this piece, I looked up the definition of entertainment in the Oxford dictionary: “the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment.”

Are you ready for it? Truthfully, it sounds pretty good.

Matt James Is the First Black Bachelor. But He Alone Can’t Solve the Franchise’s Issues ...

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:11:30 GMT

In the season 25 opener of The Bachelor last week, host Chris Harrison introduced Matt James, the show’s new lead, as a trailblazer ushering in a series of firsts for the show. Breaking with tradition, James, a then 28-year old North Carolina native and New York City-based real estate agent, was cast as the Bachelor without first appearing on The Bachelorette or any other Bachelor franchise shows. James is the first Bachelor to film his season during a pandemic. And, most significantly, James is the first Black Bachelor in the 18-year history of the show.

In many ways, James fits the tried-and-true Bachelor blueprint: he’s a very tall and photogenic former athlete, he hails from the South and was formerly a registered Republican, he’s forthright about his Christian faith (so much so that he led a group prayer on night one) and he’s charitable, the founder of a non-profit mentoring program. Yet it’s clear that despite all his parallels to Bachelors past, the weight of this milestone moment is lost neither on James or the creators of the show. In another first, James pulled Harrison aside before greeting his suitors during the premiere to discuss his biracial identity and the “pressure that I’ve put on myself being the first Black Bachelor.” During their talk, James, whose father is Black and whose mother is white, discussed how his upbringing shaped how he thinks about love—and how he’ll approach potentially finding a partner on The Bachelor.

“I’ve experienced what it’s like to be a product of an interracial marriage, and it’s tough,” James told Harrison. “You’ve got people who are cheering for you to find love, and you’ve got people who are cheering for you to end up with a specific person—a specific person of a specific race. That’s something that has kept me up at night. I don’t want to piss off white people. I don’t want to piss off Black people. But I’m both of those.”

Throughout the premiere episode, James made multiple references to being biracial, sitting down with his mother to talk about love and later bonding with a contestant who opened up about her own parents’ interracial relationship. The show’s fixation comes as no a surprise; The Bachelor is a notoriously white franchise with a notoriously white fan base, a status quo that has drawn endless critique and a class action lawsuit over the years. The emphasis on James’ biracial identity, even while coupled with discussion of what it means to James and the women that he is the first Black Bachelor, speaks volumes about where the show’s priorities lie.

It’s clear that James, earnest and endearingly nervous as a newcomer to the franchise thrust into the role of its leading man, will remain hyperaware of the expectations awaiting him from every side as the season continues—and why wouldn’t he be? When is the last time a white Bachelor had to consider these tensions while searching for the woman of his dreams?

In 24 previous seasons of The Bachelor and 16 seasons of The Bachelorette, the franchise has featured 36 white leads, the vast majority of whom have chosen white partners at the end of the show. Few BIPOC contestants make it to the later rounds of the show, which is usually the way to land another role in the franchise. Rachel Lindsay became the franchise’s first Black lead in 2017, and in a twist in the most recent season of The Bachelorette, Tayshia Adams, who is Black and Mexican, stepped in midway as the star.

And for a show with millions of viewers, the implications of representation reach further than any one season’s competition. Speaking to TIME, Lindsay reflected on what it meant to her to fill the role of a romantic lead. “When I said I wanted to be the Bachelorette, I said I want this audience to see a lead who looks like me, and who they’ve never seen in this role before,” she said. “I want you to see that I’m different and how I’m different, but how I’m still deserving of love.”

For some fans, James’ historic casting was a long time coming after repeated calls for more diversity in the franchise over the past 18 years. Karey Burke, the president of ABC Entertainment, acknowledged this failure in a statement announcing the casting of Matt James in June, just weeks after George Floyd was killed by police and a resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country. “We know we have a responsibility to make sure the love stories we’re seeing onscreen are representative of the world we live in and we are proudly in service to our audience. This is just the beginning and we will continue to take action with regard to diversity issues on this franchise.”

ABC via Getty Images—2020 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.Matt James gives a toast during the season premiere of ‘The Bachelor’

But for many critics, ABC’s hasty announcement about James as the first Black Bachelor this summer appeared to be little more than a performative gesture in the wake of a national reckoning with race. During this time, an anti-racism petition about the franchise began circulating, with demands that included casting a Black Bachelor for season 25 and hiring a diversity consultant for the show; it was signed by multiple alumni of the shows.

