A ‘comprehensive review’ of the US’s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 has also been ordered.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the United States is reviewing whether to designate Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, as a “foreign terrorist organization”.
Rubio told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, “I believe that classification is now, once again, under review.”
The response came a day after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a “comprehensive review” of the United States’s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, an evacuation operation in which 13 US service members and 150 Afghans were killed at Kabul’s airport in an ISIL (ISIS) bombing.
Hegseth said in a memo on Tuesday that after three months of assessing the withdrawal, a comprehensive review was needed to ensure accountability for this event.
“This remains an important step toward regaining faith and trust with the American people and all those who wear the uniform, and is prudent based on the number of casualties and equipment lost during the execution of this withdrawal operation,” Hegseth wrote.
Former President Joe Biden’s administration, which oversaw the pull-out, mostly blamed the resulting chaos on a lack of planning and reductions in troops by the first Donald Trump administration, following its deal with the Taliban to accelerate the withdrawal of US forces.
Trump had signed the deal with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020 aimed at ending its 18-year war in Afghanistan, beginning with the withdrawal of about 4,000 troops “within months”.
The then-Trump administration had agreed it would withdraw from the country by May 2021 if the Taliban negotiated a peace agreement with the Afghan government and promised to prevent internationally designated terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and ISIL, from gaining a foothold in the country.
After assuming office in January 2021, Biden said he had to respect the agreement or risk new conflicts with the Taliban, which could have required additional troops in Afghanistan.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump frequently criticised Biden and his administration for the withdrawal, saying that the manner in which it was done “was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.” Trump said that the withdrawal should have been done with “dignity, with strength, with power.”
Senior US military officials, including then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the then-top US general, Mark Milley, have already appeared before lawmakers to give their testimonies regarding the withdrawal.
The war in Afghanistan from 2001-2021 was the US’s longest war, surpassing Vietnam.
US Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, has also carried out an investigation into the ISIL attack on Kabul during the last few days of the withdrawal.
LIKE a beloved old pet dog, DOOM: The Ages is impossible to put down.
It’s a demonic drug, a hit of horrifying annihilation that makes you want more and more. Because it slays more than Taylor Swift in a glitter hat factory.
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Hell hath no fury… like a Doom Slayer with loads of gunsCredit: Bethesda Softworks
Care must always be taken when trying to improve a cult classic – and the original Doom rightfully belongs among the icons of gaming history.
So it’s a huge relief to see that idSoftware has not only been respectful in making this DOOM, they’ve also been really smart. But is The Dark Ages the best game since the original release?
Hell yeah!
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There’s an impressive array of weaponry to dispatch demons withCredit: Bethesda Softworks
First off, there’s a more involved plot than previous follow-ups like DOOM (2016) and 2020’s DOOM: Eternal.
You play the heavy-footed Doom Slayer called upon by the Night Sentinels of Argent D’Nur and the mysterious Maykrs in their battle against the dark forces of Hell. Your job? To save humanity.
The Maykrs have a strange hold over the Slayer who gradually starts to think, and fight, on his own terms.
Previous follow-ups to this mega franchise were decent nods to the original but they weren’t truly great games. They lacked what makes a DOOM game utterly brilliant – an intense, mind-blowing run-and-gun experience which takes your breath away. Literally.
The Dark Ages, however, achieves this in bundles.
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The 22 chapters are bold and intenseCredit: Bethesda Softworks
Because you become so engrossed in dispatching the multitude of enemies spawning all around you that you forget to breathe.
I lost count of the times where I finished a chapter (there are 22 to smash through), let out an exhausting breath… and noticed that I was two feet away from my gaming chair.
Such is the intensity of The Dark Ages.
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Jumping into a giant mech suit feels like Power Rangers but, you know, betterCredit: Bethesda Softworks
It’s not just a blast and dash game either. This time round you have to be more tactically astute in your demon-slaying ways.
The sheer number of enemies that bear down on you during battle is daunting, but this just increases the adrenaline rush you get when your planned destruction works.
This immersive action results in hours lost wiping the floor with growling Pinky Riders and horrible Hell Knights.
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Plan your battles wisely as you’ll need to be smart as well as sharpCredit: Bethesda Softworks
The arsenal is as kick-ass as it is clever. And each new weapon brings slightly different whoops of joy as you learn more about what can be achieved when you pull the trigger.
For example, the Impaler is brilliant for headshots and once you get your upgrades to a certain point, it can then slow down time to get the perfect hit.
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Enemies vary in difficulty and there are some cool close-up melee optionsCredit: Bethesda Softworks
The Shredder can dispatch hordes of Imp Stalkers all at once and again, use your upgrades wisely, and it can auto-charge to a more destructive ammo when following a melee attack.
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Saving humanity has never been so exhaustively exhilaratingCredit: Bethesda Softworks
But id Software’s addition of a shield is a masterstroke – this can rip through multiple foes or deflect attacks. It’s upgradable too and becomes an essential tool at your side. That is until you get the ball and chain – talk about an epic flail!
Each chapter is gorgeous in its detail and impressive in scope. The map is easy to read and offers a clear pathway to cute collectables, gold chests and secret areas you won’t want to miss in your 20+ hours of the game.
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A banging soundtrack helps immerse you in the depths of HellCredit: Bethesda Softworks
Even the soundtrack is gloriously DOOM-esque. A head-banging barrage of heavy metal which delights the senses when blasted through decent headsets – I couldn’t help but ramp up my Turtle Beach Stealth 700s to complete the experience.
It all makes for an epic romp in Hell – you won’t just dip your toes in the Lake of Fire, you’ll want to go skinny-dipping and plunge in head-first.
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A deep plot gives DOOM: The Dark Ages an extra edge over predecessorsCredit: Bethesda Softworks
The Dark Ages is intense – a cacophony of chaos that impales itself firmly as a Game of the Year contender.
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A dragon! Yes, you can ride a dragonCredit: Bethesda Softworks
The lure for music stars to cinematize their success will never grow old, and the movies — in need of high-wattage attractions as ever — always seem ready to oblige. The latest to enter that terrain is Abel Tesfaye, the artist known as the Weeknd, whose chart-toppers over the last decade-plus have painted, in club colors and through his haunted falsetto, a hedonist performer’s ups and downs.
It’s one thing to croon about the aftertaste of youthful excess to a dirty, mesmerizing dance beat, however, and another to draw the subject out to a compelling feature length, which the turgid psychodrama “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” starring Tesfaye and directed by Trey Edward Shults, mostly fails to do. But not for lack of trying from the visually vibey “Waves” filmmaker, who wrote the movie with Tesfaye and Reza Fahim, and from co-stars Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, roped into playing along in the superstar’s sandbox of tour-nightmare solipsism.
The title also belongs to the latest hit album of Tesfaye’s, released this year, which the singer-songwriter has hinted in the press to be a redemptive mic drop of sorts for his mysterious sex-and-drugs-fueled Weeknd persona. Whether you call the film a promotional tie-in or companion piece — it was filmed two years ago, before all the album’s tracks were recorded — it’s still little more than a long-form music video vanity project, straining for importance, fumbling at resonance.
A tight frame on Tesfaye’s boyish, anxious-looking face, his angry girlfriend’s breakup voice message (“I used to think you were a good person!”), and superficial pumping up from his manager (a bro-mode Keoghan), let us know all is not right backstage for this musician on the first night of a big tour. Elsewhere, a distraught young woman (Ortega) drenches a house’s interior with gasoline and sets it on fire, then drives to a gas station to refill her canister.
These tortured souls meet the night his coked-up, busted-heart malaise triggers a walk-off midperformance, and she’s there backstage to lock eyes with him and ask if he’s OK. (He’s not!) From there it’s an escapist date of air hockey, carnival rides and, once they settle in a fancy hotel room, the sharing of a sensitive new song.
In the cold light of day, though, when her vulnerabilities bump up against his reset untouchability — Ortega gets a great line, “You don’t look worried, you look scared” — this impulsive star/fan connection takes a violent turn. Anyone familiar with the HBO series “The Idol” that Tesfaye co-created will soon sense an unwelcome reprise of that short-lived showbiz yarn’s retrograde misogyny.
