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"content": "\u003cp>For such a famed historical figure, Napoleon has made only fleeting appearances in movies since Abel Gance’s 1927 silent film.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Stanley Kubrick had grand designs for a Napoleon epic that went unmade. (Steven Spielberg is attempting to revive those plans as a series ). Napoleon and his bicorne hat — more icon of history than a real character — mostly only pops up in time-traveling odysseys like \u003cem>Time Bandits\u003c/em> or \u003ca href=\"https://video.kqed.org/video/bill-and-teds-excellent-adventure-web-extra-zii6ya/\">\u003cem>Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The party, though, is finally on in Ridley Scott’s \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>, starring Joaquin Phoenix. Scott doesn’t do anything small, not even famously diminutive French emperors. And his two-hour-38-minute big-screen biopic serves up a heaping historical spectacle complete with bloody European battles and massive military maneuvers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937499']But don’t mistake Napoleon for your average historical epic. Our first sense that this may not be a grand glorification of a Great Man of history comes early in the film, when a 24-year-old Bonaparte leads the siege on the British troops controlling the port city of Toulon. When Napoleon, then a major, charges forward in the fight, he’s visibly terrified, even panting. He looks more like Phoenix’s anxious protagonist in \u003cem>Beau Is Afraid\u003c/em> than the man who would become France’s Caesar. Napoleon doesn’t storm the gates so much as lurch desperately at them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And for the rest of Scott’s film and Phoenix’s riveting performance, Napoleon’s actions are never much more complicated than that. He assumes power cavalierly. His coup d’état against the French Directory in 1799 is a ramshackle farce. He flings his armies around the continent without the slightest concern. He’s prone to petulant rages, screaming at the British: “You think you’re so great because you have boats!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> subscribes more to the Not-So-Great Man theory of history. This Napoleon isn’t extraordinary nor is he much of a man. He’s a boyishly impulsive, thin-skinned brute, careening his way through Europe and leaving battlefields of dead soldiers in his wake. When he, while on a campaign in Egypt, is informed over lunch that his wife Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby) is having an affair back in Paris, he responds curtly to the messenger: “No dessert for you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIsfMO5Jd_w\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For more than 200 years, characterizations of Napoleon have ranged from genius reformer born out of the French Revolution to marauding tyrant whose wars left three million dead. Napoleon, himself, helped shape his legacy while exiled on St. Helena with a self-serving memoir. Some of the titans of 19th century literature reckoned with him. Victor Hugo wrote Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he had grown “troublesome to God.” Tolstoy, in \u003cem>War and Peace\u003c/em>, was less impressed, calling him, “that most insignificant instrument of history.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13938143']In \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>, which begins with Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and ends with Napoleon on St. Helena where he died at age 51 in 1821, it’s startling how much disregard the movie has for its protagonist. Hollywood historical epics have traditionally leaned toward aggrandizement, not the undressing of fragile, deluded male egos who exclaim over dinner: “Destiny has brought me here! Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here is a sweeping historical tapestry — no one does it better today than Scott — with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix — Scott’s spectacle and Phoenix’s the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance — makes \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> a rivetingly off-kilter experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not always a smooth mix. Phoenix’s characterization may at times have more in common with some of his past depictions of melancholy loners (\u003cem>The Master\u003c/em>, \u003cem>The Joker\u003c/em>) than any factual record of Napoleon. A quality like ambition, you’d think, would be prominent in depicting Napoleon. He was a notorious workaholic, meticulously organized and an energetic intellectual — little of which is present here, making Napoleon’s rise to power sometimes hard to fathom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s also part of the point of \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>, which surely has some contemporary echoes. There are plenty of enablers along the way (a highlight of the supporting cast is Paul Rhys as the scheming diplomat Talleyrand) as the film marches through major events like the fall of Robespierre, the 1799 coup, Napoleon making himself Emperor in 1804 and the triumphant Battle of Austerlitz. The last is Scott’s finest set piece in the film, ending in a rout of the Russian forces as they flee over a frozen pond while the bombardment of cannons plunges them into an icy grave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in David Scarpa’s screenplay, the real through line in \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> isn’t the string of battles leading up to the downfall we all know is coming at Waterloo. (There, Rupert Everett’s sneering Duke of Wellington enlivens the military tactics.) It’s Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine that makes the main thread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he first sees her across a crowded party, he stands transfixed. Anyone would be. The slinky Kirby, sporting a pixie cut, rivals Phoenix for most potent presence in \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>. She has a complete hold on Napoleon, who turns out to be no more suave in the bedroom than he is among society. When he returns from Egypt furious from the well-publicized rumors of her infidelity, they have a prolonged fight that ends with her turning the tables. “You are nothing without me,” she tells him, as he cowers, happily. “Say it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937870']There’s a version of the film that could be wholly focused on their dynamic. Joséphine is omnipresent for a long stretch — he writes her constantly from the battlefront in letters narrated to us — but \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> never quite finds its balance in cutting between their life together and the military exploits. Scott is expected to release a four-hour director’s cut on Apple TV+ after the film’s theatrical run, which may offer a more calibrated version.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the 85-year-old Scott — himself a symbol of ceaseless ambition — has made a film that, like his previous \u003cem>The Last Duel\u003c/em>, is a provocative takedown of male power. Scott has made plenty of brawny, swaggering epics in his time — including \u003cem>Gladiator\u003c/em>, with an Oscar-nominated Phoenix as the Roman emperor Commodus. But even though not everything in \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> coheres, it’s appealingly destabilizing. In one of the film’s final images, Napoleon and his hat are in silhouette as he slumps to his death like a keeling ship, going down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Napoleon’ hits theaters nationwide on Nov. 22, 2023.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> subscribes more to the Not-So-Great Man theory of history. This Napoleon isn’t extraordinary nor is he much of a man. He’s a boyishly impulsive, thin-skinned brute, careening his way through Europe and leaving battlefields of dead soldiers in his wake. When he, while on a campaign in Egypt, is informed over lunch that his wife Joséphine (Vanessa Kirby) is having an affair back in Paris, he responds curtly to the messenger: “No dessert for you.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/LIsfMO5Jd_w'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/LIsfMO5Jd_w'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>For more than 200 years, characterizations of Napoleon have ranged from genius reformer born out of the French Revolution to marauding tyrant whose wars left three million dead. Napoleon, himself, helped shape his legacy while exiled on St. Helena with a self-serving memoir. Some of the titans of 19th century literature reckoned with him. Victor Hugo wrote Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he had grown “troublesome to God.” Tolstoy, in \u003cem>War and Peace\u003c/em>, was less impressed, calling him, “that most insignificant instrument of history.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>, which begins with Marie Antoinette at the guillotine and ends with Napoleon on St. Helena where he died at age 51 in 1821, it’s startling how much disregard the movie has for its protagonist. Hollywood historical epics have traditionally leaned toward aggrandizement, not the undressing of fragile, deluded male egos who exclaim over dinner: “Destiny has brought me here! Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here is a sweeping historical tapestry — no one does it better today than Scott — with a damning, almost satirical portrait at its center. That mix — Scott’s spectacle and Phoenix’s the-emperor-has-no-clothes performance — makes \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> a rivetingly off-kilter experience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not always a smooth mix. Phoenix’s characterization may at times have more in common with some of his past depictions of melancholy loners (\u003cem>The Master\u003c/em>, \u003cem>The Joker\u003c/em>) than any factual record of Napoleon. A quality like ambition, you’d think, would be prominent in depicting Napoleon. He was a notorious workaholic, meticulously organized and an energetic intellectual — little of which is present here, making Napoleon’s rise to power sometimes hard to fathom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s also part of the point of \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>, which surely has some contemporary echoes. There are plenty of enablers along the way (a highlight of the supporting cast is Paul Rhys as the scheming diplomat Talleyrand) as the film marches through major events like the fall of Robespierre, the 1799 coup, Napoleon making himself Emperor in 1804 and the triumphant Battle of Austerlitz. The last is Scott’s finest set piece in the film, ending in a rout of the Russian forces as they flee over a frozen pond while the bombardment of cannons plunges them into an icy grave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in David Scarpa’s screenplay, the real through line in \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> isn’t the string of battles leading up to the downfall we all know is coming at Waterloo. (There, Rupert Everett’s sneering Duke of Wellington enlivens the military tactics.) It’s Napoleon’s relationship with Joséphine that makes the main thread.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he first sees her across a crowded party, he stands transfixed. Anyone would be. The slinky Kirby, sporting a pixie cut, rivals Phoenix for most potent presence in \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em>. She has a complete hold on Napoleon, who turns out to be no more suave in the bedroom than he is among society. When he returns from Egypt furious from the well-publicized rumors of her infidelity, they have a prolonged fight that ends with her turning the tables. “You are nothing without me,” she tells him, as he cowers, happily. “Say it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>There’s a version of the film that could be wholly focused on their dynamic. Joséphine is omnipresent for a long stretch — he writes her constantly from the battlefront in letters narrated to us — but \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> never quite finds its balance in cutting between their life together and the military exploits. Scott is expected to release a four-hour director’s cut on Apple TV+ after the film’s theatrical run, which may offer a more calibrated version.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the 85-year-old Scott — himself a symbol of ceaseless ambition — has made a film that, like his previous \u003cem>The Last Duel\u003c/em>, is a provocative takedown of male power. Scott has made plenty of brawny, swaggering epics in his time — including \u003cem>Gladiator\u003c/em>, with an Oscar-nominated Phoenix as the Roman emperor Commodus. But even though not everything in \u003cem>Napoleon\u003c/em> coheres, it’s appealingly destabilizing. In one of the film’s final images, Napoleon and his hat are in silhouette as he slumps to his death like a keeling ship, going down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Napoleon’ hits theaters nationwide on Nov. 22, 2023.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Inspired by a 1990s Tabloid Story, ‘May December’ Fictionalizes a Real Tragedy",
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"content": "\u003cp>If you were in reach of a TV or a tabloid in the ’90s, you probably remember the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington state schoolteacher who was convicted of raping her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fualaau was 12 when Letourneau, 34, first had sex with him. They had two children, one of whom was born while Letourneau was in prison. After her release in 2004, she and the now-adult Fualauu wed and were married for 14 years until their separation. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937866']The dark and sometimes disturbingly funny new movie \u003cem>May December\u003c/em> was inspired by the Letourneau-Fualaau story, though it never mentions them by name. \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2013/05/23/182597401/julianne-moore-relishing-complicated-characters\">Julianne Moore\u003c/a> plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who’s in her late 50s, and Charles Melton plays her husband, Joe Yoo, who’s in his 30s. They have three college-age children and a beautiful home in Savannah, Ga., where their close-knit community has long accepted them despite the scandal that broke out when their relationship came to light two decades earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The director \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2007/11/19/16419557/todd-haynes-exploring-six-degrees-of-dylan\">Todd Haynes\u003c/a>, working from a smart, layered script by Samy Burch, comes at this material from a fascinating angle. A famous TV actor named Elizabeth Berry, played by the famous movie actor \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2010/11/29/131667596/to-become-a-black-swan-portman-had-to-go-dark\">Natalie Portman\u003c/a>, is set to play Gracie in an independent film. Elizabeth has come to Savannah to do some research by spending time with the couple, who are hoping they’ll be depicted sympathetically. In one scene, Elizabeth attends a barbeque at Gracie and Joe’s house and strikes up a conversation about them with one of their friends, who says what she most loves about Gracie is that she’s an “unapologetic” woman who “always knows what she wants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VdAParM4h8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore, who gave two of her greatest performances in Haynes’ earlier dramas \u003cem>Safe\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Far From Heaven\u003c/em>, plays Gracie with an edge of steel and a childlike lisp inspired by Letourneau herself. Although Gracie gives Elizabeth a friendly welcome, over the next few days she turns brittle and a little testy as the actor asks about her and Joe’s relationship. There’s an acid humor to Gracie’s defiance as she refuses to wring her hands over her past misdeeds. In her mind, she and Joe and their kids are a happy and pretty normal family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937140']But Gracie is clearly deluding herself, and it doesn’t take long for Elizabeth’s presence to drive a wedge between the couple as old, unresolved issues rise to the surface. Melton, best known for the series \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511672776/archie-got-hot-is-a-sentence-youll-hear-in-new-noir-riverdale\">\u003cem>Riverdale\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, is quietly revelatory as Joe, a man stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence. We can’t help but notice how closely Joe resembles his teenage kids, not just in appearance but in age. Or how Gracie seems to treat him the way a needy mother might treat her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as messed up as Gracie and Joe are, \u003cem>May December\u003c/em> seems to respect them more than it does Elizabeth, who’s clearly working this situation from every possible angle. Portman, doing her best and subtlest work in some time, brilliantly reveals the calculation behind Elizabeth’s polite smiles and gently probing questions. Haynes clearly loves actors, but he isn’t afraid to show how callous and even monstrous some of them can be in pursuit of their art. He’s also critiquing the endless appetite for sensationalized, ripped-from-the-headlines stories and the industry’s willingness to feed it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this would be rich dramatic fodder even if it were played perfectly straight. But Haynes, one of the most inventive stylists working in American movies, is incapable of being completely straightforward, and here he walks a tricky tonal line between melodrama, realism and camp.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937499']At times he accents key moments with a deliberately overwrought burst of music, as if to give us a glimpse of the soap opera that Elizabeth’s indie film project might well become. Elsewhere his references skew higher-brow: When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in closeup, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman’s \u003cem>Persona \u003c/em>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/1104241680/david-lynch\">David Lynch\u003c/a>‘s \u003cem>Mulholland Drive\u003c/em>, as if to suggest that Gracie’s and Elizabeth’s identities are blurring together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In shifting among these different modes, Haynes reminds us that we’re watching a movie, and that most movies can only give us a partial understanding of the truth. Still, for all its surface artifice and self-aware humor, what’s striking about \u003cem>May December\u003c/em> is how piercingly sad it becomes as it invites us to feel the full weight of Gracie and Joe’s loneliness and desperation. These characters may be fictionalized constructs, but their tragedy is all too real.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Inspired+by+a+1990s+tabloid+story%2C+%27May+December%27+fictionalizes+a+real+tragedy&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘May December’ is in theaters nationwide from Nov. 17 and begins streaming on Netflix on Dec. 1, 2023.