The misgivings surrounding the timing of James’ announcement as the first Black Bachelor are hardly unfounded; on top of the franchise’s longstanding problems with casting, executives have defended those choices. The show has also perpetuated damaging racial stereotypes and faced legal action. In 2012, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette were sued for racial discrimination in a class action lawsuit by Christopher Johnson and Nathaniel Claybrooks, two Black men who auditioned for the show. In their suit, they claimed that “deliberate exclusion of people of color from the roles of the Bachelor and Bachelorette underscores the significant barriers that people of color continue to face in media and the broader marketplace.” While the show’s production company Warner Horizon Television deemed the suit “without merit” and the case was ultimately thrown out thanks to the First Amendment, it helped bring attention to the overwhelming whiteness of the franchise’s casts. Harrison later gave an especially damning explanation of why there had only been white leads on the show in an NPR interview that underscored the franchise’s racial bias in 2015: “Advertisers have to buy the next season of the show. I need millions of people to want to watch this show. So I need to put on people that others want to watch.”

Likewise, the franchise’s controversial handling (and in some cases, exploitation) of racial issues over the years it has been on air have garnered a fair share of criticism. When Lindsay starred on The Bachelorette in 2017, a disturbing storyline during her season involved Lee Garrett, a white contestant with a history of making racist and xenophobic statements online, who provoked Black contestants Kenny King and Eric Bigger by gaslighting them and invoking racist stereotypes. During the “Men Tell All” special at the end of Rachel’s season, Garrett was confronted about racist and misogynistic tweets as well as his behavior on show and given ample time to apologize and explain his actions.

Justine Kay, one of the co-hosts of the podcast 2 Black Girls, 1 Rose, which she and Natasha Scott launched in 2017 to discuss what they call “the whitest show on earth,” wants the franchise’s producers and editors to take more accountability for pursuing storylines like Garrett’s that capitalize on racial trauma for dramatic effect. “The Bachelor franchise has a history of casting very problematic white contestants and allowing them a platform on a very huge primetime show,” Kay told TIME. “People like Lee get redemption moments, but where is the uplifting and recognition of people of color? It’s not just about casting Matt James—what else are you going to do to make contestants feel heard and safe and seen?”

Just days before James was announced as the next Bachelor this summer, Lindsay, who co-hosts the official podcast for the franchise, issued a public ultimatum calling for the show to confront its longtime issues with diversity or see her cut all ties. Lindsay has long been outspoken about the ways that The Bachelor and its related shows need to step up to support BIPOC cast members, especially ahead of James’ season.

Lindsay said there were no Black or other BIPOC producers working on the show when she was a contestant on Nick Viall’s season in 2017. Later that year, when she became the first Black Bachelorette, the show offered a more diverse cast of suitors and hired producers of color to work with the men. But Lindsay did not receive the same support, working only with white producers. “In addition to being the lead on the show and trying to find love, I also had to explain, ‘This is what it’s like for a Black person,'” Lindsay told TIME ahead of James’ premiere. “That shouldn’t have to be my job—all the white women before me didn’t have to do that.”

For her, the issues with diversity extend far past casting, production and editing and to the executive levels. “The show does not understand people of color. Period,” Lindsay said. “I know that from my own experience and I know that from watching seasons after me. The only way to do that is to have people of color in the decision-making room.”

ABC via Getty Images—2020 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.The season 25 cast of ‘The Bachelor,’ starring Matt James.

It seems like ABC might be finally listening: Adams’ season of The Bachelorette featured a frank and moving discussion about the killing of George Floyd and the injustice of the U.S. incarceration system. And season 25’s opener showcased one of the most diverse casts of contestants in the show’s 18-year-history, including 32 women of different backgrounds (EW reported that this is the first time white women have been in the minority for a Bachelor cast). According to Lindsay, the franchise hired a diversity consulting team for James’ season. And it appears that the show is attempting to make an effort to look at diversity beyond just race; James awarded his first impression rose, the most highly coveted prize of the night, to Abigail Heringer, whom Harrison recently reported is the first hearing-impaired contestant in the show’s history.

These changes are promising and may bode well for an exciting and different type of season to come. Even so, there are more markers that equity-minded fans will be looking out for as James’ story progresses. Communication professor Rachel E. Dubrofsky, the author of The Surveillance of Women on Reality Television: Watching ‘The Bachelor’ and ‘The Bachelorette,’ cautions that hiring a consultant and casting a Black bachelor and a more diverse set of suitors do not improve inclusion on a structural level. She points out that the franchise’s history of capitalizing on racial conflict for content could continue to be a key obstacle to inclusivity. “Perhaps one of the important commitments by the series to privilege equity and inclusion would be to handle these issues in a way that does not sensationalize,” Dubrofsky told TIME. “However, as anyone who watches the series knows, sensationalism is the very backbone.”

A true commitment by the show to being anti-racist would mean giving space and time in episodes for people of color to have complex and developed storylines, Dubrofsky said. It would also mean grappling directly with uncomfortable truths about the history of racism and how white women’s perceived vulnerability has been used to justify violence against Black men—an approach that runs counter to the narrative the show is built on, that whiteness is desirable and romance is the solution to all problems. “It means showing that race always matters, and love is not enough,” Dubrofsky said, a stark contrast to a comment James is seen making in a trailer for the rest of the season: “Love for me is about the heart, and there’s not a color you can put on that.”