The germ of an edgy fantasia about an isolated pop icon’s ego death is swimming somewhere in the DNA of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” but it’s been flattened into a superficial, tear-stained pity party. Shults and cinematographer Chayse Irvin are gifted image makers, but they seem hamstrung applying their bag of style tricks — different aspect ratios, multiple film stocks, 360 shots and roving takes — to so shallow and prideful an exercise. There’s always something to look at but little that illuminates.
As for Tesfaye, he’s not uninteresting as a screen presence, but it’s an embryonic magnetism, in need of material richer than a bunch of close-ups that culminate in a howl of a ballad. In the flimsy narrative’s pseudo-biographical contours — notably the real-life voice loss he experienced onstage a few years ago — parallels to what Prince sought to achieve with the real-life-drawn “Purple Rain” are understandable. But that film was a cannier bid for next-level success, offsetting its three-act corniness with emotional stakes that led to a crescendo of its genius headliner’s performance prowess.
“Hurry Up Tomorrow” is thinner and sloppier. It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.
‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’
Rated: R for language throughout, drug use, some bloody violence and brief nudity
After humans, and arguably before dogs and horses, there is no character more vital to the screen, and more vital onscreen, than the automobile.
Driven or driverless, the car is the most animated of inanimate objects, sometimes literally a cartoon, with a voice, a personality, a name. Even when not speaking, they purr, they roar. They are stars in their own right — the Batmobile, the Munster Koach, James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, K.I.T.T. (the modified 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from “Knight Rider”), the Ford Grand Torino (nicknamed the Striped Tomato) driven by Starsky and Hutch. They might represent freedom, power, delinquency or even the devil. Whole movies have been built about them and the amazing things they can do, but even when they aren’t jumping and flipping and crashing, they play an essential role in helping flesh-and-blood characters take care of business.
Perhaps in some sort of reaction to our enlightened view of the effects of our gas-guzzling ways, two new series fetishizing the internal combustion engine arrive, Max’s “Duster,” now streaming, and Prime Video’s “Motorheads,” premiering Tuesday.
Created by J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan and named for the supernaturally shiny cherry-red Plymouth the hero drives, “Duster” is stupid fun, a comic melodrama steeped in 1970s exploitation flicks, with a lot of loving homage to period clothes, knickknacks and interior design. The driver is Jim Ellis, played by Josh Holloway, in what reads like a turn on Sawyer, his charming, criminal character from Abrams’ “Lost,” topped with a shot of Matthew McConaughey.
Jim, a man who has never bothered to make a three-point turn, works out of Phoenix for Southwest crime boss Ezra Saxton (Keith David, monumental as always), picking up this, delivering that. The first delivery we see turns out to be a human heart, picked up from a fast-food drive-through window, destined for Saxton’s ailing son, Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson). Along for the ride is little Luna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), who calls Jim “uncle,” though you are free to speculate; her mother, Izzy (Camille Guaty), is a big-rig trucker — trucking being another fun feature of ’70s pop culture — who will find cause to become a labor leader.
Keith David, left, as Ezra Saxton and Benjamin Charles Watson as his son, Royce.
(Ursula Coyote / Max)
The Ellises and the Saxtons, also including daughter Genesis (Sydney Elisabeth), have history — Jim’s father, Wade (Corbin Bernson), served with Ezra in World War II, and his late lamented brother had worked for him as well. Saxton is the sort of bad guy with whom you somehow sympathize in spite of the violence he employs; there’s genuine affection among the families, though one is never sure when or where a line will be drawn, only that one probably will be.
Into Jim’s low-rent but relatively settled, even happy world comes FBI agent Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson, sparky), fresh out of Quantico and ambitious to make a mark. As a Black woman, she’s told, “No one’s clamoring for an agent like you,” but she’s been assigned to Phoenix “because we have no other options.” She’s partnered there with cheerful Navajo agent Awan (Asivak Koostachin), as if to corral the minorities into a manageable corner, and assigned the Saxton case, regarded as “cursed” and so intractable as to be not worth touching.
Which is to say, agents deemed not worth taking seriously — along with underestimated “girl Friday” Jessica (Sofia Vassilieva) — have been thrown a case deemed not worth taking seriously. This is a classic premise for a procedural and strikes some notes about racism and sexism in the bargain, not out of tune with the times in which it’s set, or the times in which we’re watching.
Nina, who has managed to gather evidence of Jim crossing state lines to deliver the heart, which was stolen, and that Saxton may have been responsible for his brother’s death, bullies and tempts him into becoming a confidential informant. Thus begins an uneasy partnership, though their storylines run largely on separate tracks in separate scenes.
“Lost” was not a show that bothered much with sense in order to achieve its effects, and “Duster,” though it involves a far-reaching conspiracy whose payoff plays like the end of a shaggy-dog story, is a show of effects, of set pieces and sequences, of car chases and fistfights, of left-field notions and characters. These include Patrick Warburton as an Elvis-obsessed mobster named Sunglasses; Donal Logue as a corrupt, perverse, evangelical policeman; Gail O’Grady as Jim’s stepmother, a former showgirl who doesn’t much like him; LSD experiments; absurd puzzles (also see: “Lost”); an airheaded version of Adrienne Barbeau (Mikaela Hoover), with the actual Barbeau, a queen of genre films, making an appearance; Richard Nixon (in a few creepy seconds of AI); an oddly jolly Howard Hughes (Tom Nelis) in his Kleenex-box slippers; and a “Roadrunner” pastiche. Though not devoid of genuine feeling, it’s best experienced as a collection of attitudes and energies, noises and colors. Don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself.
The opening titles are super cool.
Zac (Michael Cimino), left, Caitlyn (Melissa Collazo) and Marcel (Nicolas Cantu) in Prime Video’s “Motoheads.”
(Keri Anderson / Prime Video)
“Motorheads” is a familiar sort of modern teenage soap opera but with cars. For reasons known only to series creator John A. Norris, the whole town is obsessed with them, and along with its human storylines, the series is a tour of automotive entertainments — drag racing, street racing, ATV racing, go-kart racing, classic car collecting. I have no idea whether this will resonate with the target demographic, but there is much I cannot tell you about kids these days.
As is common to the form, our young protagonists — Michael Cimino as Zac and Melissa Collazo as Caitlyn — are new to town, having been brought back from New York City by their mother, Samantha (Nathalie Kelly), to the oxymoronically named Rust Belt hamlet of Ironwood, where she was raised, and which is the last place anyone saw their father, Christian (Deacon Phillippe in flashbacks), 17 years earlier. He’s an infamous local legend, admired for his skill behind the wheel; aerial footage of Christian threading his way through a cordon of police cars as the getaway driver in a robbery keeps making its way into the show, though if you live in Los Angeles, you see this sort of thing on the news all the time. Marquee name Ryan Phillippe plays the kids’ Uncle Logan, who runs a garage that apparently does no business, but he has love and wisdom to spare.
Though at the center of the series, Zac’s storyline is a little shopworn, not just his wish to become, almost out of nowhere, Ironwood’s top speed racer, but his textbook interest in rich girl Alicia (Mia Healey), the girlfriend of rich boy Harris (Josh Macqueen), a Porsche-driving bully who is also hurting inside — so feel free to get a crush on him, if that’s your type. More interesting is sister Caitlyn, who prefers building cars to racing them and is perhaps the series’ most emotionally balanced character.
She becomes friends with shop classmate Curtis (Uriah Shelton), tall and good-looking, whose criminally inclined older brother, Ray (Drake Rodger), will become a sort of dark mentor to Zac. With the addition of Marcel (Nicolas Cantu), the archetypal “geek who becomes the hero’s best friend,” who works at the diner his father (grieving, drunk) used to own and dreams of designing cars, the four constitute the show’s outsider band of good guys.
They’ll have their not-always-happy business with each other — being teenagers, you know, things happen — and with their elders, as their elders will with one another. The past is not past in Ironwood; old feelings will resurface and old plots unravel. (And no one knows what happened to Christian.) Except for the cars sprinkled on top, it’s old stuff, not very deep, but produced with an engaging naturalism that rounds off the narrative extremes, enhances what’s commonplace and makes “Motorheads” easy to watch. (Colin Hoult is the sensitive director of photography, it’s worth mentioning.)