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The dark and sometimes disturbingly funny new movie \u003cem>May December\u003c/em> was inspired by the Letourneau-Fualaau story, though it never mentions them by name. \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2013/05/23/182597401/julianne-moore-relishing-complicated-characters\">Julianne Moore\u003c/a> plays Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who’s in her late 50s, and Charles Melton plays her husband, Joe Yoo, who’s in his 30s. They have three college-age children and a beautiful home in Savannah, Ga., where their close-knit community has long accepted them despite the scandal that broke out when their relationship came to light two decades earlier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The director \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2007/11/19/16419557/todd-haynes-exploring-six-degrees-of-dylan\">Todd Haynes\u003c/a>, working from a smart, layered script by Samy Burch, comes at this material from a fascinating angle. A famous TV actor named Elizabeth Berry, played by the famous movie actor \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2010/11/29/131667596/to-become-a-black-swan-portman-had-to-go-dark\">Natalie Portman\u003c/a>, is set to play Gracie in an independent film. Elizabeth has come to Savannah to do some research by spending time with the couple, who are hoping they’ll be depicted sympathetically. In one scene, Elizabeth attends a barbeque at Gracie and Joe’s house and strikes up a conversation about them with one of their friends, who says what she most loves about Gracie is that she’s an “unapologetic” woman who “always knows what she wants.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/4VdAParM4h8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/4VdAParM4h8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore, who gave two of her greatest performances in Haynes’ earlier dramas \u003cem>Safe\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Far From Heaven\u003c/em>, plays Gracie with an edge of steel and a childlike lisp inspired by Letourneau herself. Although Gracie gives Elizabeth a friendly welcome, over the next few days she turns brittle and a little testy as the actor asks about her and Joe’s relationship. There’s an acid humor to Gracie’s defiance as she refuses to wring her hands over her past misdeeds. In her mind, she and Joe and their kids are a happy and pretty normal family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>But Gracie is clearly deluding herself, and it doesn’t take long for Elizabeth’s presence to drive a wedge between the couple as old, unresolved issues rise to the surface. Melton, best known for the series \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2017/01/26/511672776/archie-got-hot-is-a-sentence-youll-hear-in-new-noir-riverdale\">\u003cem>Riverdale\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, is quietly revelatory as Joe, a man stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence. We can’t help but notice how closely Joe resembles his teenage kids, not just in appearance but in age. Or how Gracie seems to treat him the way a needy mother might treat her son.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But as messed up as Gracie and Joe are, \u003cem>May December\u003c/em> seems to respect them more than it does Elizabeth, who’s clearly working this situation from every possible angle. Portman, doing her best and subtlest work in some time, brilliantly reveals the calculation behind Elizabeth’s polite smiles and gently probing questions. Haynes clearly loves actors, but he isn’t afraid to show how callous and even monstrous some of them can be in pursuit of their art. He’s also critiquing the endless appetite for sensationalized, ripped-from-the-headlines stories and the industry’s willingness to feed it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>All this would be rich dramatic fodder even if it were played perfectly straight. But Haynes, one of the most inventive stylists working in American movies, is incapable of being completely straightforward, and here he walks a tricky tonal line between melodrama, realism and camp.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>At times he accents key moments with a deliberately overwrought burst of music, as if to give us a glimpse of the soap opera that Elizabeth’s indie film project might well become. Elsewhere his references skew higher-brow: When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in closeup, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman’s \u003cem>Persona \u003c/em>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/artists/1104241680/david-lynch\">David Lynch\u003c/a>‘s \u003cem>Mulholland Drive\u003c/em>, as if to suggest that Gracie’s and Elizabeth’s identities are blurring together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In shifting among these different modes, Haynes reminds us that we’re watching a movie, and that most movies can only give us a partial understanding of the truth. Still, for all its surface artifice and self-aware humor, what’s striking about \u003cem>May December\u003c/em> is how piercingly sad it becomes as it invites us to feel the full weight of Gracie and Joe’s loneliness and desperation. These characters may be fictionalized constructs, but their tragedy is all too real.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 Fresh Air. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/\">Fresh Air\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Inspired+by+a+1990s+tabloid+story%2C+%27May+December%27+fictionalizes+a+real+tragedy&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘May December’ is in theaters nationwide from Nov. 17 and begins streaming on Netflix on Dec. 1, 2023.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a “ballad,” but you can’t call it “The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes” now, can you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concision was never much in favor in the four \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015’s \u003cem>The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2\u003c/em>. The intervening years have done nothing to shrink the ambitions of this unapologetically gaudy dystopic series where the brutal deaths of kids are watched over by outrageously styled Capitol denizens with names like Effie Trinket.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_14149']That clash of YA allegory and color palette is just as pronounced, if not more so, in \u003cem>The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, a prequel set 64 years before the original books, adapted from Suzanne Collins’ 2020 book of the same name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, which opens in theaters Nov. 16, is an origin story of the Hunger Games, themselves, as well as numerous characters — primarily the devious President Coriolanus Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the first four films. Here, Snow is an impoverished but opportunistic 18-year-old student played by Tom Blyth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as in the \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> films led by Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, the new one proves how much you can sacrifice in story when you’ve got a thrilling young performer commanding the screen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Francis Lawrence’s prequel often wobbles, especially in the early going. And yet, in the end, \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, propelled by Blyth’s performance, manages to be the deepest expression yet of the series’ melodrama of adolescence. In Panem, the only thing more tragic than the suffering inflicted by adults on the young may be a bright kid warping wickedly into one of those elders, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13938004\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1722px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13938004\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM.png\" alt=\"A Black woman with her hair a mass of grey and white curls stands with an unimpressed facial expression. She is wearing a purple and gold gown with a high pleated collar. Her left eye is white.\" width=\"1722\" height=\"1126\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM.png 1722w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-800x523.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-1020x667.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-160x105.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-768x502.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-1536x1004.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1722px) 100vw, 1722px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Viola Davis in ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.’ \u003ccite>(Lionsgate via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That generational divide was always at the heart of the appeal of \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em>, a fantasy where no adult or institution can be trusted, and the normal pressures of teendom are amplified in a modern, televised Roman Coliseum — an \u003cem>American Idol\u003c/em> with murder — concocted by elders. It’s madness shrugged off as, “That’s just the way it is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='pop_16694']In \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, we see how it got to be that way. The 10th annual Hunger Games are approaching but it feels more like pre-Super Bowl times when the NFL and the AFL played in separate leagues. The broadcast is low rent, the ratings are poor and the games themselves are staged in a dilapidated stadium.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With little food in the fridge, Coriolanus is living with his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) and grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan). Their family has fallen on hard times, in part because of a family rivalry with Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the dean of the academy who harbors hatred for the Snows. (Dinklage, whose wry presence adds a kick to the film, has managed to appear once again in an outlandish fantasy with a man named Snow. )\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxW_X4kzeus\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the students gather amid Third Reich architectures (the production design by Uli Hanisch is stellar) and the games’ founder Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, majestic in blue, with a turquoise eye) gazes on, Coriolanus is assigned his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, a bold young woman from District 12 (also the home of Katniss) who wears a rainbow skirt and sports a dubious Southern accent. During the reaping ceremony, she makes an immediate impression, putting a snake down the back of a rival and bursting into song for the cameras. (“See, now there’s concision,” I thought. “You get your songbird and snake, straight off.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937870']Lawrence’s Katniss was a thrilling female warrior whose seizing of center stage had reverberations off screen, paving the way for blockbuster female protagonists. Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray is inevitably a disappointment by comparison. Lawrence’s film, scripted by Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, for a while has the stale feeling of an unneeded retread. The tonal fluctuations, always a tricky balance in Panem, can be ridiculous. The stadium is abruptly bombed by unseen rebels. Once the games begin, one tribute contracts rabies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main thing holding our attention at this point is Jason Schwartzman’s Lucretius Flickerman, a TV host with a Salvador Dali mustache who wants the games wrapped up just so he can make his dinner reservations. (It’s been a very good year for Schwartzman, who transformed himself in Wes Anderson’s \u003cem>Asteroid City\u003c/em> and transmogrified in \u003cem>Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\u003c/em>. )\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13938006\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1684px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13938006\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM.png\" alt=\"A middle-aged man with dwarfism stands in a grand hall wearing a black ceremonial outfit, almost like a priest. Behind him, lines of young people all wearing red uniforms line up in unison.\" width=\"1684\" height=\"1188\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM.png 1684w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-800x564.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-1020x720.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-160x113.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-768x542.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-1536x1084.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1684px) 100vw, 1684px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peter Dinklage in ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.’ \u003ccite>(Lionsgate via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But \u003cem>Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> sneakily begins making a case for itself. The relationship between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray is compellingly complex. He works desperately to help her survive the games because he believes in her, and maybe loves her, but also because her success benefits him, too. Whether Lucy Gray is as purehearted as her songs, too, is up for debate. Both, we sense, are cunningly playing the hands they’ve been delt, seeking an advantage where they can. When Coriolanus begins making suggestions for the games to Volumnia, he proves himself a natural-born marketer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That there’s tension in Coriolanus’ character, considering we know how he ultimately ends up, is a tribute to just how good Blyth is. We’ve by now seen plenty of prequels that show us how some famous villain broke bad, but there’s nothing in Blyth’s performance that telegraphs his future. He’s a sincere striver — we root for him because of his poverty and his puck — who’s operating in the society he’s found himself. He’s a villain born entirely of circumstance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13304145']\u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> extends the saga for a third act that takes place in District 12, an addition that another franchise might have saved for the next installment. But it’s also where that tragedy of \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em>, and Coriolanus’ fate, earns some of the Shakespearean touches that have liberally been sprinkled throughout. (Shakespeare’s \u003cem>Coriolanus\u003c/em> is likewise about an ambiguous warrior set amid times of famine and class struggle.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em> kicked off a YA craze in film that had its ups and downs but petered out several years ago. Whether \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.\u003cbr>\n\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ hits theaters nationwide on Friday, Nov. 17.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a “ballad,” but you can’t call it “The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes” now, can you?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concision was never much in favor in the four \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> films, which reached a seeming finale with 2015’s \u003cem>The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2\u003c/em>. The intervening years have done nothing to shrink the ambitions of this unapologetically gaudy dystopic series where the brutal deaths of kids are watched over by outrageously styled Capitol denizens with names like Effie Trinket.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>That clash of YA allegory and color palette is just as pronounced, if not more so, in \u003cem>The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, a prequel set 64 years before the original books, adapted from Suzanne Collins’ 2020 book of the same name.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, which opens in theaters Nov. 16, is an origin story of the Hunger Games, themselves, as well as numerous characters — primarily the devious President Coriolanus Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the first four films. Here, Snow is an impoverished but opportunistic 18-year-old student played by Tom Blyth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just as in the \u003cem>Hunger Games\u003c/em> films led by Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, the new one proves how much you can sacrifice in story when you’ve got a thrilling young performer commanding the screen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Francis Lawrence’s prequel often wobbles, especially in the early going. And yet, in the end, \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, propelled by Blyth’s performance, manages to be the deepest expression yet of the series’ melodrama of adolescence. In Panem, the only thing more tragic than the suffering inflicted by adults on the young may be a bright kid warping wickedly into one of those elders, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13938004\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1722px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13938004\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM.png\" alt=\"A Black woman with her hair a mass of grey and white curls stands with an unimpressed facial expression. She is wearing a purple and gold gown with a high pleated collar. Her left eye is white.\" width=\"1722\" height=\"1126\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM.png 1722w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-800x523.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-1020x667.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-160x105.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-768x502.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.45.17-AM-1536x1004.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1722px) 100vw, 1722px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Viola Davis in ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.’ \u003ccite>(Lionsgate via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>That generational divide was always at the heart of the appeal of \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em>, a fantasy where no adult or institution can be trusted, and the normal pressures of teendom are amplified in a modern, televised Roman Coliseum — an \u003cem>American Idol\u003c/em> with murder — concocted by elders. It’s madness shrugged off as, “That’s just the way it is.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em>, we see how it got to be that way. The 10th annual Hunger Games are approaching but it feels more like pre-Super Bowl times when the NFL and the AFL played in separate leagues. The broadcast is low rent, the ratings are poor and the games themselves are staged in a dilapidated stadium.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With little food in the fridge, Coriolanus is living with his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) and grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan). Their family has fallen on hard times, in part because of a family rivalry with Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the dean of the academy who harbors hatred for the Snows. (Dinklage, whose wry presence adds a kick to the film, has managed to appear once again in an outlandish fantasy with a man named Snow. )\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/NxW_X4kzeus'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/NxW_X4kzeus'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>As the students gather amid Third Reich architectures (the production design by Uli Hanisch is stellar) and the games’ founder Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, majestic in blue, with a turquoise eye) gazes on, Coriolanus is assigned his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird, a bold young woman from District 12 (also the home of Katniss) who wears a rainbow skirt and sports a dubious Southern accent. During the reaping ceremony, she makes an immediate impression, putting a snake down the back of a rival and bursting into song for the cameras. (“See, now there’s concision,” I thought. “You get your songbird and snake, straight off.”)