James’ historic casting is a significant yet small step in the right direction when it comes to diversity efforts for The Bachelor. Featuring a sole Black Bachelor can hardly undo decades of carefully curated whiteness, something that James is all too aware of. In a conversation with one of the contestants, after being asked how he feels about being the first, James summed up the impossible challenge of his role on the show succinctly.

“I feel a load of responsibility,” he said. “But in that, I feel that my experience isn’t everyone’s experience. I can only go and speak on things that I experience and live out my truths.”

Sen. Josh Hawley’s Canceled Book Underscores Long-Simmering Tensions Around Trump-Era Book Deals

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 14:00:17 GMT

After Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley played a leading role in the Electoral College challenge at the center of the violent Jan. 6 insurrection of the U.S. Capitol, the publisher of his upcoming book announced its cancellation. Bookseller Hannah Oliver Depp felt relieved when she saw the news on Thursday. But she would rather the book never have been slated for publication.

“I’m very firmly in the camp of, ‘Hey, maybe don’t sign those contracts to begin with.’ But the second best option is to read the room and cancel the book,” Depp, owner of Loyalty Books in Washington, D.C. and Silver Spring, M.D., tells TIME.

Depp is one of many booksellers who are anxious to see change after years of witnessing books by and about members of President Donald Trump’s Administration dominate the discourse and bestseller lists, even if some feel pressure to sell these books in their stores. These critics disagree with lending a platform and financial opportunities to authors promoting incendiary ideas, withholding urgent information for their own gain or profiting from their roles in policies that have separated families and put marginalized groups in danger. “I’m sympathetic to publishers who are facing unprecedented everything right now because we all are,” Depp says. “But the fact of the matter is that they are publishing without considering the repercussions of what they publish—and they’ve been doing that for some time.”

Some of the books written during the Trump Administration by current and former officials, as well as top Washington reporters and other insiders, have included inaccurate reporting or revealed crucial information about the Administration months after the fact. In 2018, Center Street published Trump: The Blue Collar President by Anthony Scaramucci, in which the former White House Communications Director describes Trump’s father as hardworking and honest, though he was later revealed to be part of fraudulent tax schemes. In June, Simon & Schuster published John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, which included severe criticism of Trump’s presidency and foreign policy approach—information that many believed would have been more useful during Trump’s impeachment hearings months prior, where the former national security adviser had refused to testify. “What might have been blockbuster testimony in January or February seems more historical than contemporary today,” one reviewer wrote in NPR. “The Bolton revelations now have far less impact than they might have had.”

Similarly, in September, Simon & Schuster also released Bob Woodward’s Rage, which revealed details of the President’s knowledge of how deadly the coronavirus was from a February phone call and his plans to downplay it during another call the following month. When asked why he didn’t inform the public as soon as this information was verified, Woodward responded that he had wanted to share his reporting in complete book form to provide as much possible context before the election. “He held onto information that was vital to the public good because of the system that incentivized him to do so,” Danny Caine, owner of Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kans., says.

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, publishers have released books from a slate of former White House staff and Cabinet members, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Sean Spicer, Andrew McCabe, David Shulkin and even an official who retained a shield of anonymity (later revealed to be former Homeland Security official Miles Taylor). The financial deals secured by some of these authors have been massive—Bolton reportedly received an advance of over $2 million for his—and many have dominated the bestseller lists, bringing in further profits. When Bolton’s book was published in June, Simon & Schuster sold more than 780,000 copies in just one week. When Mary Trump’s explosive memoir Too Much and Never Enough (also published by Simon & Schuster) debuted the following month, it set a new sales record for the publisher, selling over 950,000 copies on its first day.

The cancellation of Hawley’s book underscores the gravity of this debate. Simon & Schuster was set to publish The Tyranny of Big Tech, about technology corporations like Google and Facebook, in June. Those who called for the book’s cancellation feared that its publication would legitimize his actions at the Capitol while giving him money and a greater platform, which can be harmful given his recent actions. On Thursday, Simon & Schuster released a statement of its decision to cancel publication. “As a publisher, it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat,” the publishing company said.

In response, Hawley posted a statement on Twitter, claiming that the publisher’s decision was an attack on his First Amendment rights and suggesting that he plans to sue. Simon & Schuster responded with a statement defending its right to cancel the book. (The publisher did not comment beyond its two statements.)

Josh Cook, co-owner of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., believes that politicians like Hawley should not have a relationship with the publishing industry. “If we don’t want to empower white supremacists and fascists, we shouldn’t give them a platform and we shouldn’t give them a revenue stream and publishing their books does both,” Cook tells TIME in an email.