CANNES, France — Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt arrived in France in 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” clinging to a high speed train through the Chunnel, pursued and nearly skewered by a helicopter. It was, as the French might say, une entrée dramatique. In 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” he leapt from an airplane to plummet four-and-a-half miles down to the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais and now, for the big finale of his franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” he’s come to conquer the Cannes Film Festival.
One boisterous fan outside the premiere shoved her Chihuahua at Cruise so he could see it was wearing a pink sweatshirt with his face. Another brandished a DVD of 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2,” arguably the worst entry in the series. Cruise took a photo with her anyway. “Le selfie!” the red-carpet announcer cried.
The series hasn’t been kind to its French actors: Emmanuelle Béart was shot, Jean Reno blown up by exploding chewing gum, Léa Seydoux kicked out of a window at the Burj Khalifa. (Pom Klementieff, whose character’s name is Paris, has survived to co-star in this eighth entry.) Yet, you didn’t have to parler français to glean the excitement on the ground.
This is only Cruise’s third trip to Cannes and it took him nearly half an hour to walk the 60 yards of red carpet, an exhausting amount of waving, even for someone lauded for his cardio. He took care to acknowledge everyone who’d come to cheer, even trotting back down a few steps to make eye contact and thump on his heart for the fans in the corner flank.
In 2022, as part of the lead-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” the blockbuster that would defibrillate the pandemic box office, Cruise received an honorary Palme d’Or and a salute from eight zipping French jets. During his first visit, for 1992’s “Far and Away,” times were different and he felt free to be outspoken, telling the press that the then-recent Rodney King verdict “sickened me.” Today, he seems to feel the weight of championing the theatrical experience, just as Ethan Hunt is repeatedly forced to shoulder the burden of saving the world. Neither of them truly has the freedom to “choose to accept it.” More than any of his movie star peers, Cruise seems aware that someone has to symbolize an increasingly bygone era of filmmaking, to be this century’s Charlie Chaplin.
The vibe before the screening of “Final Reckoning” was a bit bar mitzvah. The DJ alternated between dance-floor classics — Kool & the Gang, Joan Jett — and remixes of Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating “Mission: Impossible” theme, one by four beatboxers who mimicked police sirens, another classed-up by a live saxophone and violins. This year’s big Cannes fashion headline is that women are no longer allowed to wear “voluminous” frocks on the steps. Nevertheless, Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace, a pickpocket-turned-secret-agent, wore a gown on the daring end of puffy. Red with large flares at her hips and ankles, she resembled the vintage biplane Cruise dangles from in the film. He could have clung onto her elbow for a teaser.
But when the movie started, the mood turned funereal. This farewell to Ethan Hunt begins with a three-decade-spanning montage of Cruise that could double as the intro to his inevitable honorary Oscar. “I want to thank you for a lifetime of unrelenting and devoted service,” Angela Bassett’s President Erika Sloane tells Ethan in the opening minute. Later, she slips him a code with an important date — May 22, 1996 — which also happens be the day the “Mission: Impossible” franchise launched. The whole film is a panegyric: big speeches and weighty moments with very little sense of play. Tonally, it starts with an ending and keeps on ending for the next 2 hours and 49 minutes.
The eight “Mission” films can be cleaved into two groups. The first four made a point of swapping directors and moods and even Ethan’s core identity: Brian De Palma made him a jaundiced naif; John Woo, a hot-blooded flirt; J.J. Abrams, a devoted husband; Brad Bird, a near-mute human cartoon. The last four are all helmed by Christopher McQuarrie (who’s co-written this script with Erik Jendresen) but neither has added much to his personality. We’re told, over and over, that Ethan is a gambler and a rule-breaker — and paradoxically, that he’s the only human worthy of our trust, an odd thing to say about a spy who wears masks of other people’s faces like party hats.
Of all the “Mission: Impossible” films, this is the only one that needs you to remember what happened in the previous entry, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” which introduced an all-knowing AI villain called the Entity and its equally unemotional minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) that made a fun foil for Cruise himself, as a sinister duo that values digital trickery over human sweat. Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’s weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London. A grunting Cruise batters a goon while huffing, “You spend! Too much time! On the internet!”
That last film managed to introduce Atwell’s Grace and collect the key while still enjoying a sense of play, like an axle-cracking Fiat chase through Rome and flirtations manifested via close-up magic. Here, the plot weighs everything down. Not just the threat-of-extinction stuff, which includes Bassett’s POTUS debating which American city to blow up as a preemptive gesture, but by its own irritating God’s-eye omniscience that rarely allows the suspense to spool out in the present. The editing is always cutting to the past or the future. There’s flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier and flash-forwards to how a stunt could look instead of just getting on with it.
Just as exhausting is how the entire cast trades lines of exposition to explain Ethan’s daredevil feats before he actually does them. There are almost no conversations, only premonitions and plans delivered in bullet-points like a group research project. No one steps on anyone else’s dramatic pauses. They may as well be reciting how to build an IKEA Billy bookcase. I can’t think of anything more thrill-stifling, even with cinematographer Fraser Taggart lighting everybody’s eyeballs to look so shiny that the actors continually appear on the verge of tears. Still, even within those limitations, Simon Pegg is delightful as Hunt’s longtime tech-whiz teammate Benji, as are new and returning ensemble members Tramell Tillman, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Rolf Saxon, the latter of whom plays a throwback character once threatened with manning a radar tower in Alaska — a punishment that did, in fact, come to pass.
But Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. (One too-miraculous rescue attempts to distract us from asking questions by inserting an out-of-place close-up of Atwell’s heaving bosom.) Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.
The flight chase is fantastic. It’s what Isaac Newton might have made if he’d demonstrated velocity by placing an apple in a bucket and whipping it in circles. But even its exhilaration gets bested by a centerpiece underwater sequence in which Cruise scuba dives alone in silence suffering stunts that you cannot believe. I couldn’t tell you how long he swam — at some point, my heart stopped — but there are images of vertical sheets of water and the star in shivering, fetal isolation that felt like the franchise wasn’t just trying to top itself, but hoping to best “Titanic” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
As the sound design rumbled with queasy creaks over shots of a submarine teetering on the edge of a deep-sea cliff, I found myself thinking most of all of that famous sequence of a frozen shack sliding off a cliff in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 “The Gold Rush,” which celebrates its centennial anniversary this fall. By coincidence or grand design, a gorgeously restored “The Gold Rush” was also the first movie screened at this year’s Cannes. If there’s a Cannes in 2125, maybe it’ll play a 100-year-old Tom Cruise classic. It won’t be this “Mission: Impossible” over the first, third or fourth. Regardless, I bet the fans will still be cheering.
‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’
Rated: PG-13, for sequences of strong violence and action, bloody images, and brief language
Near the end of an evening ruled by queens, a king was keeping Chaka Khan waiting.
“Stevie Wonder’s in the house tonight,” Khan said late Sunday as she stood in the spotlight at Inglewood’s Kia Forum. “I don’t know where he is.” The veteran soul-music star wandered over to the edge of the stage, the black fringe of her bedazzled cape swaying with every step, and peered out into the crowd. “Steve, you over there?”
Khan was in the middle of her set to close Sunday’s installment of a traveling R&B revue called “The Queens” that launched last week in Las Vegas and has her on the road through the fall with three fellow lifers in Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight and Stephanie Mills. (One longs to have been in the room when they decided who plays last.) She’d come out singing “I Feel for You” — saucy, casual, effortlessly funky — then glided through “Do You Love What You Feel” and “What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me.” Now her would-be special guest was nowhere to be found.
Chaka Khan performs with Stevie Wonder.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
“Stevie Wonder!” she said again, attempting to summon him to the stage. “We go back a long, long way. I remember once we did a tour, he and I — must have been back in the ’80s, the ’70s or something. It was that long ago. We were on tour for dang near two years. Two friggin’ frack years.” Khan went on for a minute about a vexing old record deal then seemed wisely to think better of that. “Call him,” she instructed the crowd, which started up a “Stevie” chant.