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Lawrence’s Katniss was a thrilling female warrior whose seizing of center stage had reverberations off screen, paving the way for blockbuster female protagonists. Rachel Zegler’s Lucy Gray is inevitably a disappointment by comparison. Lawrence’s film, scripted by Michael Arndt and Michael Lesslie, for a while has the stale feeling of an unneeded retread. The tonal fluctuations, always a tricky balance in Panem, can be ridiculous. The stadium is abruptly bombed by unseen rebels. Once the games begin, one tribute contracts rabies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The main thing holding our attention at this point is Jason Schwartzman’s Lucretius Flickerman, a TV host with a Salvador Dali mustache who wants the games wrapped up just so he can make his dinner reservations. (It’s been a very good year for Schwartzman, who transformed himself in Wes Anderson’s \u003cem>Asteroid City\u003c/em> and transmogrified in \u003cem>Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse\u003c/em>. )\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13938006\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1684px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13938006\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM.png\" alt=\"A middle-aged man with dwarfism stands in a grand hall wearing a black ceremonial outfit, almost like a priest. Behind him, lines of young people all wearing red uniforms line up in unison.\" width=\"1684\" height=\"1188\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM.png 1684w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-800x564.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-1020x720.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-160x113.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-768x542.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-14-at-10.52.39-AM-1536x1084.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1684px) 100vw, 1684px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Peter Dinklage in ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.’ \u003ccite>(Lionsgate via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But \u003cem>Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> sneakily begins making a case for itself. The relationship between Coriolanus and Lucy Gray is compellingly complex. He works desperately to help her survive the games because he believes in her, and maybe loves her, but also because her success benefits him, too. Whether Lucy Gray is as purehearted as her songs, too, is up for debate. Both, we sense, are cunningly playing the hands they’ve been delt, seeking an advantage where they can. When Coriolanus begins making suggestions for the games to Volumnia, he proves himself a natural-born marketer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That there’s tension in Coriolanus’ character, considering we know how he ultimately ends up, is a tribute to just how good Blyth is. We’ve by now seen plenty of prequels that show us how some famous villain broke bad, but there’s nothing in Blyth’s performance that telegraphs his future. He’s a sincere striver — we root for him because of his poverty and his puck — who’s operating in the society he’s found himself. He’s a villain born entirely of circumstance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> extends the saga for a third act that takes place in District 12, an addition that another franchise might have saved for the next installment. But it’s also where that tragedy of \u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em>, and Coriolanus’ fate, earns some of the Shakespearean touches that have liberally been sprinkled throughout. (Shakespeare’s \u003cem>Coriolanus\u003c/em> is likewise about an ambiguous warrior set amid times of famine and class struggle.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Hunger Games\u003c/em> kicked off a YA craze in film that had its ups and downs but petered out several years ago. Whether \u003cem>The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes\u003c/em> is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.\u003cbr>\n\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ hits theaters nationwide on Friday, Nov. 17.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Local Surfers Raise Awareness, Call for Ceasefire with ‘Gaza Surf Club’ Screening",
"headTitle": "Local Surfers Raise Awareness, Call for Ceasefire with ‘Gaza Surf Club’ Screening | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>“Gaza is nothing without the beach. It’s the only escape for the people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a line from a Palestinian surfer in \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHF9AOZeGw\">\u003ci>Gaza Surf Club\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, a 2016 film which documents an intergenerational and mixed-gender group of surfers in Gaza. On Friday, Nov. 17, the documentary screens in San Francisco and Berkeley as part of a grassroots effort to raise relief funds for families impacted by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The death toll from Israeli air strikes in Gaza surpassed 11,000 late last week, according to Gaza’s ministry of health. While the Israeli government has said its air strikes are a necessary response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas that took around 240 people hostage and killed approximately 1,200 in Israel, a human rights expert from the U.N. has said the Israeli military’s current bombardment could soon amount to “\u003ca href=\"https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls\">ethnic cleansing\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is about amplifying Palestinian voices, which aren’t very accessible right now,” says Yasmine El-Hage, a Bay Area surfer of Lebanese, Peruvian and Iranian descent who is co-organizing the San Francisco event. “Lives in the Middle East and for people of color worldwide aren’t valued equally in our discourse. We see the numbers [of deaths] rising to 11,000, but we need to be reminded that these are people with dreams, just like us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For El-Hage and her community of waveriders, that means cultivating a space for connection and discourse centered on a universal human need: access to water. El-Hage — who has volunteered her time as a member of an oil spill emergency response team, and who is active in advocating for clean water rights in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point community — has previously worked in refugee camps amid various crises. For her, surfing is an escape and a reflection of the human condition, regardless of where you stand on a map.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Surfing is] a taste of freedom for all of us, no matter what you’re doing, whatever is going on, you just go out into the ocean and it’s incredibly peaceful,” El-Hage says. “So many of us understand that feeling deeply.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The screening marks a collaboration between El-Hage and other surfers and community advocates: Drew Madsen of the \u003ca href=\"https://bwtf.surfrider.org/\">Blue Water Task Force\u003c/a> and Golden Gate Longboard Collective; Leenah, a surfer who is organizing a Surf Power Hour in solidarity with Palestinians in the Peninsula; and Marie Salem, a California community organizer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The organizers welcome those in the Bay Area who care about the conflict in Gaza but haven’t been quite sure how to get involved. In addition to the screening, a friend of El-Hage, who grew up in Gaza and currently has family there, will speak about their experiences in a Q&A after the film. And the Bay Area’s own \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13928345/mishmish-vegan-palestinian-pop-up\">vegan Palestinian pop-up, Mishmish\u003c/a>, will be on hand to serve diasporic plates throughout the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13928355\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1366px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13928355\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1366\" height=\"2048\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large.jpeg 1366w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-800x1199.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-1020x1529.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-160x240.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-768x1151.jpeg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-1025x1536.jpeg 1025w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1366px) 100vw, 1366px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bazella, a carrot and green pea stew, served at Mishmish. \u003ccite>(Alan Chazaro)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The screening will be hosted at a private location with a suggestion donation of $10, and the option to lend additional aid to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.palestinercs.org/en\">Palestine Red Crescent Society\u003c/a>, a member of the International Red Cross. In order to attend, audience members must show proof of having reached out to their representatives \u003ca href=\"https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/call-congress-support-ceasefire/\">calling for a ceasefire\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coincidentally, the East Bay surf club \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/queersurf/?hl=en\">Queer Surf\u003c/a>, in conjunction with Cinema Iran, will screen the film in Berkeley that same night. El-Hage says the events weren’t coordinated, but are a reflection of a “collective consciousness in this heavy moment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>El-Hage, who is in the process of applying to medical school, notes that 2.2 million people in Gaza currently don’t have access to food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine and other basic needs. “Why are we calling for a ceasefire? People are lacking basic services and are under siege,” she says. “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians\">40% of them are under the age of 14\u003c/a>. That’s a crucial humanitarian issue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>El-Hage continues: “Here in the Bay Area, we love surfing. We love the ocean. We can all approach this with that love and learn about a group of amazing people who just happen to speak another language, and that can lead to taking more action.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://gazasurfclub.com/\">‘Gaza Surf Club’\u003c/a> screens in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. For more details, \u003ca href=\"mailto:sfsurfingpals@gmail.com\">email the organizers\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/queersurf/?hl=en\">Queer Surf\u003c/a> will screen the film Friday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. at \u003ca href=\"https://www.2727.today/\">2727 Gallery\u003c/a> (2727 California St., Berkeley). $10 donation suggested. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>“Gaza is nothing without the beach. It’s the only escape for the people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s a line from a Palestinian surfer in \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdHF9AOZeGw\">\u003ci>Gaza Surf Club\u003c/i>\u003c/a>, a 2016 film which documents an intergenerational and mixed-gender group of surfers in Gaza. On Friday, Nov. 17, the documentary screens in San Francisco and Berkeley as part of a grassroots effort to raise relief funds for families impacted by the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The death toll from Israeli air strikes in Gaza surpassed 11,000 late last week, according to Gaza’s ministry of health. While the Israeli government has said its air strikes are a necessary response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas that took around 240 people hostage and killed approximately 1,200 in Israel, a human rights expert from the U.N. has said the Israeli military’s current bombardment could soon amount to “\u003ca href=\"https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls\">ethnic cleansing\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is about amplifying Palestinian voices, which aren’t very accessible right now,” says Yasmine El-Hage, a Bay Area surfer of Lebanese, Peruvian and Iranian descent who is co-organizing the San Francisco event. “Lives in the Middle East and for people of color worldwide aren’t valued equally in our discourse. We see the numbers [of deaths] rising to 11,000, but we need to be reminded that these are people with dreams, just like us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For El-Hage and her community of waveriders, that means cultivating a space for connection and discourse centered on a universal human need: access to water. El-Hage — who has volunteered her time as a member of an oil spill emergency response team, and who is active in advocating for clean water rights in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point community — has previously worked in refugee camps amid various crises. For her, surfing is an escape and a reflection of the human condition, regardless of where you stand on a map.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[Surfing is] a taste of freedom for all of us, no matter what you’re doing, whatever is going on, you just go out into the ocean and it’s incredibly peaceful,” El-Hage says. “So many of us understand that feeling deeply.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The screening marks a collaboration between El-Hage and other surfers and community advocates: Drew Madsen of the \u003ca href=\"https://bwtf.surfrider.org/\">Blue Water Task Force\u003c/a> and Golden Gate Longboard Collective; Leenah, a surfer who is organizing a Surf Power Hour in solidarity with Palestinians in the Peninsula; and Marie Salem, a California community organizer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The organizers welcome those in the Bay Area who care about the conflict in Gaza but haven’t been quite sure how to get involved. In addition to the screening, a friend of El-Hage, who grew up in Gaza and currently has family there, will speak about their experiences in a Q&A after the film. And the Bay Area’s own \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13928345/mishmish-vegan-palestinian-pop-up\">vegan Palestinian pop-up, Mishmish\u003c/a>, will be on hand to serve diasporic plates throughout the night.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13928355\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1366px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13928355\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1366\" height=\"2048\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large.jpeg 1366w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-800x1199.jpeg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-1020x1529.jpeg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-160x240.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-768x1151.jpeg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/5HOA9KqO.jpg-large-1025x1536.jpeg 1025w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1366px) 100vw, 1366px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bazella, a carrot and green pea stew, served at Mishmish. \u003ccite>(Alan Chazaro)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The screening will be hosted at a private location with a suggestion donation of $10, and the option to lend additional aid to the \u003ca href=\"https://www.palestinercs.org/en\">Palestine Red Crescent Society\u003c/a>, a member of the International Red Cross. In order to attend, audience members must show proof of having reached out to their representatives \u003ca href=\"https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/call-congress-support-ceasefire/\">calling for a ceasefire\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Coincidentally, the East Bay surf club \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/queersurf/?hl=en\">Queer Surf\u003c/a>, in conjunction with Cinema Iran, will screen the film in Berkeley that same night. El-Hage says the events weren’t coordinated, but are a reflection of a “collective consciousness in this heavy moment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>El-Hage, who is in the process of applying to medical school, notes that 2.2 million people in Gaza currently don’t have access to food, water, fuel, electricity, medicine and other basic needs. “Why are we calling for a ceasefire? People are lacking basic services and are under siege,” she says. “\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians\">40% of them are under the age of 14\u003c/a>. That’s a crucial humanitarian issue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>El-Hage continues: “Here in the Bay Area, we love surfing. We love the ocean. We can all approach this with that love and learn about a group of amazing people who just happen to speak another language, and that can lead to taking more action.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://gazasurfclub.com/\">‘Gaza Surf Club’\u003c/a> screens in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. For more details, \u003ca href=\"mailto:sfsurfingpals@gmail.com\">email the organizers\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/queersurf/?hl=en\">Queer Surf\u003c/a> will screen the film Friday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. at \u003ca href=\"https://www.2727.today/\">2727 Gallery\u003c/a> (2727 California St., Berkeley). $10 donation suggested. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Nicolas Cage Finds Fame to Be Overrated in Chillingly Funny ‘Dream Scenario’",