Quick comment from my lane: Don't give fascists book deals. If they get book deals, don't stock them in your stores. This is happening, in part, because publishing/bookstores legitimized & monetized white supremacist ideas & white supremacists

— Josh Cook (@InOrderOfImport) January 6, 2021

Because of these books’ financial value and popularity, for booksellers, the issue isn’t as simple as choosing not to carry a book they feel might be unethical—Cook explains that his store does not have an official policy on what titles it purchases, but he hopes to develop one soon. These tensions are especially nuanced for Depp as a Black and queer bookseller who runs a store with a mission to amplify books that represent communities of color and queerness. “The typical author in people’s mind, that’s the minority at my store,” Depp tells TIME. “So I have to figure out the balance, because this is a business.” Big political books can bring in a significant amount of money for an independent bookstore, so the decision not to carry a given title isn’t one that Depp makes lightly. And while she’s glad that Simon & Schuster canceled Hawley’s, Depp doesn’t consider that action to indicate a turning point for an industry already undergoing social justice and racial reckonings. “This in particular doesn’t signal anything to me other than a wise move on a publisher’s part to not publish a book that wasn’t going to be worth it,” she says.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a major publisher has dropped a book under public pressure. In 2017, Simon & Schuster canceled alt-right personality Milo Yiannopoulos’ book deal after a video of him condoning pedophilia circulated online. And last March, employees from Hachette Book Group walked out in retaliation to the announced publication of Woody Allen’s memoir in April. Hachette dropped the book—but it found a new home at Arcade Publishing, where it was published.

The controversy over Hawley’s book deal and its subsequent cancellation is evidence that the role that public opinion and reaction plays in the publishing process is gaining more weight. “We are living in a world where publishers increasingly question whether publishing a book will create a backlash,” says John Warren, director of George Washington University’s MPS in Publishing program, adding that a question always on publishers’ minds is whether or not a book will sell. Greater sensitivity can be a good thing, he says, allowing publishers to more critically choose which voices to amplify. But he cautions that it also poses a potential issue when it comes to censoring ideas we don’t agree with. “Our society benefits greatly from the free exchange of ideas, and publishers play a critical role in this exchange,” he says, citing the American Library Association and other publishing organizations that seek to protect free speech, particularly in books. “If groups on the right and on the left succeed in banning controversial books from libraries, schools and bookstores, ultimately our society will suffer.”

Depp says she hopes what’s going on in the country will force publishing leaders to continue looking at their decision-making processes on a broad scale. She wants them to consider why they make book deals with certain people over others, and what kind of advances they offer to what kinds of people. “What has to be fought for and justify itself over and over again? Who was allowed to not make out their advance and yet still gets three or four more books published until they hit it big?” she asks. “Who do we extend that grace to as an industry, and who do we not?”

In Herself, a Young Dublin Mother Builds a House to Find Her Way Home

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:42:21 GMT

There’s never a bad time for movies about women pulling themselves out of bad situations. And even though Herself—directed by Phyllida Lloyd, and written by Malcolm Campbell and the movie’s star, Clare Dunne—isn’t specifically a COVID-related film, it speaks to an era in which many people are having to do a lot with a little.

Dunne plays Sandra, the Dublin mother of two smart, cute-as-hell little girls (Ruby Rose O’Hara and Molly McCann) who’s struggling to separate from her abusive partner, and the girls’ father, Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson). Though she’s working two jobs and receiving some child support, she and her daughters still find themselves essentially homeless: as they wait for public housing, they’re squeezed into a small room in an airport hotel, far from the girls’ school, and Sandra yearns to give them more. She investigates the possibility of building her own home for 35,000 euros, and one of her employers, the seemingly crotchety yet enormously kind Peggy (Harriet Walter), comes through with an offer of some land and a loan. Sandra doesn’t just set out to build a house; she practically wills it into being.

Amazon ‘Herself’ isn’t specifically a COVID-related film, but it speaks to an era in which many people are having to do a lot with a little

Of course, it’s not as easy as all that, though Herself focuses more on can-do spirit than it does on kitchen-sink hardship. That’s not necessarily a flaw: Lloyd—a director of stage productions as well as films like Mamma Mia! and The Iron Lady—guides the movie with a firm yet gentle touch, approaching the domestic-violence angle, in particular, in a way that’s both discreet and suitably forceful. Even so, the film does feel a little off-balance dramatically. There’s a great deal of slow story buildup until the last 10 minutes or so, at which point about three movies’ worth of plot hit at once. This gives the picture’s ending a rushed feel that’s vaguely unsatisfying. It’s not that you want things to be harder for Sandra; but her challenges—particularly her emotional conflicts—might have been explored in a little more depth.