“What?” boomed a voice at last over the sound system. It was Wonder, shuffling out from the wings wearing his signature shades and beret to join his old friend for — well, for what? Khan had set up Wonder’s cameo by saying they should do “I Feel for You” again since Wonder played harmonica on the original record in 1984. But Wonder didn’t appear to have gotten that note: After clasping hands with Khan, he started telling the story of writing “Tell Me Something Good” a decade earlier for her group Rufus, which led Khan to cue her backing band on that number instead.
And what a number it was — that slinky up-and-down riff still a marvel of rhythmic ingenuity that inspired Khan and Wonder to go off in a volley of ad libs like the seasoned pros they are.
Patti Labelle performs.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
Signs of life such as that one are precisely the reason to go to a concert like “The Queens,” in which the vast experience of the performers — Mills was the youngest at 68, LaBelle the oldest at 80 — serves not as a safeguard against the unexpected but as a guarantee that whatever might happen is fully roll-with-able.
Mills got up there Sunday and discovered an unwelcome climate situation — “I wish they would cut that air off,” she said, “it’s blowing so cold on me” — but went ahead and sang the bejesus out of “Home,” from “The Wiz.” LaBelle put out a call for willing men from the audience — “Black, white, straight, gay,” she made clear — then presided over an impromptu talent show as each guy did a bit of “Lady Marmalade” for her. And then there was Knight’s handler, who seemed to show up a few beats early to guide her offstage after “Midnight Train to Georgia.” No biggie: He could just stand there holding her arm gently for a minute while she traded “I’ve got to go’s” with her background singers.
Gladys Knight performs.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
Another reason to go to “The Queens,” especially on Mother’s Day, was to behold the finery displayed onstage (and in the crowd). Knight wore a crisp red pantsuit with glittering figure-eight earrings, Mills an off-the-shoulder mermaid gown. LaBelle showed off two outfits, emerging in a silky blue suit before changing into a long tunic-style dress. During “On My Own,” she kicked off her heels, sending them hurtling across the stage; later, she spritzed herself from a bottle of fragrance then spritzed the front row for good measure.
As a three-hour program — Knight opened at 7 p.m. on the dot — Sunday’s show moved quickly, with a rotating stage that whirred to life after each woman’s set. And of course nobody stuck around long enough to offer up anything but hits. The musical pleasures were the ripples of detail in all those familiar tunes: a little ha-ha-ha Knight used to punctuate “That’s What Friends Are For”; LaBelle’s frisky vocal runs in “When You Talk About Love,” which she sang as a stagehand came out to help put her in-ear monitor back in; the way Khan toyed with her phrasing in “Through the Fire,” slowing down when you thought she’d speed up and vice versa. (Nobody wants to start a fight here, but Khan was undoubtedly the night’s best singer.)
Stephanie Mills performs.
(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)
After bringing the Mother’s Day audience to its feet with “I’m Every Woman” — somewhere out there was Khan’s own 91-year-old mom, she said — she started to make for the exit when her band revved up the throbbing synth lick from “Ain’t Nobody.”
“Oh, one more?” she said to no one in particular. “S—. One more!”
BUYING a used car involves lots of decisions. What size and style do you want? Are you petrol, diesel, hybrid or EV? Should you buy as cheaply as possible or invest as much as you can?
We can’t answer any of these questions, but we can tell you what the UK’s most popular car for sale on Sun Motors is.
When it was launched, this compact crossover SUV pretty much defined the category. It’s nearly 20 years old but remains as popular as ever.
I’ve driven the Nissan Qashqai and I’ll give you my honest opinion of its good points, bad points and anything else I can remember that’s relevant.
What are the most popular used cars?
Sun Motors is a nationwide marketplace that connects thousands of buyers and dealers. We keep track of every purchase and can reveal our list of the 10 most popular used cars in the UK.
You already know that at the top of the charts is the Nissan Qashqai. Here’s a list of the rest…
Nissan Qashqai
VW Golf
Mercedes A-Class
Mini (all models)
Kia Sportage
BMW 1 Series
Ford Kuga
BMW 3 Series
Audi A3
Hyundai Tucson
Buying a used car? Find cars for under £200 on Sun Motors here.
Nissan Qashqai used car review
The Nissan Qashqai may have a name that you’ll struggle to spell, but its appeal isn’t hard to spot.
It’s a crossover SUV, which means it looks like a car that’s capable of running off-road and has an elevated driving position, but in reality, it’s a pretty refined and reliable city car.
We’re going to talk about the second-generation (and subsequent) models that launched in 2013.
With this version, Nissan ironed out all the faults and created the UK’s favourite (sort of) SUVs.
It’s now beloved by middle managers, school-run mums and dads and anyone for whom a MINI was just a little bit too small.
Modern versions are even more aggressive-looking but, for our money, don’t look as good.
5
Models such as this Nissan Qashqai 1.5 dCi n-tec+ SUV 5dr Diesel Manual 2WD Euro 6 can be found on Sun Motors for as little as £130 per month – it has 68K miles and is from 2015
The high-up driving position offers great visibility, and the responsive handling makes the car manoeuvrable enough to slide into that supermarket parking spot.
OK, so it’s not going to knock your socks off or make you smile too much, but it’s a family car, so we never expected it would.
Sun Motors: Buy your next vehicle today
If you’re part of the 3.3 million Brits looking to buy a used vehicle this year, Sun Motors is an ideal place to start
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Enjoy:
A choice of fuel type whether it’s petrol, diesel, electric or hybrid
A range of models from convertible, estate, saloon and many more
A range of top brands such as Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota and BMW
There have been far too many engine variations (including petrol, diesel, hybrid and the latest e-POWER powertrain) for us to run through them all.
Reviewers seem to favour the 1.3-litre DIG-T 140 mild-hybrid petrol engine, and we won’t argue.
Bad points are, as you’d expect, few and far between. The Qashqai is quite expensive as a used car, with other makes and models perhaps a little cheaper to buy, run and insure.
The Qashqai is, like lots of crossovers, a bit of a fake too. It’s not really an off-roader like the Range Rover, but not many people need that sort of performance (or can afford the price).
Are Nissan Qashqais reliable?
The Nissan Qashqai isn’t quite as reliable as the bullet-proof Nissan cars of old, with the 2014-21 diesel models in particular suffering from engine and exhaust problems.
Overall though, it’s a sturdy family motor that shouldn’t leave you stranded by the roadside.
Try to buy one with a full service history, ensure all recalls are done and check receipts for any work.
How much is a Nissan Qashqai?
Nissan Qashqais start from £5,000 for a 10-year old (2015) model with over 100,000 miles on the clock. Nearly new models, including the e-POWER version, can cost over £35,000.
As a ballpark, expect to pay around £15-17,000 for a 2020 Qashqai.
It’s not the cheapest car on the market, with some used models that are as expensive as a new Dacia Duster, for example, but it’ll hold its value.
Is Nissan Qashqai a 4×4?
The Nissan Qashqai isn’t a true 4×4 like a Land Rover, Range Rover, etc, but you can find both front-wheel drive (FWD) and four-wheel drive (AWD) models on the market.
In off-road mode the 4×4 Qashqai will tackle difficult terrain like mud and gravel, more much more confidently than the 2WD version.
Most drivers who really need 4WD performance should look elsewhere. In the end, they probably already were.
Used Nissan Qashqais for sale
We’ve scoured Sun Motors to find three top used cars for sale. You’ll need to get in quick to secure these…
This isn’t the cheapest Qashqai on the market, but it’s arguably one of the best-value used motors we’ve seen.
Don’t let the 60,000+ miles on the clock put you off. This Acenta Premium model comes with 17” alloys, a good touchscreen and parking sensors.
It’ll do 55mpg all day long, too. That’s why this is our bargain buy.
Awesome auto: Nissan Qashqais SUV 1.3 DIG-T Tekna
5
Reviewers love the 1.3 litre DIG-T petrol engine for its power, control and reliability.
This automatic Qashqai is in Tekna trim, featuring cool 18-inch alloy wheels, a Bose sound system, and a head-up display. Nice.
High-class hybrid: Nissan Qashqai 1.5 E-Power Acenta Premium 5dr Auto
5
The 2024 Qashqai is a thoroughly modern car. Its petrol/electric hybrid motor produces an impressive 188bhp.