"headTitle": "Nicolas Cage Finds Fame to Be Overrated in Chillingly Funny ‘Dream Scenario’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Quick: What’s a good adjective for Nicolas Cage’s screen presence? Mercurial, perhaps? Volcanic? Volatile?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How about mundane, schlubby, average? Not the page we’d think to turn to in our Roget’s Thesaurus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937140']Yet here Cage is, channeling his inner drabness to chillingly comic effect in Kristoffer Borgli’s \u003cem>Dream Scenario\u003c/em>. As Paul Matthews (heck, even the name is drab), a college professor at nowhere famous, he performs his job with perfect mediocrity, and seems a fairly mediocre husband and dad, too. With his graying beard, wire-rimmed specs and shiny bald spot, Cage’s Paul is the guy in the room you ignore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Until, suddenly, you can’t. Because something weird starts happening. Paul starts appearing in people’s dreams. Everyone’s dreams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The premise is delicious — and precarious. It recalled for me the setup in a very different movie, \u003cem>Yesterday\u003c/em>, where only one guy on Earth remembers the Beatles. It makes for a fantastic beginning, but you immediately worry how they’ll manage to keep it going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director making his English-language debut here (Ari Aster co-produces), is aiming for a broader statement about the nature of fame. And while the topic, which he’s broached before, may not be original, it’s ripe for exploration in the right hands — especially with an actor as inventive and unpredictable as Cage. Fame can be intoxicating, this film is saying, but it can and probably will turn on you in an instant, unless you’re Taylor Swift (OK, we added that last part).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We begin on an autumn day by a suburban swimming pool, where Paul is raking leaves near his teen daughter. Scary things start dropping from the heavens, and suddenly the girl is grabbed by an unknown force and lifted, screaming, into the sky. Dad? He does nothing to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only the girl’s dream. But then there are more. Paul and his patient wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson, reliably excellent) run into someone at the theater, and she too has dreamed about Paul. At a dinner party, several guests discover to their shock that they’ve been dreaming about the same person. Yep, Paul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3x9iUL-74w\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s happening? On campus, Paul’s students, who mostly chat among themselves during his unremarkable lectures on evolutionary biology, start listening — they’re dreaming about him, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many of these dreams, Paul stands by, inexplicably, as others experience peril — slithering alligators, for example. But in real life, for once, Paul has the floor — a man who until now seethed with frustration over his unrealized ambitions as others succeeded. Now, everyone is interested in him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937708']Borgli never stops to analyze the science of this bizarre development, and frankly, Paul doesn’t either. He takes a meeting with a snarky group of branding experts (led by Michael Cera, perfectly cast) who want to market him up the wazoo. They can get him a Sprite commercial! Well, Paul doesn’t want that — he just wants a book deal for his biology research. But his ears perk up at the idea of an endorsement from Barack Obama. (“I know Malia,” one of these young professionals says.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One young woman even lets on to Paul that in her dreams, the two have great sex. This is too stunning for the schlubby Paul to ignore, especially when she invites him home to recreate the dream. Needless to say, it doesn’t go as well in real life. In fact, the dénoument is utterly, agonizingly humiliating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then, everyone’s dreams change. Suddenly Paul is the one causing harm. His students, terrified, don’t want to see him anymore. He gets sent home from a dinner with friends. He can’t even sit in a coffee shop and read a book without a fellow diner spitting on his food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the branding consultants, well, they inform Paul that Obama is off the table — but hey, they could get him time with Joe Rogan or maybe Tucker Carlson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937880\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1834px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937880\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1834\" height=\"1102\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM.png 1834w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-800x481.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-1020x613.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-160x96.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-768x461.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-1536x923.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1834px) 100vw, 1834px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dylan Gelula, Michael Cera and Kate Berlant in ‘Dream Scenario.’ \u003ccite>(A24 via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937525']We won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just make the obvious point that Borgli is not making a rom-com — is there a word for “horror-com”? We walk away from this funny, sad, scary film acutely reminded that if fame has two sides, one of them is pretty darned horrible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And perhaps, as you walk home from the multiplex this time, you might even revel in the fact that nobody’s paying attention. Obscurity can be underrated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Dream Scenario’ is released nationwide on Nov. 10.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Quick: What’s a good adjective for Nicolas Cage’s screen presence? Mercurial, perhaps? Volcanic? Volatile?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How about mundane, schlubby, average? Not the page we’d think to turn to in our Roget’s Thesaurus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Yet here Cage is, channeling his inner drabness to chillingly comic effect in Kristoffer Borgli’s \u003cem>Dream Scenario\u003c/em>. As Paul Matthews (heck, even the name is drab), a college professor at nowhere famous, he performs his job with perfect mediocrity, and seems a fairly mediocre husband and dad, too. With his graying beard, wire-rimmed specs and shiny bald spot, Cage’s Paul is the guy in the room you ignore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Until, suddenly, you can’t. Because something weird starts happening. Paul starts appearing in people’s dreams. Everyone’s dreams.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The premise is delicious — and precarious. It recalled for me the setup in a very different movie, \u003cem>Yesterday\u003c/em>, where only one guy on Earth remembers the Beatles. It makes for a fantastic beginning, but you immediately worry how they’ll manage to keep it going.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Borgli, the Norwegian writer-director making his English-language debut here (Ari Aster co-produces), is aiming for a broader statement about the nature of fame. And while the topic, which he’s broached before, may not be original, it’s ripe for exploration in the right hands — especially with an actor as inventive and unpredictable as Cage. Fame can be intoxicating, this film is saying, but it can and probably will turn on you in an instant, unless you’re Taylor Swift (OK, we added that last part).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We begin on an autumn day by a suburban swimming pool, where Paul is raking leaves near his teen daughter. Scary things start dropping from the heavens, and suddenly the girl is grabbed by an unknown force and lifted, screaming, into the sky. Dad? He does nothing to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only the girl’s dream. But then there are more. Paul and his patient wife, Janet (Julianne Nicholson, reliably excellent) run into someone at the theater, and she too has dreamed about Paul. At a dinner party, several guests discover to their shock that they’ve been dreaming about the same person. Yep, Paul.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/q3x9iUL-74w'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/q3x9iUL-74w'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>What’s happening? On campus, Paul’s students, who mostly chat among themselves during his unremarkable lectures on evolutionary biology, start listening — they’re dreaming about him, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many of these dreams, Paul stands by, inexplicably, as others experience peril — slithering alligators, for example. But in real life, for once, Paul has the floor — a man who until now seethed with frustration over his unrealized ambitions as others succeeded. Now, everyone is interested in him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Borgli never stops to analyze the science of this bizarre development, and frankly, Paul doesn’t either. He takes a meeting with a snarky group of branding experts (led by Michael Cera, perfectly cast) who want to market him up the wazoo. They can get him a Sprite commercial! Well, Paul doesn’t want that — he just wants a book deal for his biology research. But his ears perk up at the idea of an endorsement from Barack Obama. (“I know Malia,” one of these young professionals says.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One young woman even lets on to Paul that in her dreams, the two have great sex. This is too stunning for the schlubby Paul to ignore, especially when she invites him home to recreate the dream. Needless to say, it doesn’t go as well in real life. In fact, the dénoument is utterly, agonizingly humiliating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then, everyone’s dreams change. Suddenly Paul is the one causing harm. His students, terrified, don’t want to see him anymore. He gets sent home from a dinner with friends. He can’t even sit in a coffee shop and read a book without a fellow diner spitting on his food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the branding consultants, well, they inform Paul that Obama is off the table — but hey, they could get him time with Joe Rogan or maybe Tucker Carlson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937880\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1834px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937880\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"1834\" height=\"1102\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM.png 1834w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-800x481.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-1020x613.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-160x96.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-768x461.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-09-at-11.07.05-AM-1536x923.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1834px) 100vw, 1834px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dylan Gelula, Michael Cera and Kate Berlant in ‘Dream Scenario.’ \u003ccite>(A24 via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>We won’t spoil the ending, but let’s just make the obvious point that Borgli is not making a rom-com — is there a word for “horror-com”? We walk away from this funny, sad, scary film acutely reminded that if fame has two sides, one of them is pretty darned horrible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And perhaps, as you walk home from the multiplex this time, you might even revel in the fact that nobody’s paying attention. Obscurity can be underrated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘Dream Scenario’ is released nationwide on Nov. 10.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Barbra Streisand's Memoir Shows She Wasn't Born a Leading Lady — She Made Herself One",
"headTitle": "Barbra Streisand’s Memoir Shows She Wasn’t Born a Leading Lady — She Made Herself One | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The season of the celebrity memoir is upon us. In just the past few months \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13936729/britney-spears-book-autobiography-the-woman-in-me-gallery-books\">Britney Spears\u003c/a>, Jada Pinkett Smith, Kerry Washington, and more have showered us with bombshells and revelations about their origin stories and private lives. Despite those heavy hitters and the crowded field they occupy, the celebrity memoir I’ve coveted most is that of the singular Ms. Barbra Streisand. Thanks to the opportunity to speak with her for this week’s edition of \u003cem>It’s Been A Minute\u003c/em>, I was able to get my hands on a copy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For me, the iconography of Streisand begins with her nails. More than the deeply parted bouffant of Streisand’s early stardom, or the sleek bob she adopted in the ’90s, or even the smoky chevrons of her signature cat eye, her elegant talons — all natural, by the way — are visual proof of Streisand’s trademark steadfastness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the old story goes, when Streisand was a fledgling actor, her mother suggested she take typing classes to become a secretary in the New York school system. Streisand grew out her nails in refusal, went all in on show business, and the rest is history — though Streisand now concedes that the ability to type might have made book writing a bit easier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937733 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/mynameisbarbra_custom-29d0cf4fa23d7c15d82e2915d82cb3dfe1267e51.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"303\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/mynameisbarbra_custom-29d0cf4fa23d7c15d82e2915d82cb3dfe1267e51.jpg 200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/mynameisbarbra_custom-29d0cf4fa23d7c15d82e2915d82cb3dfe1267e51-160x242.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\">Streisand’s memoir, \u003cem>My Name Is Barbra\u003c/em>, is nearly 1,000 pages of such gumption, her rhythmic Brooklyn cadence communicated via countless ellipses and more than a few pleasant divergences on her favorite kind of egg roll or a particularly good antique shopping trip. There was the time Streisand jumped in to offer a blocking cue to Robert Redford on the set of \u003cem>The Way We Were\u003c/em>. And of \u003cem>course\u003c/em> she informed the director of the best way to block herself for her Broadway debut at the tender age of 20.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, when everyone from her agent to dozens of producers suggested \u003cem>Yentl\u003c/em> was “too Jewish” to connect with mainstream audiences, she pressed on, eventually garnering five Academy Award nominations and one win for the film. The film took over 15 years to make, but ultimately Streisand’s resolve won out. “I became what I wanted to be … I don’t want somebody telling me what I can’t be,” she told me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937207']Across the book’s 59 chapters and many decades, Streisand is careful to uplift the names of those who encouraged, impressed, or even challenged her. Her detractors tend to be aired out or paid dust. She recounts her life as a series of odysseys, and she the ever triumphant victor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Frankly, she’s earned it. Her resumé is living legend: more than 50 albums, a box office titan, and a whole EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony for those unfamiliar). She was told to alter her features and change her name, and by not doing so, she redefined Hollywood notions of beauty and relatability. But even I’ve known the diva reputation that has followed her for decades and wanted to go there. “Divas, I don’t think, come from Brooklyn,” Streisand quipped to me, and yet the rumors persist. Sexism and misogyny are to blame, but there’s also a fundamental misread of Streisand’s artistry at play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937736\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1808px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937736\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM.png\" alt=\"A young woman, casually dressed, talks on a landline telephone in a dressing room, a table scattered with make-up in front of her.\" width=\"1808\" height=\"1210\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM.png 1808w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-800x535.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-1020x683.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-768x514.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-1536x1028.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1808px) 100vw, 1808px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Barbra Streisand in her dressing room in October 1965. \u003ccite>(Harry Benson/ Daily Express/ Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Our culture loves to see and persistently pause Streisand as Babs, the consummate prima donna, our forever leading lady. But in doing so, audiences, critics and biographers have failed to acknowledge the shrewd image-maker she has always been — the architect of her persona and performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13936614']In 1984, Streisand became the first woman to win the Golden Globe for Best Director for her work on \u003cem>Yentl\u003c/em>, and still remains one of only three female winners in history. In 1996, her direction on \u003cem>The Mirror Has Two Faces\u003c/em> led Lauren Bacall to the first Academy Award nomination in Bacall’s then five-decade career. By the time all American women had won the right to open a credit card without a husband, Streisand had already founded two production companies. When I asked Streisand about her legacy as a trailblazing businesswoman, she insisted that her goal wasn’t to become a mogul, but simply to serve her ultimate artistic vision. “I just never thought about, really, the business aspect. I just thought about it from the control aspect,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And still, even as a devoted fan, I don’t think I grasped the depth of Streisand’s mastery until I saw a video of her that recently made the rounds on social media. It’s a behind-the-scenes clip of an explosive scene from \u003cem>Yentl\u003c/em>. Streisand is in a pixie-length wig topped with a yarmulke, seamlessly shifting gears between directing a screaming Mandy Patinkin, instructing the camera operator, and playing a key emotional moment in character. We don’t see a diva, we see a genius.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0MngamiROs\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Streisand’s legacy still scatters like a constellation across our cultural landscape; Jane Campion’s Oscar win, Lady Gaga’s screen goddess turn, Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment. But artistic powerhouses like them, like Barbra, don’t spring forth, fully formed. They’re sharpened over years, one overnight shoot, one “let’s take that again from the top,” and one lengthy fingernail at a time. And in a society that tends to value women’s passivity while lauding their accomplishments in hindsight, it’s a distinct pleasure to look back with \u003cem>My Name Is Barbra\u003c/em> and marvel at how the real she came to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Barbra+Streisand%27s+memoir+shows+she+wasn%27t+born+a+leading+lady+%E2%80%94+she+made+herself+one&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The season of the celebrity memoir is upon us. In just the past few months \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13936729/britney-spears-book-autobiography-the-woman-in-me-gallery-books\">Britney Spears\u003c/a>, Jada Pinkett Smith, Kerry Washington, and more have showered us with bombshells and revelations about their origin stories and private lives. Despite those heavy hitters and the crowded field they occupy, the celebrity memoir I’ve coveted most is that of the singular Ms. Barbra Streisand. Thanks to the opportunity to speak with her for this week’s edition of \u003cem>It’s Been A Minute\u003c/em>, I was able to get my hands on a copy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For me, the iconography of Streisand begins with her nails. More than the deeply parted bouffant of Streisand’s early stardom, or the sleek bob she adopted in the ’90s, or even the smoky chevrons of her signature cat eye, her elegant talons — all natural, by the way — are visual proof of Streisand’s trademark steadfastness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the old story goes, when Streisand was a fledgling actor, her mother suggested she take typing classes to become a secretary in the New York school system. Streisand grew out her nails in refusal, went all in on show business, and the rest is history — though Streisand now concedes that the ability to type might have made book writing a bit easier.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937733 alignright\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/mynameisbarbra_custom-29d0cf4fa23d7c15d82e2915d82cb3dfe1267e51.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"303\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/mynameisbarbra_custom-29d0cf4fa23d7c15d82e2915d82cb3dfe1267e51.jpg 200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/mynameisbarbra_custom-29d0cf4fa23d7c15d82e2915d82cb3dfe1267e51-160x242.