Even so, Dunne—who has performed in several of Lloyd’s stage productions—gives plenty of dimension to Sandra’s particular brand of anxiety, optimism and determination. In one scene, Sandra’s older daughter presents her with an envelope, which the girl’s father has instructed her to deliver. Gary’s temper is so violent that it caused Sandra to fear for her life; she knows she must never go back to him, even though he keeps begging her for reconciliation. But inside that envelope is a snapshot of the two of them in happier times—the casual, intimate warmth between them is clear from their body language. Sandra gazes at the picture and breaks down, telling Peggy through tears, “I miss who he was.” It’s a simple line of dialogue that opens a deep sea of feelings. The sudden acknowledgement that a person you once loved doesn’t exist anymore can knock the wind out of you, and Dunne captures that breathless free fall beautifully. You want Sandra to have everything—her house, a better life for her kids. And if nothing else, it’s gratifying to see her learn that the big triumphs are really just a series of small ones strung together.

Pieces of a Woman Features a Superb Performance From Vanessa Kirby, If You Can Bear to Watch It

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:33:22 GMT

There’s a strong argument to be made—maybe it’s the only argument—that art should make us feel something. But a work can sometimes beat its audience into a kind of glassy-eyed retreat from feeling, even against a filmmaker’s best intentions. It’s one thing to have emotions coaxed out of you; it’s another to feel punished into submission.

The first half-hour or so of Pieces of a Woman—directed by Kornél Mundruczó and starring Vanessa Kirby as a woman whose child dies just minutes after birth, and now streaming on Netflix—is so emotionally grueling that it’s almost unbearable. Even if you force yourself to watch, as I had to, you may feel beaten up afterward, rather than devastated by a pure rush of feeling. Unintentionally, the film’s opening also does a disservice to the subtlety of some of the performances, particularly Kirby’s. It may be a movie that takes the wrong route for all the right reasons: if the death of a child is a horrible event to suffer in real life, it’s also hard to dramatize. But movies about tough subjects don’t need to be torture, and if Pieces of a Woman proves anything, it’s that too much is sometimes also not enough.

Kirby and Shia LaBeouf play Martha and Sean, a Boston couple who have chosen to have their child at home. An early scene establishes their class differences: Sean works some sort of construction job, specializing in the building of bridges, a gig that apparently doesn’t bring in much money. Martha, we learn much later, works at some unspecified job in a posh-looking office. It rankles Sean that Martha’s upper-crusty mother, Elizabeth (a crispy-cool Ellen Burstyn), has bought the couple a new car in preparation for the birth of their child, but he grudgingly accepts it. Not long after these particular tensions are established, Martha goes into labor.

The midwife they’ve planned on is in the middle of an emergency childbirth; her substitute, Eva (Molly Parker, in a fine and delicately balanced performance), arrives almost immediately, attended by an aura of extreme calm and capability. Things seem to be going well—until they don’t. Mundruczó follows the action in a long, tendril-like take: Eva gently guides the suffering mother-to-be from the living room to the bathroom to the bedroom, and the camera follows; the effect is one of blurry intimacy, as if we’ve taken up residence in the couple’s apartment. Mundruczó tastefully sets up the impending disaster we know is coming. The scene is dexterous and accomplished; it’s also draining to watch.

The rest of Pieces of a Woman deals very specifically with Martha’s inability to cope with her loss. She and Sean fight with icy words and icier actions: they’re grieving at different speeds, and in different ways, and they lose sight of one another. Elizabeth interferes, in everything from the baby’s gravestone to the lawsuit she pushes forward in order to punish Eva. Sean, suffering in his own way, engages in some despicable behavior: the movie works a little too hard at making him a villain, when just showing a fragile human in pain would have been enough. (LaBeouf’s performance has a somber, unsettling gravity that’s touching, at least when his character isn’t behaving like a complete heel.)

Kirby’s performance is the best thing about the movie: in the moments when Martha is most numbed by grief, her blank gaze invites both terror and empathy. It’s as if strands of her very being were peeling away before our eyes—her performance is a poetic echo of the movie’s title. But especially after that early, extended, harrowing scene, Mundruczó—perhaps best known for his 2014 feature White Dog, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes that year—makes sure we’re aware of his craftsmanship every minute. His approach isn’t exactly showy, yet its disciplined austerity calls attention to itself. Pieces of a Woman is sometimes very effective. I’m sure there are people who will say, “Something like this happened to me, and the movie captured it accurately.” But yanking at our most wrenching emotions doesn’t necessarily make art great, or even artful. Sometimes it just makes you want to turn away, to watch from a position of defensiveness. That’s the exact opposite of giving yourself over to a movie, and sometimes it’s a battle that’s just too hard to fight.