It’s quiet, quick and has the mean look of the new Qashqai.
This particular car has fewer than 5,000 miles on the clock, so it’s as nearly new as it gets.
Buying a used car? Check out Sun Motors and find your next vehicle today. Whether you’re looking for automatic, manual or electric, use Sun Motors to decide on your next model.
By Ron Chernow Penguin Press: 1,200 pages, $45 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Mark Twain was America’s first celebrity, a multiplatform entertainer loved and recognized all over the world. Fans from America to Europe to Australia bought his books and flocked to his one-man shows, and his potent doses of humor and hard truth enthralled both the highborn and the humble. After he died, his work lived on through his novels, and his influence has endured — this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “James” by Percival Everett, reverses the roles of the main characters in Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” replacing the narration of the teenaged Huck with that of the slave Jim.
Ron Chernow writes books about men of great ambition ranging from President Ulysses S. Grant to financier J.P. Morgan — his biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired the long-running Broadway musical — and is an expert chronicler of fame’s highs and lows. But in taking on Twain’s story, he signed on for a wild ride. Twain was both a brilliant writer who exposed America’s hypocrisies with humor and wit, and an angry man who savored revenge, nursed grudges and blamed God for the blows fate rained down on his head. “What a bottom of fury there is to your fun,” said Twain’s friend, the novelist William Dean Howells.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in the slaveholding community of Hannibal, Mo., a town he would immortalize in “Huckleberry Finn” and its prequel, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” The restless young man drifted from one job to another, then found his first calling as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, an experience that would inform Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and other books. The river gave him his pen name (the phrase “mark twain” indicated a safe water depth) and inflicted an early blow in the loss of his younger brother: encouraged by Twain, Henry Clemens signed on to a riverboat crew, then died when the boat exploded. Twain blamed himself.
Twain’s river idyll ended with the Civil War. Traffic dried up, and to escape conscription into the Confederate Army, Twain headed west with his brother Orion to the Nevada territory. He reveled in the rambunctious disorder of its mining towns, and as a young reporter there he uncorked his ebullient sense of humor. His literary career began in earnest when he moved to San Francisco, and helped by California writers such as Bret Harte, he went national when in 1865 a New York newspaper picked up his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Twain moved east, and his career took off like a rocket.
On a travel junket that inspired his first book, “Innocents Abroad,” Twain saw a portrait of his future wife, Olivia “Livy” Langdon. He fell for her image and contrived to meet her, and despite Twain’s many eccentricities, her distinguished family accepted him. They married, and their life in Hartford, Conn., padded by Livy’s family wealth, was a gracious dream, as the greatest of Twain’s age — Grant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen Keller — sought his company. But tragedy struck again: their first child, a son, died at 18 months.
The couple had three more children — daughters — and Livy’s seemingly bottomless wealth supported him. She edited his manuscripts, ran his household and smoothed his rough edges. But the couple’s Achilles’ heel was their shared taste for luxury. They routinely lived beyond their means, running up bills even as Twain, a reckless investor with terrible business sense, gambled with both his publishing earnings and her inheritance.
Throughout it all, he kept writing. The most enduring of Twain’s books is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” published Stateside in 1885 when Twain was 49, the story of a runaway boy and an escaped slave who flee down the Mississippi River. A sequel to Twain’s comic novel “Tom Sawyer,” it penetrated the dark heart of Hannibal’s savage treatment of Black people. Chernow writes that “if Tom Sawyer offered a sunlit view of antebellum Hannibal, in ‘Huck Finn’ Twain delved into the shadows. As he dredged up memories anew, he now perceived a town embroiled in slavery.”
Ron Chernow has previously authored biographies on historical figures including Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton.
(Beowulf Sheehan)
“Huck Finn” was the apotheosis of Twain’s gift for truth-telling, as he exposed the sadistic oppression of Black people and made the slave Jim the hero. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the book has been banned for its use of a racial slur, but Chernow makes a strong case for the book’s significance, buttressed by “James” author Everett’s summation: “Anyone who wants to ban Huck Finn hasn’t read it.”
Twain’s book sales failed to balance the household budget, and the family had to move to Europe to curtail expenses, the beginning of years of exile. Their departure from America was the end of a dream and the beginning of a nightmare. Twain’s daughter Susy, who had remained in America, died of bacterial meningitis at age 24. Then Livy died. Her loss unleashed Twain’s anger at pitiless fate, and his relationships with his two surviving daughters became increasingly estranged. “Ah, this odious swindle, human life,” he swore, after his daughter Jean endured a major epileptic seizure.
“In most lives there arrives a mellowing, a lovely autumnal calm that overtakes even the stormiest personalities,” Chernow writes. “In Twain’s case, it was exactly the reverse: his emotions intensified, his indignation at injustice flared ever more hotly, his rage became almost rabid.” He continued to write and make appearances, drawing huge crowds, honing his image as a white-suited, cigar-chomping seer. But he also became self-indulgent and self-isolating, assisted by a poorly paid helper, Isabel Lyon, who took over most aspects of his life, an arrangement that was a prescription for disaster. His main companions were his “angelfish,” prepubescent girls he arranged to keep company with (Chernow makes a strong case that there was no sexual abuse in this arrangement), but his retreat into a second childhood couldn’t shield him from the final, catastrophic family loss that came shortly before his own death.
The downward trajectory of Twain’s life shadows his story in elements of Greek tragedy. Twain was a cauldron of creativity and often courage, speaking for Black equality and the suffrage movement, and against anti-Chinese harassment, colonialism and kings. But in his final years, he allowed grief and bitterness to swamp his life, and one wonders at how such a brilliant man could have such little understanding of himself. At 1,200 pages, this is not a book for the casual reader, and Chernow never quite gets to the core of the contradictions in Twain’s conflicted soul. But he tells the whole story, in all its glory and sorrow.
“Mark Twain” is a masterful exploration of the magnificent highs and unutterable lows of an American literary genius. Twain himself once said that “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” But this one feels like the truth of one man’s star-crossed life.
Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.
Take note: If you have any anxiety about flying, director James Madigan’s “Fight or Flight” will not be for you. But if a cheap and cheerful one-setting action thriller à la “Bullet Train” featuring one of the preeminent heartthrobs of the Y2K era is up your alley, well then belly up to this (airport) bar. The flick isn’t a masterpiece, not even a vulgar one, but it’s cheeky and entertaining enough in its giddy hyper-violence, thanks almost entirely to the star turn of Josh Hartnett, who has proved during his recent renaissance that he’s especially great in bozo mode.
Hartnett was the brooding bad boy in movies like “The Faculty” and “The Virgin Suicides,” which rocketed him to stardom in the late ’90s. But in recent years, his career has been reinvigorated, playing characters like “Boy Sweat Dave” in Guy Ritchie’s “Wrath of Man,” and turning in especially delicious work in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap.” For “Fight or Flight,” Hartnett looks straight out of the 2000s with his bleached hair and cargo shorts, the only difference is that he’s now unleashed, freed from those moody shackles: wild-eyed and frequently covered in fake blood the vibrant hue of strawberry jam.
Indeed, “Fight or Flight” wouldn’t work without his fizzy central performance that brings an edge of mania to the absurd premise, which is essentially “Assassins on a Plane.” The script, by Brooks McLaren and “Shazam” actor D.J. Cotrona, draws on the kind of “John Wick”-style story that the action franchise perfected when it posed the question: What if there was a bounty on a hit man’s head? “Fight or Flight” borrows the conceit and sets it in a confined, high-altitude setting, taking a humorous tone for its thrills.
Hartnett plays a down-on-his luck drifter named Lucas, who wakes up in Bangkok with a hangover, a black eye and his hated ex Katherine (Katee Sackhoff) calling him for a favor. A high-level security professional, Lucas is her last option after a hacker known as Ghost has stolen billions in cryptocurrency following a terrorist attack. Katherine needs Lucas to get on the same plane in order to deliver the hacker into custody (alive), and he’s the only one she knows on the ground at the moment. When he boards the flight, he’s not aware that a bounty on Ghost’s head has spread across the dark web and thus, the rest of the passengers are mostly assassins, looking to make an easy buck.