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\">Streisand’s memoir, \u003cem>My Name Is Barbra\u003c/em>, is nearly 1,000 pages of such gumption, her rhythmic Brooklyn cadence communicated via countless ellipses and more than a few pleasant divergences on her favorite kind of egg roll or a particularly good antique shopping trip. There was the time Streisand jumped in to offer a blocking cue to Robert Redford on the set of \u003cem>The Way We Were\u003c/em>. And of \u003cem>course\u003c/em> she informed the director of the best way to block herself for her Broadway debut at the tender age of 20.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Years later, when everyone from her agent to dozens of producers suggested \u003cem>Yentl\u003c/em> was “too Jewish” to connect with mainstream audiences, she pressed on, eventually garnering five Academy Award nominations and one win for the film. The film took over 15 years to make, but ultimately Streisand’s resolve won out. “I became what I wanted to be … I don’t want somebody telling me what I can’t be,” she told me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Across the book’s 59 chapters and many decades, Streisand is careful to uplift the names of those who encouraged, impressed, or even challenged her. Her detractors tend to be aired out or paid dust. She recounts her life as a series of odysseys, and she the ever triumphant victor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Frankly, she’s earned it. Her resumé is living legend: more than 50 albums, a box office titan, and a whole EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony for those unfamiliar). She was told to alter her features and change her name, and by not doing so, she redefined Hollywood notions of beauty and relatability. But even I’ve known the diva reputation that has followed her for decades and wanted to go there. “Divas, I don’t think, come from Brooklyn,” Streisand quipped to me, and yet the rumors persist. Sexism and misogyny are to blame, but there’s also a fundamental misread of Streisand’s artistry at play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937736\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1808px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937736\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM.png\" alt=\"A young woman, casually dressed, talks on a landline telephone in a dressing room, a table scattered with make-up in front of her.\" width=\"1808\" height=\"1210\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM.png 1808w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-800x535.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-1020x683.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-160x107.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-768x514.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-07-at-12.20.32-PM-1536x1028.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1808px) 100vw, 1808px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Barbra Streisand in her dressing room in October 1965. \u003ccite>(Harry Benson/ Daily Express/ Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Our culture loves to see and persistently pause Streisand as Babs, the consummate prima donna, our forever leading lady. But in doing so, audiences, critics and biographers have failed to acknowledge the shrewd image-maker she has always been — the architect of her persona and performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In 1984, Streisand became the first woman to win the Golden Globe for Best Director for her work on \u003cem>Yentl\u003c/em>, and still remains one of only three female winners in history. In 1996, her direction on \u003cem>The Mirror Has Two Faces\u003c/em> led Lauren Bacall to the first Academy Award nomination in Bacall’s then five-decade career. By the time all American women had won the right to open a credit card without a husband, Streisand had already founded two production companies. When I asked Streisand about her legacy as a trailblazing businesswoman, she insisted that her goal wasn’t to become a mogul, but simply to serve her ultimate artistic vision. “I just never thought about, really, the business aspect. I just thought about it from the control aspect,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And still, even as a devoted fan, I don’t think I grasped the depth of Streisand’s mastery until I saw a video of her that recently made the rounds on social media. It’s a behind-the-scenes clip of an explosive scene from \u003cem>Yentl\u003c/em>. Streisand is in a pixie-length wig topped with a yarmulke, seamlessly shifting gears between directing a screaming Mandy Patinkin, instructing the camera operator, and playing a key emotional moment in character. We don’t see a diva, we see a genius.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/d0MngamiROs'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/d0MngamiROs'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Streisand’s legacy still scatters like a constellation across our cultural landscape; Jane Campion’s Oscar win, Lady Gaga’s screen goddess turn, Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment. But artistic powerhouses like them, like Barbra, don’t spring forth, fully formed. They’re sharpened over years, one overnight shoot, one “let’s take that again from the top,” and one lengthy fingernail at a time. And in a society that tends to value women’s passivity while lauding their accomplishments in hindsight, it’s a distinct pleasure to look back with \u003cem>My Name Is Barbra\u003c/em> and marvel at how the real she came to be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Barbra+Streisand%27s+memoir+shows+she+wasn%27t+born+a+leading+lady+%E2%80%94+she+made+herself+one&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Let’s get this out of the way: \u003cem>Donna and Ally\u003c/em> is not a polished movie. Hell, it’s not even a movie that always entirely makes sense. But it is a movie that — over the course of 83 minutes — will win you over with heart and humor. Most importantly, it has two lead characters with whom you might just fall head-over-heels in love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13832451']Set in Oakland, the story is about Ally (played by rapper \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13845940/after-a-high-speed-police-chase-a-female-rapper-endures-raps-double-standard\">Qing Qi\u003c/a>) and Donna (Cousin Shy, who also wrote and executive produced the movie) who’ve been best friends since the teen years they spent in a group home together. Since running away from the home at 16 years old, the duo has been hustling to survive and dreaming of a day when they wouldn’t just be scraping by anymore. A major hindrance to their success: Donna’s temper. When facing any kind of criticism or threat, Donna launches herself at the problem with both fists first, and leaves it to Ally to worry about the consequences later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After losing their jobs at a local strip club, Donna and Ally must get extra creative to make rent. When a guy Donna punched at the club tracks her down and asks for more of the same, the duo set up a dominatrix dungeon in their studio apartment. It’s there that Donna finally figures out how to turn her inner rage into cold, hard cash — whipping, beating and humiliating people who actually enjoy it — and Ally turns into the boss she always knew she could be.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPfD7y0vuH0\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Often absurd, and awash with winks and nods to the audience, \u003cem>Donna and Ally\u003c/em> is held together by the realistic and endearing friendship at its center. Shy and Qi both shine in their roles, even when faced with some decidedly clunky acting from a couple of the side characters. Both women also have a delightful knack for delivering dry humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shy is radiant and memorable on screen, but it’s Qi’s consistently unselfconscious performance that ultimately steals the show. (The sight of her lying spreadeagled on a giant inflatable swan inside a tiny inflatable pool belongs on a line of T-shirts.) Qi’s music also offers the perfect soundtrack to this story, with “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGc-GzV1NK4\">IDWIW\u003c/a>” an outstanding anthem for these rebellious entrepreneurs. (The twosome’s ridiculous dance routine to “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GMMKS125kA\">Talking on the Phone Is Cancerous\u003c/a>” is also a high point.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937068']When the credits roll, \u003cem>Donna and Ally\u003c/em> isn’t quite the “Oakland Cinderella Story” it proclaims to be. Not because there isn’t true love at the center of it — there’s plenty of that — but because the love doesn’t come from some fantasy prince. Rather, at its core, this is a tale about women supporting other women and the enduring value of female friendships. By the end of it, you’ll wish Donna and Ally, messy as they are, were your best friends too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.donnaandally.com/\">Donna and Ally\u003c/a>’ premieres at Oakland’s New Parkway Theater (474 24th St.) on Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. \u003ca href=\"https://www.donnaandally.com/premiere-ticket/p/red-carpet-premiere\">Tickets here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Let’s get this out of the way: \u003cem>Donna and Ally\u003c/em> is not a polished movie. Hell, it’s not even a movie that always entirely makes sense. But it is a movie that — over the course of 83 minutes — will win you over with heart and humor. Most importantly, it has two lead characters with whom you might just fall head-over-heels in love.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Set in Oakland, the story is about Ally (played by rapper \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13845940/after-a-high-speed-police-chase-a-female-rapper-endures-raps-double-standard\">Qing Qi\u003c/a>) and Donna (Cousin Shy, who also wrote and executive produced the movie) who’ve been best friends since the teen years they spent in a group home together. Since running away from the home at 16 years old, the duo has been hustling to survive and dreaming of a day when they wouldn’t just be scraping by anymore. A major hindrance to their success: Donna’s temper. When facing any kind of criticism or threat, Donna launches herself at the problem with both fists first, and leaves it to Ally to worry about the consequences later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After losing their jobs at a local strip club, Donna and Ally must get extra creative to make rent. When a guy Donna punched at the club tracks her down and asks for more of the same, the duo set up a dominatrix dungeon in their studio apartment. It’s there that Donna finally figures out how to turn her inner rage into cold, hard cash — whipping, beating and humiliating people who actually enjoy it — and Ally turns into the boss she always knew she could be.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/YPfD7y0vuH0'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/YPfD7y0vuH0'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Often absurd, and awash with winks and nods to the audience, \u003cem>Donna and Ally\u003c/em> is held together by the realistic and endearing friendship at its center. Shy and Qi both shine in their roles, even when faced with some decidedly clunky acting from a couple of the side characters. Both women also have a delightful knack for delivering dry humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>When the credits roll, \u003cem>Donna and Ally\u003c/em> isn’t quite the “Oakland Cinderella Story” it proclaims to be. Not because there isn’t true love at the center of it — there’s plenty of that — but because the love doesn’t come from some fantasy prince. Rather, at its core, this is a tale about women supporting other women and the enduring value of female friendships. By the end of it, you’ll wish Donna and Ally, messy as they are, were your best friends too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.donnaandally.com/\">Donna and Ally\u003c/a>’ premieres at Oakland’s New Parkway Theater (474 24th St.) on Nov. 11 at 7 p.m. \u003ca href=\"https://www.donnaandally.com/premiere-ticket/p/red-carpet-premiere\">Tickets here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "In David Fincher’s ‘The Killer,’ an Assassin Hides in Plain Sight",
"headTitle": "In David Fincher’s ‘The Killer,’ an Assassin Hides in Plain Sight | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>It’s a noir staple to open with a bit of narration, but once the nameless hit-man protagonist of David Fincher’s \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> starts gabbing, he doesn’t stop.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_34570']As Fincher’s assassin (Michael Fassbender) awaits his target from a high, unfinished floor in a Paris building that looks out on the home of his mark, his inner monologue runs with a smooth, affectless monotone. His musings are a mix of professional tips (“Anticipate, don’t improvise”), nihilistic existential observations (“Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void”) and sincere self-reflections (“I’m not exceptional, I’m just apart”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That last line is the most telling one. \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> is a terse, minimalist thriller in the cool, cold-hearted tradition of Jean Pierre Melville’s \u003cem>Le Samouraï\u003c/em>. But while its methodical and solitary assassin acts and moves like cunning killers we’ve seen before, he blends into a modern background. He doesn’t wear a trench coat or fedora; he dresses like a German tourist, with a dopey bucket hat. He shops for tools on Amazon. He picks up supplies at Home Depot. His position in Paris is an unused WeWork space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs1epO_zLG8\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, an agent of death is hiding in plain sight. He’s an assassin for our homogeneous, corporate world operating in the same spaces we all do. He eats McDonalds. He drives a white Avis rental van that’s the exact same as a dozen others in the rental car parking lot. Sameness is his superpower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That also means that his nihilism is ours, too. \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, is a thriller where pointlessness isn’t just lurking in the shadows. It’s everywhere, even in a movie plot that grows increasingly resistant to offering the usual genre satisfactions. Fassbender’s hitman, a background actor supreme, is a lethal manifestation of our soulless environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937525']In that opening scene, he boasts of having a batting average (1.000, he brags) ‘better than Ted Williams.’ Yet the job goes badly. In the ensuing turmoil, he races to erase his footsteps but not before a dissatisfied client has his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) nearly beaten to death at their clandestine Dominican Republic home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He embarks on a location-hopping mission to eliminate those responsible, an odd twist for an assassin who, at length, preaches disaffection. Much doesn’t quite fit in \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>. That he even has a live-in girlfriend — we barely see her and his thoughts never again turn back to her — seems unlikely. A revenge plot also doesn’t quite suit such a dispassionate protagonist. “Forbid empathy,” he says. And the movie, too, can be withholding of anything like emotion. The most distinct thing about Fassbender’s killer is that, like Patrick Bateman bopped to Huey Lewis and the News, he listens exclusively to the Smiths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s much pleasure to be found in the unnamed hit man’s proficiency, just as there is in Fincher’s cool finesse. Here, the director — long known for his own meticulous rigor — is working with some regular collaborators, among them screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (\u003cem>Se7en\u003c/em>), composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (\u003cem>The Social Network\u003c/em>) and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (\u003cem>Mank\u003c/em>). And there’s a kinetic thrill to seeing Fincher back in B-movie territory. (The script is based on a French graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Especially good is a nighttime sequence set in Florida that begins and ends with a bloodthirsty dog and in between features violent hand-to-hand combat that careens through glass and walls. The scene, like several others in \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, is a filmmaking feat of control. Fassbender, a natural at playing a loner (see \u003cem>Shame\u003c/em>), is captivating throughout because he so possesses the movie’s chief traits of guile and a deadpan sense of humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937499']Everything here is tantalizingly close to calculated perfection that it comes almost as a surprise how \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> ends up missing its mark. You could call it a feature of the film’s existentialism, but \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> increasingly is working, albeit proficiently, in a vacuum. Our hitman travels from place to place — always with fake passports with the names of TV characters like Felix Unger, Lou Grant or Sam Malone — but we don’t get anywhere deeper with him or anything else. Meaningless may be the point in \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, but at a certain point in this stylishly composed but empty vessel, you feel like pleading as another Fincher protagonist once did: What’s in the box?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘The Killer’ begins streaming on Netflix on Nov. 10.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>As Fincher’s assassin (Michael Fassbender) awaits his target from a high, unfinished floor in a Paris building that looks out on the home of his mark, his inner monologue runs with a smooth, affectless monotone. His musings are a mix of professional tips (“Anticipate, don’t improvise”), nihilistic existential observations (“Most people refuse to believe that the great beyond is anything more than a cold, infinite void”) and sincere self-reflections (“I’m not exceptional, I’m just apart”).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That last line is the most telling one. \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> is a terse, minimalist thriller in the cool, cold-hearted tradition of Jean Pierre Melville’s \u003cem>Le Samouraï\u003c/em>. But while its methodical and solitary assassin acts and moves like cunning killers we’ve seen before, he blends into a modern background. He doesn’t wear a trench coat or fedora; he dresses like a German tourist, with a dopey bucket hat. He shops for tools on Amazon. He picks up supplies at Home Depot. His position in Paris is an unused WeWork space.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/vs1epO_zLG8'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/vs1epO_zLG8'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>In \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, an agent of death is hiding in plain sight. He’s an assassin for our homogeneous, corporate world operating in the same spaces we all do. He eats McDonalds. He drives a white Avis rental van that’s the exact same as a dozen others in the rental car parking lot. Sameness is his superpower.