What to Know About Britney Spears, Her Conservatorship and the #FreeBritney Movement

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 15:00:21 GMT

If you follow Britney Spears on Instagram, you’re probably used to seeing her post a mix of filtered selfies, free-spirited dance videos, inspirational quotes and photos with her boyfriend, personal trainer Sam Asghari. But you’ve also probably noticed there’s a lot more going on with the pop icon, especially over the last few years, as legal battles and online protests have shed light on her perceived independence.

Ever since 2008, Spears’ person and finances have largely been managed by her father and a lawyer, which has spawned a vocal, often conspiratorial, online movement calling to #FreeBritney. If you’ve seen the hashtag, worried about her current situation or wondered what the future might hold for the Toxic singer, here’s what you need to know about Spears’ conservatorship and the #FreeBritney movement.

What’s going on with Britney and when did it begin?

Kevin Winter—Getty ImagesBritney Spears performs onstage during the 2016 Billboard Music Awards at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 22, 2016.

During the nearly 30 years she’s spent living in the public eye, Spears has faced a number of highly publicized ups and downs. But in the wake of canceling her Las Vegas residency in January 2019 and checking into a mental health facility a few months later, she has frequently made headlines for one specific reason: her conservatorship.

Since Spears’ career took off when she was still a child—at 11, she was famously cast on The Mickey Mouse Club alongside fellow future pop stars Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera—her parents were heavily involved in her work life from an early age. But it wasn’t until the conservatorship was put in place that her father gained legal control over her affairs as an adult.

Spears’ conservatorship, a legal guardianship designed for those who can’t take care of themselves or manage their own finances, was put in place in 2008 after the singer suffered a prolonged public breakdown involving a series of incidents, including shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. That led to multiple stints in rehab, two separate hospitalizations under psychiatric holds and losing custody of her two sons to ex-husband Kevin Federline. (Federline and Spears now split custody 70/30, with Federline designated as the kids’ primary caregiver.)

The court-approved conservatorship gave Spears’ father, Jamie Spears, and attorney Andrew Wallet authority over her finances and many aspects of her personal life, with filings citing Britney suffered from an undisclosed mental illness and substance abuse. Some aspects of the conservatorship have changed over the years, but Spears’ father remains at the center, having served as conservator of both her person and estate.

Recent attempts by Spears to remove her father as conservator, coupled with rampant fan theories about the singer’s personal struggles, have ignited the #FreeBritney movement, a fan-driven push to restore Spears’ autonomy. This online protest has garnered support from celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton and Rose McGowan. Proponents of #FreeBritney say that Spears is being exploited under the conservatorship—but the movement is largely fueled by unverified claims and conspiracies about Spears’ life circulating online.

What’s the current status of Britney Spears’ conservatorship?

Getty Images—2017 Scott DudelsonBritney Spears walks the red carpet at the 2017 Pre-Grammy Gala and Salute to Industry Icons Honoring Debra Lee at The Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Feb. 11, 2017.

To understand what’s currently happening with Spears’ conservatorship, we have to go back to early 2019. That March, two months after Spears canceled her Las Vegas Domination residency and announced an “indefinite work hiatus,” Wallet abruptly resigned from his position as co-conservator alongside Spears’ father.

Wallet did not provide a specific reason for his resignation but wrote in court filings that the “conservatorship is engaged in numerous ongoing business activities requiring immediate attention” and it was therefore in Spears’ best interest that his resignation be accepted without delay. “Substantial detriment, irreparable harm and immediate danger will result to the conservatee and her estate if the relief requested herein is not granted,” the filings added.

This left Jamie Spears, who was suffering from health issues after rupturing his colon in November 2018, as sole conservator.

In September 2019, citing his health troubles, Jamie temporarily relinquished control of Britney’s person to her care manager, Jodi Montgomery, while maintaining control of Britney’s finances. The switch-up came in the wake of Federline filing a police report over an alleged physical altercation between Jamie and Britney’s then-13-year-old son Sean Preston Federline. Britney’s sons were then granted a restraining order against their grandfather.

Britney’s mother, Lynne Spears, who is divorced from Jamie, also made attempts to get involved in the conservatorship in 2019. In May, she filed a legal motion to be kept informed of all matters regarding her daughter’s medical condition, according to court filings obtained by CNN.

Montgomery’s stint as co-conservator is set to end in September 2021, but the situation grew more complicated over the course of 2020.

Early in 2020, a Los Angeles county judge extended the conservatorship twice—once in February until April 30 and then again through Aug. 22—prior to Britney’s attempts to remove Jamie as conservator. The second extension was handed down around the same time that Britney shared a video on Instagram revealing that she had accidentally burned down her home gym —a post that sparked alarm among some fans.

Why is no one talking about Britney Spears’ gym that she burned down with 2 candles???? Her only explanation was that one thing led to another???