And so, aviation mayhem ensues, as Lucas fights off a coterie of bad guys through a haze of drugs and liquor. He has his own reasons for wanting to complete the task — events in his past that explain why he ended up on his journey to the heart of darkness through the bottom of a whiskey bottle in Southeast Asia. They are honorable, of course, and when we meet Ghost, we discover motivations that are similarly altruistic, if a bit shallowly written.
The filmmakers would rather focus on the outlandish violence anyway. Hartnett holds his own up and down the aisles, through the cargo area and into the bathroom, making use of the space and tools within his vicinity. But it’s more fun to watch his face move than his body, his crazed eyes and tight grins delivering the high-wire tension. He has great chemistry with a feisty flight attendant (Charithra Chandran) and faces every foe with a gritted-teeth intensity and a sense of genuine surprise whenever he bests one. Madigan is fond of the trick that is setting particularly bloody sequences to high-energy, tonally mismatched tunes — Hartnett bashes and stabs his way through everything from punk to polka.
But then the already goofy “Flight or Flight” takes a turn to the insanely cartoonish as it begins its descent, into a tangle of hallucinatory madness, unearned twists and mind-boggling cliffhangers. It’s a true Looney Tune with a shocking amount of digital blood. The film almost entirely squanders whatever appeal it may have churned up, except it all happens so fast. Surprisingly, Hartnett’s Lucas hasn’t worn out his welcome, even if the movie around him has fallen apart midair. Ergo, the old truism has never been truer: When it comes to “Fight or Flight,” your mileage may vary.
Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.
‘Fight or Flight’
Rated: R, for strong bloody violence, language throughout and some drug material
The sardonic meme phrase “Are men okay?” gets a bleakly amusing yet quietly devastating workover in Joel Potrykus’ “Vulcanizadora,” about a pair of downtrodden dudes on a disturbingly consequential journey into the woods near Lake Michigan. In its focused glimpse into a strange, funny-sad friendship, it’s almost mesmerizingly nonjudgmental as it treks to a very dark place.
That doesn’t mean “Vulcanizadora” lacks a point of view. Potrykus’ cinematic playground — forged in small-scale curios like “Buzzard” and “Relaxer” — is the stagnant air of failure surrounding a certain kind of shameless, embittered, immature guy for whom life’s richest challenges are video-game levels and petty pranks. Mel Brooks famously contextualized our perspective on misfortune when he said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” But Potrykus, whose oeuvre of slacker micro-apocalypses has become as distinctive as anyone’s in the DIY indie realm, seems intent on finding a discomfiting if poetic space between those poles, where your snickers might be colored by a slight repugnance, and at times you’ll stare as you would at a half-squished insect still trying to move.
“Vulcanizadora” is a 10-years-later follow-up to “Buzzard” — because the word “sequel” almost sounds too materialistically mercenary for such lo-fi fare as this. But knowing that may not be necessary, because as the story’s humans come into view from the leafy serenity of Adam J. Minnick’s 16mm cinematography, it doesn’t take long to grasp who Marty, played by longtime Potrykus collaborator Joshua Burge, and motormouth Derek (Potrykus) are: inexperienced campers, committed weirdos, close pals, stunted juveniles and men on a mission to fulfill an obligation they’ve made to each other.
The details of their pact aren’t initially clear, but the journey seems tilted toward appeasing Derek’s junky pleasures: bottle rockets, martial arts play-acting, swigging Jaeger from a canteen, porn mags. Marty, meanwhile, hollow-eyed and churlish about straying from their objective, seems haunted with guilt after a recent stint in jail for setting a building on fire. (Marty’s deteriorating life of small-time criminality was the loose narrative of “Buzzard,” although it’s best known for a long take of him messily eating spaghetti that could almost qualify as dirtbag performance art.)
Burge is a singular screen presence, like an R. Crumb misfit made real, and it’s almost touching how much faith Potrykus has in the awkward majesty of staying on his face so that Marty’s sour desperation tips us over from wanting to laugh at him to feeling sorry for his misery. But Potrykus, whose character was mostly a punching bag in “Buzzard,” also gives himself a chance to make this a real two-hander when the vibrating Derek’s own regrets eventually come to the surface — he’s got a 5-year-old son he knows he’s ill-suited to be a real father to — and we see the lost man inside the arrested adolescent. Potrykus makes a psychologically revealing meal out of every nervous interjection of Derek’s until they become animalistic and eventually sorrowful.
Flush with emotion after expressing some of that deep-set pain and perhaps trying to stave off a no-turning-back reality, Derek tries to convince his friend he feels better getting everything out. But Marty’s right there to let him know that tomorrow he’ll feel bad all over again. And that feels real too, as if it were this fable’s slap-you-awake moral.
But then, on the lake’s gleaming shore, “Vulcanizadora” reveals its truest colors with a horrifying, absurd twist of fate for these two that, if not exactly unpredictable, kicks off a final act of smudgy, eccentric, farcical grace about the complicated bonds of friendship. The ending’s a downer, all right, but you might just smile too. Then feel bad about it. Then chuckle. Which is when you realize Potrykus has you right where he wants you.
The natural world is aswirl in “Life of Pi,” a marvelously inventive stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker Prize-winning novel. This pageant of puppetry includes a flutter of butterflies, a goat with a plaintive bleat, a menagerie of wild animals and, at one point, a school of glowing fish.
Rather than try to compete with the technological thrills of the 2012 film that earned director Ang Lee an Academy Award, this national tour of “Life of Pi” succeeds through magical simplicity. My senses were dazzled when I first saw the show on Broadway in 2023, but my heart was completely won over at the Ahmanson Theatre, where this production opened on Wednesday.
Taha Mandviwala, left, Anna Leigh Gortner, Shiloh Goodin and Toussaint Jeanlouis in the national tour of Life of Pi” at the Ahmanson.
(Evan Zimmerman)
The story revolves around the survival at sea of a 17-year-old boy named Pi Patel (a mesmerizing Taha Mandviwala) after the Japanese cargo ship transporting his family sinks en route to Canada. The souls lost on board include Pi’s zookeeper father’s fantastical collection of animals. In a lifeboat with barely any supplies for 227 days, Pi somehow manages to escape the fate that leaves his parents, sister and most (but not all) of his bestial companions at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
How did he pull off the miracle? That is the question posed at the start of Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation by two visitors to Pi’s hospital room: Mr. Okamoto (Alan Ariano) from the Japanese Ministry of Transport and Lulu Chen (Mi Kang), from the Canadian Embassy, both of whom have traveled to Mexico, where the boy was washed ashore.
Pi, whose mathematical name is derived from Piscine, the French word for swimming pool, is recovering from his near-death journey. Mr. Okamoto, charged with preparing an official report, is determined to find out the exact circumstances of the shipwreck. But Pi is only able to relate the fanciful version of events that allowed him to survive for so long at sea without food or drinkable water.
Taha Mandviwala,left, and Sorab Wadia and the national tour cast of “Life of Pi” at the Ahmanson.
(Evan Zimmerman)
The staging transitions in dreamlike fashion from the hospital to Pondicherry, India, where Pi grew up in a happy, hectic ferment of adolescence. Chakrabarti turns Pi’s teasing older brother, Ravi, in the novel into an older sister named Rani (Sharayu Mahale), a math whiz, in the play. The institutional medical setting becomes the background for a tale that doesn’t finely distinguish between memory and imagination, one realm bleeding freely into the next.
Fortunately, the scenic design of Tim Hatley, who also did the costumes, isn’t bound by the traditional laws of physics. The perfectly adjudged video and animation design of Andrzej Goulding, the magnificent lighting of Tim Lutkin and Tim Deiling and the propulsive sound of Carolyn Downing puts time and space under the able command of director Max Webster.
Pi’s family is moving to escape an increasingly chaotic society. “This government shows us bad behavior has no consequences,” Pi’s father (Sorab Wadia) laments to his wife (Jessica Angleskhan), in a line that lands differently today than it did two years ago on Broadway.
Pragun Bhardwaj, left, Taha Mandviwala and the national tour cast of “Life of Pi” at the Ahmanson.