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That also means that his nihilism is ours, too. \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, which begins streaming Friday on Netflix, is a thriller where pointlessness isn’t just lurking in the shadows. It’s everywhere, even in a movie plot that grows increasingly resistant to offering the usual genre satisfactions. Fassbender’s hitman, a background actor supreme, is a lethal manifestation of our soulless environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>In that opening scene, he boasts of having a batting average (1.000, he brags) ‘better than Ted Williams.’ Yet the job goes badly. In the ensuing turmoil, he races to erase his footsteps but not before a dissatisfied client has his girlfriend (Sophie Charlotte) nearly beaten to death at their clandestine Dominican Republic home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He embarks on a location-hopping mission to eliminate those responsible, an odd twist for an assassin who, at length, preaches disaffection. Much doesn’t quite fit in \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>. That he even has a live-in girlfriend — we barely see her and his thoughts never again turn back to her — seems unlikely. A revenge plot also doesn’t quite suit such a dispassionate protagonist. “Forbid empathy,” he says. And the movie, too, can be withholding of anything like emotion. The most distinct thing about Fassbender’s killer is that, like Patrick Bateman bopped to Huey Lewis and the News, he listens exclusively to the Smiths.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There’s much pleasure to be found in the unnamed hit man’s proficiency, just as there is in Fincher’s cool finesse. Here, the director — long known for his own meticulous rigor — is working with some regular collaborators, among them screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (\u003cem>Se7en\u003c/em>), composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (\u003cem>The Social Network\u003c/em>) and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (\u003cem>Mank\u003c/em>). And there’s a kinetic thrill to seeing Fincher back in B-movie territory. (The script is based on a French graphic novel by Alexis “Matz” Nolent.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Especially good is a nighttime sequence set in Florida that begins and ends with a bloodthirsty dog and in between features violent hand-to-hand combat that careens through glass and walls. The scene, like several others in \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, is a filmmaking feat of control. Fassbender, a natural at playing a loner (see \u003cem>Shame\u003c/em>), is captivating throughout because he so possesses the movie’s chief traits of guile and a deadpan sense of humor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Everything here is tantalizingly close to calculated perfection that it comes almost as a surprise how \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> ends up missing its mark. You could call it a feature of the film’s existentialism, but \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em> increasingly is working, albeit proficiently, in a vacuum. Our hitman travels from place to place — always with fake passports with the names of TV characters like Felix Unger, Lou Grant or Sam Malone — but we don’t get anywhere deeper with him or anything else. Meaningless may be the point in \u003cem>The Killer\u003c/em>, but at a certain point in this stylishly composed but empty vessel, you feel like pleading as another Fincher protagonist once did: What’s in the box?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘The Killer’ begins streaming on Netflix on Nov. 10.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘The Mission’ Struggles to Find Its Own Reason for Being",
"headTitle": "‘The Mission’ Struggles to Find Its Own Reason for Being | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>One of the earliest shots in the documentary \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://sffilm.org/event/the-mission/\">The Mission\u003c/a>\u003c/em> hangs from a distance on North Sentinel Island, a remote speck of Indian jungle located along the southeast edge of the Bay of Bengal. Thick, gray clouds clog the sky overhead. Trees, nearly black in the gloom, crowd so close to the water that you can hardly make out a sliver of sandy shore. The island is far away, and it is alone. Its inhabitants, we will soon learn, intend to keep it that way. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Seeing the island at such a remove engenders a complicated yearning — \u003cem>why can’t we just push a little bit closer, see a little more clearly\u003c/em>, one wonders. But this complication is quickly smoothed over by suspenseful music thrumming underneath: This is adventure, not meditation, the soundtrack says. The incongruity concisely foreshadows the jumbled film to come, in which San Francisco filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss search for nuance in a sensational news event while struggling to resist its convenient thrills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Mission\u003c/em> retells the viral story of American missionary John Chau, who in November 2018 disappeared off the coast of North Sentinel Island while trying to convert the island’s Indigenous people to Christianity. The island is home to what may be the last uncontacted Indigenous group on Earth: a Stone Age people who have consistently refused interaction with the outside world by shooting — and several times killing — visitors with arrows. Chau, 26 at the time, eluded Indian naval ships charged with guarding the island by hitching a ride on a small wooden fishing boat. It is believed that after twice rebuffing his entreaties, tribesmen killed Chau and buried him on their shore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937530\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A man in a yellow kayak holds a pink fish above his head as people walk from beach into water\" width=\"2000\" height=\"832\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-800x333.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-1020x424.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-160x67.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-768x319.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-1536x639.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-1920x799.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An illustration of John showing gifts he brought as he approaches the Sentinelese. \u003ccite>(Courtesy National Geographic)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Chau’s death drew breathless media coverage from across the globe, and a logline for \u003cem>The Mission\u003c/em> reads that the documentary “uncovers the gripping story behind the headlines.” But it’s difficult to discern what in the film, if anything, needed uncovering. The movie contributes little information that wasn’t previously reported in \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/03/john-chau-christian-missionary-death-sentinelese\">newspaper features\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/john-allen-chau-life-death-north-sentinel/\">magazine narratives\u003c/a>, revolving loosely, instead, around widely reported entries from Chau’s journal and a publicly shared letter from his father, who declined to otherwise participate. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The resultant portrait is less vivid than what emerges in written narratives. McBain and Moss hire voice actors to read from Chau’s diary entries and his father’s letter, and play the readings over animated reenactments drawn in a hazy oil-paint style. The animation proves a creative solution to the filmmakers’ lack of access, but like all documentary reenactment, the performances wind up constrained by reality. Likewise, the written words are constrained by the actors’ specific dramatic choices. Where the diary entries take on a certain symbolic weight when presented unadorned on a written page, they become itchy and over-dramatized in the readings, leaving an impersonation of Chau rather than any sense of his true self. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937532\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Older man sits at table covered with books and gestures with open hand\" width=\"2000\" height=\"834\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937532\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-800x334.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-1020x425.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-160x67.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-768x320.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-1536x641.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-1920x801.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dan Everett, a professor of linguistics and a former missionary, has both a profound respect for John Chau and a disdain for his actions in ‘The Mission.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy National Geographic)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>McBain and Moss add to this source material a host of original interviews with anthropologists, historians and religious experts, as well as archival footage of Chau as a young boy. Ostensibly, the clips are meant to reflect the larger context in which Chau planned and executed his fatal journey, and thus bring him into sharper focus. The clips succeed in this endeavor, to an extent. Histories of the Christian mission movement, for example, give Chau’s conviction mooring and his hubris scale. More often, though, the supplementary materials introduce ideas and subjects that scream out for deeper attention, rendering Chau a distraction. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The truth is Chau has always been the least interesting character in his own story. It is hard to imagine that this documentary would have been made had Chau been killed by a less isolated Indigenous tribe. The intrigue lies instead with the Sentinelese, with their unknown language and their unknown culture. \u003cem>The Mission\u003c/em> shines most brightly when McBain and Moss probe the ethics of this fascination. It is our loss, as viewers, that they keep these ideas at a distance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘\u003ca href=\"https://sffilm.org/event/the-mission/\">The Mission\u003c/a>’ screens Nov. 3, 8 p.m. at Premier Theater (1 Letterman Dr. #B, San Francisco) as part of SFFILM’s \u003ca href=\"https://sffilm.org/2023-festival-program/\">Doc Stories festival\u003c/a>. It opens Nov. 10 at the Landmark Opera Plaza and the Smith Rafael Film Center.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A documentary about a missionary killed by an uncontacted tribe adds little to the coverage that followed his 2018 death.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>One of the earliest shots in the documentary \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://sffilm.org/event/the-mission/\">The Mission\u003c/a>\u003c/em> hangs from a distance on North Sentinel Island, a remote speck of Indian jungle located along the southeast edge of the Bay of Bengal. Thick, gray clouds clog the sky overhead. Trees, nearly black in the gloom, crowd so close to the water that you can hardly make out a sliver of sandy shore. The island is far away, and it is alone. Its inhabitants, we will soon learn, intend to keep it that way. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Seeing the island at such a remove engenders a complicated yearning — \u003cem>why can’t we just push a little bit closer, see a little more clearly\u003c/em>, one wonders. But this complication is quickly smoothed over by suspenseful music thrumming underneath: This is adventure, not meditation, the soundtrack says. The incongruity concisely foreshadows the jumbled film to come, in which San Francisco filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss search for nuance in a sensational news event while struggling to resist its convenient thrills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Mission\u003c/em> retells the viral story of American missionary John Chau, who in November 2018 disappeared off the coast of North Sentinel Island while trying to convert the island’s Indigenous people to Christianity. The island is home to what may be the last uncontacted Indigenous group on Earth: a Stone Age people who have consistently refused interaction with the outside world by shooting — and several times killing — visitors with arrows. Chau, 26 at the time, eluded Indian naval ships charged with guarding the island by hitching a ride on a small wooden fishing boat. It is believed that after twice rebuffing his entreaties, tribesmen killed Chau and buried him on their shore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937530\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A man in a yellow kayak holds a pink fish above his head as people walk from beach into water\" width=\"2000\" height=\"832\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-800x333.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-1020x424.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-160x67.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-768x319.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-1536x639.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_39_2000-1920x799.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An illustration of John showing gifts he brought as he approaches the Sentinelese. \u003ccite>(Courtesy National Geographic)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Chau’s death drew breathless media coverage from across the globe, and a logline for \u003cem>The Mission\u003c/em> reads that the documentary “uncovers the gripping story behind the headlines.” But it’s difficult to discern what in the film, if anything, needed uncovering. The movie contributes little information that wasn’t previously reported in \u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/03/john-chau-christian-missionary-death-sentinelese\">newspaper features\u003c/a> or \u003ca href=\"https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/john-allen-chau-life-death-north-sentinel/\">magazine narratives\u003c/a>, revolving loosely, instead, around widely reported entries from Chau’s journal and a publicly shared letter from his father, who declined to otherwise participate. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The resultant portrait is less vivid than what emerges in written narratives. McBain and Moss hire voice actors to read from Chau’s diary entries and his father’s letter, and play the readings over animated reenactments drawn in a hazy oil-paint style. The animation proves a creative solution to the filmmakers’ lack of access, but like all documentary reenactment, the performances wind up constrained by reality. Likewise, the written words are constrained by the actors’ specific dramatic choices. Where the diary entries take on a certain symbolic weight when presented unadorned on a written page, they become itchy and over-dramatized in the readings, leaving an impersonation of Chau rather than any sense of his true self. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937532\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Older man sits at table covered with books and gestures with open hand\" width=\"2000\" height=\"834\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937532\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-800x334.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-1020x425.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-160x67.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-768x320.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-1536x641.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/TheMission_UHD_21_2000-1920x801.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dan Everett, a professor of linguistics and a former missionary, has both a profound respect for John Chau and a disdain for his actions in ‘The Mission.’ \u003ccite>(Courtesy National Geographic)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>McBain and Moss add to this source material a host of original interviews with anthropologists, historians and religious experts, as well as archival footage of Chau as a young boy. Ostensibly, the clips are meant to reflect the larger context in which Chau planned and executed his fatal journey, and thus bring him into sharper focus. The clips succeed in this endeavor, to an extent. Histories of the Christian mission movement, for example, give Chau’s conviction mooring and his hubris scale. More often, though, the supplementary materials introduce ideas and subjects that scream out for deeper attention, rendering Chau a distraction. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The truth is Chau has always been the least interesting character in his own story. It is hard to imagine that this documentary would have been made had Chau been killed by a less isolated Indigenous tribe. The intrigue lies instead with the Sentinelese, with their unknown language and their unknown culture. \u003cem>The Mission\u003c/em> shines most brightly when McBain and Moss probe the ethics of this fascination. It is our loss, as viewers, that they keep these ideas at a distance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘\u003ca href=\"https://sffilm.org/event/the-mission/\">The Mission\u003c/a>’ screens Nov. 3, 8 p.m. at Premier Theater (1 Letterman Dr. #B, San Francisco) as part of SFFILM’s \u003ca href=\"https://sffilm.org/2023-festival-program/\">Doc Stories festival\u003c/a>. It opens Nov. 10 at the Landmark Opera Plaza and the Smith Rafael Film Center.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "‘Rustin’ Grabs the Spotlight in an Uplifting Civil Rights Chorus",