— saucy jayd (@heyimjayd) April 30, 2020

Britney set her gym on fire to bring media attention to her property. She’s trying to escape

— beat my your baby girl❤️ (@debra_barone) May 1, 2020

Although Britney said on Instagram that candles were the cause of the fire, some fans speculated, with no evidence, that she had purposefully set fire to the gym as a distress signal.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Britney Spears (@britneyspears)

In August, Britney asked the courts to remove Jamie as conservator of both her personal affairs and finances, requesting that Montgomery be permanently installed as conservator of her person and that a “qualified corporate fiduciary” replace Jamie as head of her estate. Instead, a judge, whose findings remain under seal, ruled to extend the current version of the conservatorship, with Montgomery acting as temporary co-conservator, through Feb. 1, 2021.

In an Aug. 17 court filing, Britney’s attorney, Samuel D. Ingham III, stated that Britney is “strongly opposed” to Jamie returning as conservator of her person and continuing as sole conservator of her estate. The next day, Jamie filed a petition to have Wallet reinstated as co-conservator of Britney’s finances—a move that Britney’s lawyers opposed, calling Wallet “uniquely unsuitable” for the role. Court filings stated that Britney would not be able to afford Wallet as a conservator due to her decision not to perform.

“Apart from the fact that Mr. Wallet has been extremely expensive in the past, based on what occurred over the 11 years he served as her co-conservator, there is no reason to believe that Mr. Wallet will be able to work with Britney to explain and implement any difficult budgetary choices that must be made,” the filings read.

Britney’s attorney also filed court documents on Sept. 2 arguing against sealing future conservatorship court hearings and addressing the support of Britney’s fans.

“At this point in her life when she is trying to regain some measure of personal autonomy, Britney welcomes and appreciates the informed support of her many fans,” Ingham wrote. “Although the sealing motion is supposedly for her ‘protection,’ Britney herself is vehemently opposed to this effort by her father to keep her legal struggle hidden away in the closet as a family secret.”

Jamie withdrew the petition to reappoint Wallet in October and the lawyer told the Daily Mail that the conservatorship is in Britney’s “best interests” and that many supporters of #FreeBritney have jumped to conclusions.

“Their perception is so wrong but you can’t go and tell them why because a lot of it is confidential,” Wallet said. “This movement on social media has definitely complicated matters. There are people lurking in the shadows pushing an agenda. I can’t say who but it is hurting Britney, she’s the only one who gets hurt by all this.”

On Oct. 28, Britney reportedly learned through a letter from Jamie’s lawyer that her longtime business manager, Lou Taylor, had resigned and been replaced without her knowledge. And at a Nov. 10 hearing, a California judge once again denied Britney’s request to remove Jamie as conservator. “My client has informed me that she is afraid of her father,” Ingham told the judge. “She will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career.”

The judge agreed to appoint Bessemer Trust, a corporate fiduciary, as co-conservator of Britney’s estate alongside Jamie and said that she would consider future petitions for his suspension or removal.

As Britney’s efforts to change the structure of her conservatorship have ramped up, the #FreeBritney movement has also gained steam. Here’s how Britney’s fans have responded to the ongoing controversy.

Why is the #FreeBritney movement gaining steam?

Frazer Harrison—Getty ImagesBanners at the Britney Spears #FreeBritney Protest outside Los Angeles Courthouse in Los Angeles at Stanley Mosk Courthouse on September 16, 2020.

Though the #FreeBritney movement has reportedly been around since 2009, it didn’t garner widespread attention until April 2019.

At that time, a fan podcast called Britney’s Gram aired audio of a voicemail from an alleged former paralegal for an attorney who worked with Spears’ conservatorship claiming, among other things, that the singer’s March 2019 stay at a mental health facility was involuntary.

The unverified claims in the podcast fueled speculation among fans that Spears was being mistreated, prompting an April 2019 public demonstration in Los Angeles where protestors demanded her release from the treatment facility.

The #FreeBritney protest is happening right now outside West Hollywood City Hall pic.twitter.com/S60ZQIEYmf

— Greg W (@gregw_dj) April 22, 2019

Spears herself seemingly debunked the rumors on Instagram.

“I am trying to take a moment for myself, but everything that’s happening is just making it harder for me. Don’t believe everything you read and hear,” she captioned a video message. “Your love and dedication is amazing, but what I need right now is a little bit of privacy to deal with all the hard things that life is throwing my way. If you could do that, I would be forever grateful. Love you.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Britney Spears (@britneyspears)

Her message did little to quell the #FreeBritney movement and unverified speculation has only grown among some fans.

Some believe that Spears now uses her Instagram to send coded cries for help, citing Britney’s emoji use and other details of her posts. Fans have zeroed in on everything from what Spears is wearing to how many times she blinks when examining her posts for clues about her supposed distress. After the singer wore a yellow top in a July Instagram, over 384,000 fans liked a tweet speculating that she had done so because, on a previous post, a follower had commented asking her to wear the color to signal that she needed help.