(Evan Zimmerman)
When the opportunity to relocate to Canada arrives, the choice is obvious but no less painful for being so. The animals, having no one else to care for them, will have to emigrate too, transforming the cargo vessel into a modern-day Noah’s Ark.
An orangutan named Orange Juice, a hyena beyond the reach of human feeling and, crucially, a royal Bengal tiger with an imperious mien named Richard Parker have prominent roles in Pi’s recollection of his harrowing voyage after the shipwreck. These animals, the creation of inspired puppet designer Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, are fluidly deployed by a team of graceful puppeteers, who preserve the essential dignity of these creatures without effacing their ferocity.
The sight of Richard Parker, a growling behemoth of musculature and whiskers, is the most fearsome. Pi, who feels at one with the natural world, has to be taught to be afraid of a creature that could end his life with a single swipe of his claw. (The harsh lesson, administered by his father, reaffirms Lord Tennyson’s image of nature as “red in tooth and claw.”)
Taha Mandviwala and the national tour cast of “Life of Pi.”
(Evan Zimmerman)
Although raised Hindu, Pi partakes of religious services from many sects. His mother is bemused to hear that her son attended mosque, temple and church on the same day. There’s a holy fool quality to the boy, who is the subject of teasing. But Pi is precociously enlightened, his innocence not a problem to be rectified but a quality to be reverenced.
In New York, Chakrabarti’s book struck me as clumsy in places, particularly in the first act. But I had no such misgiving at the Ahmanson, whether because of some slight editing or perhaps just a smoother handling of the setup moments.
Some might resist the work’s spiritual earnestness, but I’d say it’s an ideal time to consider more deeply our belief system. If “Life of Pi” has a moral to impart, it’s that what we choose to believe has as profound an effect on our experience of reality as what we rationally know to be true.
Puppeteers Anna Leigh Gortner, Shiloh Goodin and Toussaint Jeanlouis in the national tour of “Life of Pi” at the Ahmanson.
(Evan Zimmerman)
The play, following the novel’s lead, is a parable of overcoming. Pi confronts tragedy but refuses to lose what gives his life meaning. He makes sacrifices that he never thought he’d have to make. A devout vegetarian, he is forced to capture and kill a swimming turtle, then share the meat and blood with Richard Parker, a carnivore without conscience.
“Life of Pi” doesn’t dwell on the deaths of Pi’s loved ones. A cloak of magical realism is thrown over aspects of the story that might prove too disturbing. But the inexorable facts of mortality are glimpsed in the way the animals are depicted onstage.
As hunger overtakes Pi and Richard Parker, the tiger’s skeleton starts to call attention to itself. The turtle is devoured before our eyes in a way that, while cheekily theatricalized, doesn’t leave any doubt that the price of this meal is murder.
The national tour cast of “Life of Pi” at the Ahmanson.
(Evan Zimmerman)
But the darkness of the tale helps us see the shimmering beauty of the universe that keeps Pi from succumbing to a watery grave. The stage transforms into a planetarium of wonder. Are the meerkats that appear near the end of the story real or a hallucination? What difference does it make when Pi sees them as clearly as he holds a conversation with Richard Parker?
When he finally offers Mr. Okamoto a starker account of what happened to him, a chronicle affirming his father’s long-held view that man is the most dangerous animal of all, the lesson of “Life of Pi” is thrown into stark relief: Truth is not necessarily the same thing as wisdom.
Mandviwala’s performance as Pi makes this adventure tale both exhilarating and emotionally profound. In circumnavigating distant seas, this majestic production recovers some lost treasure of childhood.
‘Life of Pi’
LOS ANGELES Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays; ends June 1
We keep hearing that we’re in a male-loneliness epidemic. The agonizing and hilarious “Friendship” makes it feel like the Black Death. Written and directed by debuting filmmaker Andrew DeYoung (TV’s “PEN15,”“Shrill”), this bromance trembles as guy meets man-child, guy dumps man-child and man-child burns everything down. It’s a reflection of the adult struggle to make new friends as seen through a spook-house mirror.
Tim Robinson plays Craig, a dad who is delighted to pal around with his new neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), until a boys’ night ends in a punch and, eventually, someone calling the cops. Craig’s grief over his lost BFF makes him fume with denial, anger, bargaining and depression. Acceptance is impossible. Spontaneous nose bleeds happen twice.
Elsewhere, Robinson has become the poster boy for male social anxiety: the pariah who is so flummoxed by the rules of polite chitchat that he crosses the line and bursts into tears. On his cult sketch show “I Think You Should Leave,” he’s won two consecutive Emmys for the way he layers vulnerability under anger, like the skit in which he gets himself kicked out of an adults-only ghost tour and blubbers, “I don’t know what is going on, but somehow our wires got crossed!” Robinson has never claimed that his characters are on the spectrum, but autistic viewers have made fan videos about how much they relate to his confusion.
Only 5’ 8”, Robinson can appear threateningly huge. Choices that would diminish other actors — oversized jackets, hunched shoulders, public mockery — only make him puff up bigger. When Craig senses humiliation on the horizon, he goes on the attack. He wants desperately to fit in, but he’d rather interrupt, challenge and correct than let the tension relax. “Friendship” looks and feels so much like a feature-length extension of “ITYSL” that it’s worth pointing out that DeYoung came up with the script idea in 2018 before that show existed. The movie would be a totally different animal if it starred, say, Adam Sandler or Will Ferrell. Perhaps working in television has trained DeYoung to adapt to other’s sensibilities before insisting on his own.
“Friendship” surrounds Robinson with normalcy: filler talk, obliging laughter and the kind of handsome lighting you’d see in a home-insurance commercial. Craig somehow has a lovely wife (Kate Mara) and believable son (the always engaging Jack Dylan Grazer). Mara’s sensible Tami sets up the tone in the opening scene, which takes place at a couples’ support group. She delivers the kind of halting, relatable monologue about sexual dysfunction and malaise that you could find in an earnest indie movie. Craig, naturally, quashes the mood. “I’m orgasming fine,” he blurts.
It’s impossible to imagine why Tami ever agreed to marry him in the first place, as she chooses to spend most of her time with her ex (Josh Segarra), a hunky and sensitive fireman. Meanwhile, Craig swoons over Austin, a local weatherman whose hang-out ideas — mushroom harvesting, urban spelunking, starting a punk rock garage band — give Craig genuine joy. No one’s ever wanted to be his friend before. (Craig is so tough to be around that we’re more likely to side with his bullies, like Eric Rahill, who has a great bit part as a nasty co-worker.) When Craig spots Austin cracking a corny one-liner on the nightly news, he smiles like Santa Claus is real.
Austin’s lush mustache and hammy Southern drawl aren’t quite in sync with the tone; Rudd seems stuck in the Ferrell version of the film. I’m fine with the idea that Austin is a bit of a phony who pretends he doesn’t own a cellphone. But when he admits to the lie, nothing happens. (At least the fib leads to several scenes at a phone store with Billy Bryk’s very funny clerk.) The film doesn’t really care about anyone else’s psychology; it wants to keep Craig marooned on Oddball Island. Empathy would be too easy.
Still, Rudd and Robinson’s scenes together are great. They get laughs even going through the ritual of ordering a sandwich at Subway. And Rudd’s made an inverted version of this movie before, 2009’s sweeter and raunchier “I Love You, Man,” where he played the wallflower with a buddy (Jason Segel) who teaches him to scream. There won’t be any learning here, although Craig tries and fails to mimic Austin in his absence.
Robinson didn’t invent this kind of cringe comedy. One of the most sublime examples of the form traces back to Anton Chekhov’s wordless short play, “The Sneeze,” a proto-“SNL” skit about a man who accidentally wheezes on the back of a government official’s neck and in his escalating desperation to normalize his oopsie suffers a breakdown and dies. But “Friendship” feels exactly right for exactly right now. Cultural norms are shifting just as in-person communities are breaking down. At any given second in public, you could go from invisible to starring in a viral video that puts you on blast.
It’s hard to be a human. No wonder Craig feels more like a bunch of possums in a skin suit. By everything I’ve seen of Robinson off-camera (he doesn’t seem to enjoy press), he’s a lovely man raising two teenagers with his high school sweetheart. He plays gauche on our behalf.