"headTitle": "‘Rustin’ Grabs the Spotlight in an Uplifting Civil Rights Chorus | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The great unsung virtue of historical documentaries such as \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/brotheroutsider/\">Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin\u003c/a>\u003c/em> (2003), which premiered at Sundance 20 years ago and aired nationally on PBS,\u003cbr>\nis rescuing and preserving forgotten legacies. Rustin, the civil rights activist who masterminded the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom but was pushed to the margins because of his homosexuality, belatedly received his close-up in East Bay filmmaker Nancy Kates’ bittersweet portrait.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biopics are most moviegoers’ preferred mode of visual history, though: epic yet intimate dramas with an emotional climax, driven by a larger-than-life performance by a charismatic star. This is not a recent development, of course — \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Muni\">Paul Muni\u003c/a> did successive turns as Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola and Benito Juárez in the late 1930s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not incidentally, biopics certify heroes. I can’t imagine that Kates, or anyone else in 2003, would have predicted that Hollywood would ever make a feature film about Bayard Rustin. (Certainly not one with a budget to cover a small fleet of 1960s NYC buses, taxis and automobiles.) So let us celebrate George C. Wolfe’s rousing \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em> (opening Nov. 3 in theaters and debuting Nov. 17 on \u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81111528\">Netflix\u003c/a>), which positions — or should I say mainstreams — Bayard Rustin as one of the boosters who rocketed the Civil Rights Movement to national influence. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937519\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A group of men march arm in arm with posters for civil rights and integration\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1331\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937519\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-800x532.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-1920x1278.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left: Michael Potts as Cleve Robinson, Aml Ameen as Martin Luther King Jr., Chris Rock as NAACP Exec. Dir. Roy Wilkins, Glynn Turman as A. Philip Randolph and Kevin Mambo as Whitney Young in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(David Lee/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Wolfe’s pitch, presumably, invoked the 60th anniversary of \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/articles/march-on-washington.htm\">the massive protest\u003c/a> on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that is best remembered today as Martin Luther King Jr.’s coming-out party. King (Ami Ameen) has a small role in \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em> — this is the activist’s show, after all, and it wouldn’t do for him to be upstaged, even by the event’s headliner — that paradoxically comprises the film’s weaker moments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The supporting cast is highlighted by Jeffrey Wright’s deliciously villainous rendition of the silver-tongued, self-serving congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Rustin’s prime antagonist, however, is cautious NAACP leader Roy Wilkins (a too-recognizable Chris Rock), perpetually concerned that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (via the media) will use Rustin’s gay identity to discredit the movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='arts_13909135']These powerful men play second fiddle to a sometimes manic, sometimes melancholy, always charming Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin. Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay gives Domingo a steady stream of galvanizing speeches and punchy one-liners that put us squarely onboard with Rustin’s hard-won wisdom and daring, seize-the-moment crusade. (The preview audience at the AMC Kabuki was moved to applause and cheers more than once.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937506\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A man crouches in front of seated people in a living room, gesturing and talking excitedly\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937506\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left: Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, Jakeem Dante Powell as Norm, Ayana Workman as Eleanor and Lilli Kay as Rachelle in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(David Lee/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The film’s structure is generally inspired by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland (“let’s put on a show”), with a bigger operation and higher stakes. The movie squeezes Rustin’s life into the eight or so weeks in which he enlisted and supervised a corps of volunteers to raise funds, enroll attendees and organize the logistics from buses to bag lunches to cleanup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cresting on the National Mall, \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em> is a triumphant film, a vindication and validation of Rustin’s personality and strategy. In the same moment, it wants us to take inspiration from the idealism of the Civil Rights Movement that nonviolence and mass participation can transform our society for the better. That’s a big lift in the current climate, admittedly, and the movie’s final slip into sentimentality feels like an admission that escapism is the flip side of activism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rustin encounters devastating setbacks, of course. At the outset of the film, King’s failure to back his mentor resulted in Rustin’s ouster from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Much later, Rustin is brutally beaten by a cop for refusing to sit in the rear of a Greyhound bus. (He is en route to forgive and make up with King, who he needs to convince to join the D.C. rally he’s planning.) \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937505\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Two Black men lean towards each other while seated at bar\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937505\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin and Johnny Ramey as Elias in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(David Lee/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>His gay relationships provide comfort and pleasure, but also frustration. The movie evokes through vignettes (police raids on gay bars, the risk of public exposure) the fraught, pre-Stonewall lives of gay people, as well as the 50-something Rustin’s difficulty in integrating his personal and public lives. But Wolfe is careful — too careful, I submit — about limiting the intimacy we are allowed to witness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Homosexuality is not the taboo in the Black community that it once was, but the film is far more comfortable talking about it than depicting it. Rustin shares one chaste kiss with his younger white lover, and has one evocative love scene with a married Black minister. Consequently, we don’t get a full measure of Rustin’s softness, vulnerability and need.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rustin recorded a couple albums of spirituals — he had a lovely singing voice — that Kates used to fine effect on the soundtrack of \u003cem>Brother Outsider\u003c/em>. \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em>, in contrast, includes a clumsy scene in which a character thrusts an instrument into the protagonist’s hands and impels him to play and sing a few bars. That moment encapsulates the limitations of biopics, which compress and shoehorn events and character development into a grand narrative tide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937520\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A Black man in a black suit stands on the Lincoln Memorial steps, small against the architecture and memorial\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937520\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(Parrish Lewis/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The first half of the movie, in particular, skips at a dynamic clip, and it’s easy to slip into its enjoyable, entertaining flow. Colman Domingo carries it the rest of the way, give or take a superfluous, poorly conceived shot that confirms King and Rustin’s reconciliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we had long been convinced of Rustin’s contribution to that day, and beyond. And we also know he will always be an outsider. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘Rustin’ opens in select Bay Area theaters Nov. 3 and begins streaming on \u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81111528\">Netflix\u003c/a> Nov. 17.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Colman Domingo is the highlight of George C. Wolfe’s biopic of the March on Washington organizer Bayard Rustin.",
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"title": "‘Rustin’ Grabs the Spotlight in an Uplifting Civil Rights Chorus | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The great unsung virtue of historical documentaries such as \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pbs.org/pov/films/brotheroutsider/\">Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin\u003c/a>\u003c/em> (2003), which premiered at Sundance 20 years ago and aired nationally on PBS,\u003cbr>\nis rescuing and preserving forgotten legacies. Rustin, the civil rights activist who masterminded the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom but was pushed to the margins because of his homosexuality, belatedly received his close-up in East Bay filmmaker Nancy Kates’ bittersweet portrait.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Biopics are most moviegoers’ preferred mode of visual history, though: epic yet intimate dramas with an emotional climax, driven by a larger-than-life performance by a charismatic star. This is not a recent development, of course — \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Muni\">Paul Muni\u003c/a> did successive turns as Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola and Benito Juárez in the late 1930s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not incidentally, biopics certify heroes. I can’t imagine that Kates, or anyone else in 2003, would have predicted that Hollywood would ever make a feature film about Bayard Rustin. (Certainly not one with a budget to cover a small fleet of 1960s NYC buses, taxis and automobiles.) So let us celebrate George C. Wolfe’s rousing \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em> (opening Nov. 3 in theaters and debuting Nov. 17 on \u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81111528\">Netflix\u003c/a>), which positions — or should I say mainstreams — Bayard Rustin as one of the boosters who rocketed the Civil Rights Movement to national influence. \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937519\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A group of men march arm in arm with posters for civil rights and integration\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1331\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937519\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-800x532.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-1020x679.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211007_00843_R_f_2000-1920x1278.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left: Michael Potts as Cleve Robinson, Aml Ameen as Martin Luther King Jr., Chris Rock as NAACP Exec. Dir. Roy Wilkins, Glynn Turman as A. Philip Randolph and Kevin Mambo as Whitney Young in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(David Lee/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Wolfe’s pitch, presumably, invoked the 60th anniversary of \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/articles/march-on-washington.htm\">the massive protest\u003c/a> on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that is best remembered today as Martin Luther King Jr.’s coming-out party. King (Ami Ameen) has a small role in \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em> — this is the activist’s show, after all, and it wouldn’t do for him to be upstaged, even by the event’s headliner — that paradoxically comprises the film’s weaker moments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The supporting cast is highlighted by Jeffrey Wright’s deliciously villainous rendition of the silver-tongued, self-serving congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Rustin’s prime antagonist, however, is cautious NAACP leader Roy Wilkins (a too-recognizable Chris Rock), perpetually concerned that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (via the media) will use Rustin’s gay identity to discredit the movement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>These powerful men play second fiddle to a sometimes manic, sometimes melancholy, always charming Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin. Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay gives Domingo a steady stream of galvanizing speeches and punchy one-liners that put us squarely onboard with Rustin’s hard-won wisdom and daring, seize-the-moment crusade. (The preview audience at the AMC Kabuki was moved to applause and cheers more than once.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937506\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A man crouches in front of seated people in a living room, gesturing and talking excitedly\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937506\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211112_16090_R_f_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">From left: Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin, Jakeem Dante Powell as Norm, Ayana Workman as Eleanor and Lilli Kay as Rachelle in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(David Lee/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The film’s structure is generally inspired by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland (“let’s put on a show”), with a bigger operation and higher stakes. The movie squeezes Rustin’s life into the eight or so weeks in which he enlisted and supervised a corps of volunteers to raise funds, enroll attendees and organize the logistics from buses to bag lunches to cleanup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cresting on the National Mall, \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em> is a triumphant film, a vindication and validation of Rustin’s personality and strategy. In the same moment, it wants us to take inspiration from the idealism of the Civil Rights Movement that nonviolence and mass participation can transform our society for the better. That’s a big lift in the current climate, admittedly, and the movie’s final slip into sentimentality feels like an admission that escapism is the flip side of activism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rustin encounters devastating setbacks, of course. At the outset of the film, King’s failure to back his mentor resulted in Rustin’s ouster from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Much later, Rustin is brutally beaten by a cop for refusing to sit in the rear of a Greyhound bus. (He is en route to forgive and make up with King, who he needs to convince to join the D.C. rally he’s planning.) \u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937505\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"Two Black men lean towards each other while seated at bar\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937505\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20211014_04612_R_f_2000-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin and Johnny Ramey as Elias in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(David Lee/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>His gay relationships provide comfort and pleasure, but also frustration. The movie evokes through vignettes (police raids on gay bars, the risk of public exposure) the fraught, pre-Stonewall lives of gay people, as well as the 50-something Rustin’s difficulty in integrating his personal and public lives. But Wolfe is careful — too careful, I submit — about limiting the intimacy we are allowed to witness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Homosexuality is not the taboo in the Black community that it once was, but the film is far more comfortable talking about it than depicting it. Rustin shares one chaste kiss with his younger white lover, and has one evocative love scene with a married Black minister. Consequently, we don’t get a full measure of Rustin’s softness, vulnerability and need.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rustin recorded a couple albums of spirituals — he had a lovely singing voice — that Kates used to fine effect on the soundtrack of \u003cem>Brother Outsider\u003c/em>. \u003cem>Rustin\u003c/em>, in contrast, includes a clumsy scene in which a character thrusts an instrument into the protagonist’s hands and impels him to play and sing a few bars. That moment encapsulates the limitations of biopics, which compress and shoehorn events and character development into a grand narrative tide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937520\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000.jpg\" alt=\"A Black man in a black suit stands on the Lincoln Memorial steps, small against the architecture and memorial\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937520\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/RSTN_20220808_29393_R_f_2000-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Colman Domingo as Bayard Rustin in ‘Rustin.’ \u003ccite>(Parrish Lewis/Netflix)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The first half of the movie, in particular, skips at a dynamic clip, and it’s easy to slip into its enjoyable, entertaining flow. Colman Domingo carries it the rest of the way, give or take a superfluous, poorly conceived shot that confirms King and Rustin’s reconciliation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we had long been convinced of Rustin’s contribution to that day, and beyond. And we also know he will always be an outsider. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12127869\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>‘Rustin’ opens in select Bay Area theaters Nov. 3 and begins streaming on \u003ca href=\"https://www.netflix.com/title/81111528\">Netflix\u003c/a> Nov. 17.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A Serene Debut From Raven Jackson in ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’",
"headTitle": "A Serene Debut From Raven Jackson in ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Nature provides much of the soundtrack to \u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em>, a poised and occasionally transcendent debut from writer-director Raven Jackson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13937046']The sounds of crickets and birds, flowing water and the wind in the long summer grass are only sporadically punctured by a song at a party, or a brief moment of a swelling score. These are the kind of details that make you feel immediately rooted in a place. It’s not just the nature setting on a sleep app either, or, if it is, sound supervisor Miguel Calvo ensure that it doesn’t feel like that. It’s thoughtful and precise and also lets you more fully enjoy the moments where those human-made sounds take over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This might be a lot of talk about sound design to start, but it’s also a bit of a primer on what to expect from \u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em>, which counts \u003cem>Moonlight\u003c/em> filmmaker Barry Jenkins among its producers. Like sitting in a field for hours without a phone or a book or a companion to chat with, just the world around you, Jackson’s film requires a level of conscious, almost meditative submission. The dialogue is sparse, the narrative is also. It is probably not an accident that some of the first words uttered, minutes in, are “not too quick … slow, take your time.” It applies to the fishing lesson between father and daughter that we’re witnessing, yes, but it works on another level too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiQvFKfpCi4\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em> is a collection of moments in the life of Mack (Charleen McClure as an adult, Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a child), sometimes skipping back and forth in time. There are long stretches where the camera lingers on a hug, or the red painted toes of a mother at a party, the back of our heroine’s head, a fish on a table, a crying infant getting their first bath in a kitchen sink, or two sisters sitting on a porch, in silence, until one breaks into laughter. And there are many, many hands. It’s possible the camera spends more or at least equal time on hands — preparing a fish, digging in the dirt, holding — or not holding — another, swirling muddy water in a pond. Within this tapestry there are glimpses of great loss, of solitude, of new life and of transitions that feel familiar even if they’re not your own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For as stubbornly minimalist as it is, the imagery is always vibrant, aided by the rich, primary colors of the costumes, and thoughtfully composed shots, whether of a worm wriggling or a classic silhouette looking outside a darkened door. The emotion, too, is surprisingly palpable considering how little we really know about the people we’re watching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937372\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937372\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM.png\" alt=\"An elderly Black woman sits in the center of a brown couch between two children. One child leans her head on the woman's shoulder. The other rests his head on her lap. All three look somber. The room they're in is rustic.