!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/0GZP6THFW6

— myley ♡ (@myley__) July 7, 2020

When Spears’ mom liked several Instagram posts with the #FreeBritney hashtag, as well as a comment asking that Britney’s mom support the conservatorship’s end, it only fueled the movement’s fire.

In September 2019, a three-month Los Angeles Times investigation reportedly found no evidence that the conservatorship was detrimental to Spears’ well-being, although they seemed to have trouble getting information from those close to Spears: “The Los Angeles Times spent three months examining Spears’ conservatorship and reaching out to those who might have seen firsthand how it has affected her; no one in her inner circle responded to requests for comment. The paper could find no independent evidence that Spears was being harmed by the arrangement.”

But past comments by Spears, and her push to remove her father as conservator have continued to create concern from fans. In the 2008 MTV documentary Britney: For the Record, Spears said that the “restraints” on her life were worse than a jail sentence.

“Even when you go to jail, y’know, there’s the time when you’re gonna get out. But in this situation, it’s never ending,” she said. “It’s just like [the movie] Groundhog Day.”

Fellow celebrities have spoken out in support of Britney as well. In September 2020, Paris Hilton told Andy Cohen on his SiriusXM radio show that she felt Spears should have control over her life, noting that she had seen Spears over the summer but hadn’t directly spoken about the conservatorship with her. “I love her so much and I just feel if you’re an adult you should be able to live your life and not be controlled,” Hilton said. “After just working her whole life and working so hard…she’s just this icon. I just feel like she has no control of her life whatsoever and I just don’t think that’s fair.”

In a July 2020 Instagram post about the late actor Brittany Murphy, Rose McGowan also weighed in on #FreeBritney. “There’s another Britney on my mind today, too, one that is alive, one that can be saved from the leaches that are controlling and trafficking her. Free all the Britneys and all those who get hurt by the trauma of Hollywood values and toxic ‘rules.'”

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A post shared by Rose McGowan (@rosemcgowan)

In addition to its celebrity supporters, the #FreeBritney movement has also received a co-sign from the American Civil Liberties Union, which publicly announced its support for Spears’ autonomy in August.

“People with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights,” the organization tweeted. “If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her.”

People with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights.

If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her. https://t.co/uLRakw7c4C

— ACLU (@ACLU) August 19, 2020

However, some close to Spears have spoken out in support of the conservatorship. In May 2019, her longtime manager, Larry Rudolph, who is not involved in the conservatorship, told the Washington Post that there are legitimate reasons the arrangement is in place.

“The last thing any California state judge wants is to do something incorrectly and inappropriately and be the subject of a story about a judge that has done something wrong by Britney Spears,” he said. “The conservatorship is not a jail. It helps Britney make business decisions and manage her life in ways she can’t do on her own right now.”

The situation is further complicated by the unfounded, unverified claims perpetuated by supporters of the #FreeBritney movement. Some fans have said Spears’ father claimed she had dementia to secure the conservatorship, while some have spread that the arrangement prohibits Spears from having more children. The prevalence of these conspiracy theories only makes it more difficult to sort fact from fiction for those with a casual knowledge of the matter.

What comes next?

Lester Cohen—Getty ImagesBritney Spears attends the 2016 Billboard Music Awards at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 22, 2016.

As far as the legal proceedings surrounding Spears’ conservatorship go, at a Dec. 16, 2020 hearing on the case, a judge ruled to extend the arrangement until Sept. 3, 2021. However, there are three new hearings, including one to assess how Jamie has managed Britney’s finances, set to take place before then, the LA Times reports.

Ahead of the Dec. 16 hearing, Jamie told CNN that he hadn’t spoken to Britney since she filed to remove him as conservator in August. “I love my daughter and I miss her very much,” he said. “When a family member needs special care and protection, families need to step up, as I have done for the last 12-plus years, to safeguard, protect and continue to love Britney unconditionally. I have and will continue to provide unwavering love and fierce protection against those with self-serving interests and those who seek to harm her or my family.”

A virtual #FreeBritney rally was held in conjunction with the December hearing, reportedly attracting over 500 supporters from around the world to a group Zoom call.

It feels so good that the Britney Army is together once again. Vinyls, music etc aside…we are all here today for one reason, to FREE BRITNEY! ✨ pic.twitter.com/jYP7P0v0kh

— eoin | #freebritney (@ereyn02) December 16, 2020

“Britney doesn’t deserve this,” reform advocate Venus Gist said during the meeting. “Whatever struggle she’s had in her past, she deserves to enjoy her children and her money. She needs our support. It just shows us there’s a spectrum: Whether you’re very wealthy or low-income, you can be a victim to this probate court system.”

The Times reports that #FreeBritney organizers plan to hold similar events to support Spears going forward.