\" width=\"1700\" height=\"1086\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM.png 1700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-800x511.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-1020x652.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-160x102.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-768x491.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-1536x981.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1700px) 100vw, 1700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Jannie Hampton, Jayah Henry in ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.’ \u003ccite>(A24 via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13936873']Still, at a certain point, you may find yourself yearning for more — more story, more arc, more information, something to hold onto, to sustain interest or engagement. Sometimes it feels like you’re wandering through a gallery of moving moments that you understand on an intellectual level are connected but maybe don’t add up to a completely satisfying whole — especially at a trim, but standard, feature length.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That it works as well as it does is quite a feat, though. And with \u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em>, Jackson has firmly established herself as a filmmaker to watch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ is released nationwide on Nov. 3.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Nature provides much of the soundtrack to \u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em>, a poised and occasionally transcendent debut from writer-director Raven Jackson.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The sounds of crickets and birds, flowing water and the wind in the long summer grass are only sporadically punctured by a song at a party, or a brief moment of a swelling score. These are the kind of details that make you feel immediately rooted in a place. It’s not just the nature setting on a sleep app either, or, if it is, sound supervisor Miguel Calvo ensure that it doesn’t feel like that. It’s thoughtful and precise and also lets you more fully enjoy the moments where those human-made sounds take over.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This might be a lot of talk about sound design to start, but it’s also a bit of a primer on what to expect from \u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em>, which counts \u003cem>Moonlight\u003c/em> filmmaker Barry Jenkins among its producers. Like sitting in a field for hours without a phone or a book or a companion to chat with, just the world around you, Jackson’s film requires a level of conscious, almost meditative submission. The dialogue is sparse, the narrative is also. It is probably not an accident that some of the first words uttered, minutes in, are “not too quick … slow, take your time.” It applies to the fishing lesson between father and daughter that we’re witnessing, yes, but it works on another level too.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/qiQvFKfpCi4'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/qiQvFKfpCi4'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em> is a collection of moments in the life of Mack (Charleen McClure as an adult, Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a child), sometimes skipping back and forth in time. There are long stretches where the camera lingers on a hug, or the red painted toes of a mother at a party, the back of our heroine’s head, a fish on a table, a crying infant getting their first bath in a kitchen sink, or two sisters sitting on a porch, in silence, until one breaks into laughter. And there are many, many hands. It’s possible the camera spends more or at least equal time on hands — preparing a fish, digging in the dirt, holding — or not holding — another, swirling muddy water in a pond. Within this tapestry there are glimpses of great loss, of solitude, of new life and of transitions that feel familiar even if they’re not your own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For as stubbornly minimalist as it is, the imagery is always vibrant, aided by the rich, primary colors of the costumes, and thoughtfully composed shots, whether of a worm wriggling or a classic silhouette looking outside a darkened door. The emotion, too, is surprisingly palpable considering how little we really know about the people we’re watching.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_13937372\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1700px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-13937372\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM.png\" alt=\"An elderly Black woman sits in the center of a brown couch between two children. One child leans her head on the woman's shoulder. The other rests his head on her lap. All three look somber. The room they're in is rustic.\" width=\"1700\" height=\"1086\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM.png 1700w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-800x511.png 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-1020x652.png 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-160x102.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-768x491.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/11/Screen-Shot-2023-11-01-at-12.54.15-PM-1536x981.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1700px) 100vw, 1700px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Jannie Hampton, Jayah Henry in ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.’ \u003ccite>(A24 via AP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Still, at a certain point, you may find yourself yearning for more — more story, more arc, more information, something to hold onto, to sustain interest or engagement. Sometimes it feels like you’re wandering through a gallery of moving moments that you understand on an intellectual level are connected but maybe don’t add up to a completely satisfying whole — especially at a trim, but standard, feature length.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That it works as well as it does is quite a feat, though. And with \u003cem>All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt\u003c/em>, Jackson has firmly established herself as a filmmaker to watch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-12127869\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-800x78.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"78\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-400x39.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/09/Q.Logo_.Break_-768x75.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ is released nationwide on Nov. 3.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A Priest Explains What ‘The Exorcist’ Tells Us About Evil",
"headTitle": "A Priest Explains What ‘The Exorcist’ Tells Us About Evil | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Not much power has leached from \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13830037/william-friedkin-meets-the-devil-and-father-amorth\">\u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em>\u003c/a> since its first release in 1973. The horror film’s upcoming 50\u003csup>th\u003c/sup> anniversary has unleashed an inevitable \u003ca href=\"https://www.theexorcistbeliever.movie/\">new version\u003c/a> out in theaters now, as well as countless other tributes, including articles, special screenings and podcasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the latter, the podcast \u003ca href=\"https://rss.com/podcasts/takingonthedevil/\">\u003cem>Taking on the Devil\u003c/em>\u003c/a> is notable for its heady, intellectual interrogation of \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em>‘s theological implications. The host is horror movie scholar \u003ca href=\"https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/people/faculty/gmbrand.html\">Gina Brandolino\u003c/a>, who teaches at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure, I became friends with Brandolino while on a fellowship there.) Her partner in the podcast is \u003ca href=\"https://candler.emory.edu/faculty-profiles/gabrielle-thomas/\">Gabrielle Thomas\u003c/a>, an ordained priest and Emory University professor of early Christianity, who has written about representations of the devil. The two debate questions such as how \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> helps us think about evil in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13904911']The film has had an ongoing impact on pop culture and contemporary Christianity, Thomas told NPR. “I mean, the Church of England I’m ordained in,” she said, “we actually had to go back and look at liturgies for exorcism and deliverance and that kind of thing as a result of that movie.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Long ago in early Christianity, she said, exorcisms were a completely normal ritual that took place before baptism. “Everybody was exorcised because there was an assumption that everyone would be experiencing some kind of demonic oppression, because that’s where the church was at that time,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How humans have thought about the devil has evolved” over centuries and across faiths, she added. For example, the devil was once usually presented as being blue in the Christian contexts Thomas studies. He was seen as being like the sea, wild and inexplicable. “We understand that there’s chaos in the sea,” she said. “And it’s relatively recently that we ended up with this red thing with horns and the trident that’s slightly comical… There’s been a sort of ‘nice-ification’ of the devil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDGw1MTEe9k\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this era of grinning purple devil emojis, cute cartoon characters like Hot Stuff and sexy demon antiheros on popular shows like \u003cem>Lucifer \u003c/em>and\u003cem> Good Omens\u003c/em>, the devil in \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> punches with medieval-era power, Thomas says. This demon, Pazuzu, is not palatable. He is grotesque, primal and scary, regardless of your faith or lack thereof.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But ultimately, Thomas said, \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> is not really concerned with the devil. It’s about the people who observe his possession of a 12-year-old girl named Regan who did nothing worse than play with a Ouija board. Which raises the question: why Regan? And that in turn, Thomas notes, raises an even older question: “Why hasn’t God stepped in and solved all of this? Which is a question that lots of people are asking all the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13936524']Why do bad things happen to good people? Thomas says this is not an inquiry for God. This is a question for humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I loved about \u003cem>The Exorcist \u003c/em>is that it gives us a [sense of] how to respond, in the sense of these two priests,” she said, referring to the characters Father Karras and Father Merrin, who perform the film’s dramatic exorcism. “They’re not perfect. They’re completely messed up, just as many people on the street would be. But they respond with love,” she said. “They’re absolutely not the most successful in the way that they approach it … but they’re present in it. So Regan is not alone ultimately.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And right at a moment when the world feels caught in something profoundly, cosmically terrible, maybe \u003cem>The Exorcist \u003c/em>still carries a message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIxpPMyGcpU\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It doesn’t leave us with a sense of ‘there’s just nothing we can do’,” Thomas said. “It leaves us with a sense of: I can be present. I can be present with the person who’s experiencing evil. I can stand with them. If I’m a priest, I might pray some particular prayers. If I’m not a priest, I might not pray these prayers, but I can be with that person or with that group of people… For me, it was the message of presence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postid='arts_13830037']The director of \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> always insisted \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@transylvania/the-exorcist-is-not-a-horror-film-50b9ecfa17ea#:~:text=hold%20much%20weight.-,William%20Friedkin%20famously%20said%20that%20he%20didn't%20consider%20The,from%20the%20franchise%20moving%20forward.\">his movie was not a horror movie\u003c/a>. It was a movie about faith. And it reminds us that when we feel helpless and hopeless, there is power in being present.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited for the web by Rose Friedman. Produced for the web by Beth Novey.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+priest+explains+what+%27The+Exorcist%27+tells+us+about+evil&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Not much power has leached from \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13830037/william-friedkin-meets-the-devil-and-father-amorth\">\u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em>\u003c/a> since its first release in 1973. The horror film’s upcoming 50\u003csup>th\u003c/sup> anniversary has unleashed an inevitable \u003ca href=\"https://www.theexorcistbeliever.movie/\">new version\u003c/a> out in theaters now, as well as countless other tributes, including articles, special screenings and podcasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the latter, the podcast \u003ca href=\"https://rss.com/podcasts/takingonthedevil/\">\u003cem>Taking on the Devil\u003c/em>\u003c/a> is notable for its heady, intellectual interrogation of \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em>‘s theological implications. The host is horror movie scholar \u003ca href=\"https://lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/people/faculty/gmbrand.html\">Gina Brandolino\u003c/a>, who teaches at the University of Michigan. (Full disclosure, I became friends with Brandolino while on a fellowship there.) Her partner in the podcast is \u003ca href=\"https://candler.emory.edu/faculty-profiles/gabrielle-thomas/\">Gabrielle Thomas\u003c/a>, an ordained priest and Emory University professor of early Christianity, who has written about representations of the devil. The two debate questions such as how \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> helps us think about evil in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The film has had an ongoing impact on pop culture and contemporary Christianity, Thomas told NPR. “I mean, the Church of England I’m ordained in,” she said, “we actually had to go back and look at liturgies for exorcism and deliverance and that kind of thing as a result of that movie.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Long ago in early Christianity, she said, exorcisms were a completely normal ritual that took place before baptism. “Everybody was exorcised because there was an assumption that everyone would be experiencing some kind of demonic oppression, because that’s where the church was at that time,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“How humans have thought about the devil has evolved” over centuries and across faiths, she added. For example, the devil was once usually presented as being blue in the Christian contexts Thomas studies. He was seen as being like the sea, wild and inexplicable. “We understand that there’s chaos in the sea,” she said. “And it’s relatively recently that we ended up with this red thing with horns and the trident that’s slightly comical… There’s been a sort of ‘nice-ification’ of the devil.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/YDGw1MTEe9k'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/YDGw1MTEe9k'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>In this era of grinning purple devil emojis, cute cartoon characters like Hot Stuff and sexy demon antiheros on popular shows like \u003cem>Lucifer \u003c/em>and\u003cem> Good Omens\u003c/em>, the devil in \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> punches with medieval-era power, Thomas says. This demon, Pazuzu, is not palatable. He is grotesque, primal and scary, regardless of your faith or lack thereof.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But ultimately, Thomas said, \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> is not really concerned with the devil. It’s about the people who observe his possession of a 12-year-old girl named Regan who did nothing worse than play with a Ouija board. Which raises the question: why Regan? And that in turn, Thomas notes, raises an even older question: “Why hasn’t God stepped in and solved all of this? Which is a question that lots of people are asking all the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Why do bad things happen to good people? Thomas says this is not an inquiry for God. This is a question for humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I loved about \u003cem>The Exorcist \u003c/em>is that it gives us a [sense of] how to respond, in the sense of these two priests,” she said, referring to the characters Father Karras and Father Merrin, who perform the film’s dramatic exorcism. “They’re not perfect. They’re completely messed up, just as many people on the street would be. But they respond with love,” she said. “They’re absolutely not the most successful in the way that they approach it … but they’re present in it. So Regan is not alone ultimately.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And right at a moment when the world feels caught in something profoundly, cosmically terrible, maybe \u003cem>The Exorcist \u003c/em>still carries a message.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/PIxpPMyGcpU'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/PIxpPMyGcpU'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It doesn’t leave us with a sense of ‘there’s just nothing we can do’,” Thomas said. “It leaves us with a sense of: I can be present. I can be present with the person who’s experiencing evil. I can stand with them. If I’m a priest, I might pray some particular prayers. If I’m not a priest, I might not pray these prayers, but I can be with that person or with that group of people… For me, it was the message of presence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The director of \u003cem>The Exorcist\u003c/em> always insisted \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@transylvania/the-exorcist-is-not-a-horror-film-50b9ecfa17ea#:~:text=hold%20much%20weight.-,William%20Friedkin%20famously%20said%20that%20he%20didn't%20consider%20The,from%20the%20franchise%20moving%20forward.\">his movie was not a horror movie\u003c/a>. It was a movie about faith. And it reminds us that when we feel helpless and hopeless, there is power in being present.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Edited for the web by Rose Friedman. Produced for the web by Beth Novey.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">\u003cem>Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org\">visit NPR\u003c/a>.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+priest+explains+what+%27The+Exorcist%27+tells+us+about+evil&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/em>\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"possible": {
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"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
"reveal": {
"id": "reveal",
"title": "Reveal",
"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
"airtime": "SAT 4pm-5pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/",
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"link": "/radio/program/reveal",
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},
"rightnowish": {
"id": "rightnowish",
"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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"order": 16
},
"link": "/podcasts/rightnowish",
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