Although this is his first major movie role after his show’s breakout success, I can see him on that clown-to-thespian trajectory that ends with an Oscar to go with his Emmy. For now, however, I want to apologize to DeYoung. He won’t get the credit he deserves for this terrific comic torment because it just feels like another Tim Robinson masterclass in self-immolation. Maybe that’s an awkward thing to say. Maybe it’s fine.
By way of introduction, “Pavements,” director Alex Ross Perry’s experimental hybrid documentary about the ’90s indie-rock paragons Pavement, refers to the group as “The World’s Most Important and Influential Band,” a label that seems intended to embarrass them and their self-effacing lead singer, Stephen Malkmus. Pavement was never U2 or Nirvana. Nothing about them suggests a term as grandiose as “important,” much less stirs the soul like Kurt Cobain, whose nakedly personal lyrics are a far cry from Malkmus’s high-end refrigerator magnet poetry, with its witty wordplay and off-kilter juxtapositions.
And yet, let us whisper this part as quietly as possible: Perry sincerely believes in Pavement’s era-defining greatness. And with “Pavements,” he’s made a film that nobly and triumphantly searches for a way to capture the band’s essence. That doesn’t mean he finds it easily, because the rough edges of this story could never be buffed out into a biopic like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or an hour-long episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” What Perry has achieved here is perhaps best expressed by the name of Pavement’s 1992 breakthrough album, “Slanted and Enchanted.”
It’s hard to guess how non-fans might find their way through “Pavements,” because even devotees will need to find their footing in this conceptual cat-herding project, which patches together a thumbnail history of the band through several distinct angles at once. In the present day, Perry documents the lead-up to the band’s robust 2022 reunion tour, only the second time they’ve hit the road together since their unceremonious breakup in the year 2000. (Scott Kannberg, Pavement’s second guitarist and vocalist known as “Spiral Stairs,” remembers being so cash-strapped before a 2010 reunion that he was about to take a job as a Seattle bus driver.) Though Malkmus has maintained much of his lean, boyish West Coast cool, even edging toward late middle age, the quintet looks older and wiser, no longer burdened by their uncomfortable relationship with success.
Pavement burned out like any other rock band, but a conventional rise-and-fall treatment wouldn’t suit them. Folding their history and legacy on top of each other like the layers of a choux pastry, Perry and his editor, the documentary filmmaker Robert Greene, combine the tour footage with three other events, each building a piece of whimsical mythology. First, there’s Pavements 1933-2002, an international exhibition that features artwork, Malkmus’ old notebooks and other ephemera, like a clipped toenail from original drummer Gary Young. Then there’s two staged endeavors, an off-Broadway musical called “Slanted! Enchanted!” and a faux-Hollywood biopic titled “Range Life,” featuring a cast of recognizable young faces, led by “Stranger Things’” Joe Keery as Malkmus. Pavement never quite penetrated the mainstream, but Perry frees himself to imagine the band as a platinum-selling cultural force, even if he has to rewrite their history by hand.
Though “Pavements” doesn’t like to linger in one place very long, it does patch together a rough chronology of the band’s history from its suburban roots in Stockton, Calif., to its primordial iterations at the University of Virginia to the early singles and EPs that led to five full-length albums that spanned the 1990s. Perry and Greene let specific cultural moments speak for themselves: a humbling tour opening for Sonic Youth, Malkmus taking shots at Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots in “Range Life,” Beavis and Butt-Head making fun of the video for “Rattled by the Rush” and a miserable afternoon slot at Lollapalooza 1995, when one bored crowd in West Virginia started slinging mud at them.
But “Pavements” does its best to yada-yada through the bullet points and spend as much time as possible spinning fantasies. To that end, the behind-the-scenes clips that Perry offers of his Pavement musical are the most delightful in the movie, just for the counterintuitive thrill of watching theater kids sing and dance through a catalog that would seem to defy their essential earnestness. To hear a low-key, evocative track like 1997’s “Fin” performed by a stage full of pristine vocalists validates Perry’s belief that Malkmus’ songs “can transcend their original form.” You find yourself laughing over a montage of fresh-faced zoomers trying their hand at lyrics like “You can never quarantine the past,” and then you might admit, with equal astonishment, that it actually sounds great.
By contrast, the movie-within-a-movie, “Range Life,” isn’t a movie at all, but a ruse that turns into an elaborate parody of Method acting. Perry frees himself to explore the process of simply preparing for a role in the abstract, not unlike Greene’s 2016 documentary “Kate Plays Christine,” which followed a real-life actor, Kate Lyn Sheil, as she researched the tragic life of newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on air. To play the famously enigmatic Malkmus, Kerry goes to great and often hilariously absurd lengths to pin the man down, including a couple of visits to the Whitney Museum, where Malkmus once worked as a security guard, and on a quest to take a photograph of the singer’s tongue to better capture the mechanics of his “vocal fry.” Gazing at an iPhone shot of the inside of Malkmus’ mouth, Kerry solemnly remarks, “All the work that I’ve been doing comes from this place.”
At a little over two hours long, “Pavements” can feel a little like the band’s notoriously misshapen 1995 opus “Wowee Zowee,” a double album with only three sides. Yet the perfectly imperfect shape of “Pavements” is similarly tailored to those who appreciate the band’s creative unruliness. It also feels like an apt companion to Perry’s last fiction feature, 2018’s “Her Smell,” which strongly alludes to the life of Hole lead singer Courtney Love and pays off a chaotic two-hour drama with a breathtakingly lovely final act.
Hole and Pavement shared that main-stage lineup at Lollapalooza ’95 — Love got to play at night to a more engaged crowd — and between these two films, Perry has told a prismatic story of the “Alternative Nation” decade, when figures as disparate as Love and Malkmus were affecting the same generation. They may not have overlapped comfortably, but Perry picks up on their harmonies. Yet there’s still a vast distance between Love’s raw, arena-friendly confessionals and Malkmus’ jagged phrasing and artful deconstruction. “Pavements” is essential nonsense, preserving the band’s enigmatic allure through the same mix of irony and misdirection. It slips pleasingly through your grasp.
‘Pavements’
Not rated
Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday, May 9 at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles
“Forever…,” the 1975 Judy Blume YA novel about teenagers losing their virginity, has inspired a Netflix series with changes you’re free to regard as substantial or superficial. Premiering Thursday, it’s a very sweet show, full of characters whose differing needs and ideas sometimes put them at odds, but who are for the most part very nice. The worst you can say about any of them is that they are clueless or confused in the way that people, especially young people, with their incompletely formed brains — a scientific fact someone raises helpfully — often are.
I’ve never read any of Blume’s books, though I have read reviews and synopses of “Forever…,” and visited Reddit groups where contributors recall secretly passing the novel around in high, middle or even elementary school — Blume (already a kid-lit superstar for “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”) plus sex being an irresistible combination: adolescent hot stuff, mid-’70s style. I can report at least that in both the novel and the series, a character has named his penis Ralph.
The TV show, created by Mara Brock Akil (“Girlfriends”), cuts the ellipses from the book’s title. The characters are Black, a change that is both superficial and substantial. It honors the shape and intent of the novel while adding issues not on Blume’s agenda regarding Black culture and advancement. More significantly, the series has been set in the near-present day — 2018 — and moved from quiet suburban New Jersey to sophisticated, sprawling Los Angeles. The first episode is directed by Regina King (“One Night in Miami”).
Things have changed in the half-century since “Forever…” was published, even subtracting the years the series backtracks. Not that teenagers weren’t falling in love and having sex — or not falling in love but having sex — in the year that Captain & Tennille released “Love Will Keep Us Together.” But the texting and blocking, the free-for-all backwaters of the internet and the carnal shenanigans that color contemporary TV teendom do put a different complexion on growing up. Of course, young people can be having a lot of sex while not, in the strict formulation, “having sex,” if you get my meaning. Yet a show about a couple of high school kids who, whatever else, have never Gone All the Way, and take the prospect seriously, can feel like a throwback to more innocent times — and that is not a bad feeling at all.
Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) are our young lovers, who meet, or meet again — they had known each other in elementary school — at a New Year’s Eve party, thrown by Keisha’s rich but not snooty friend Chloe (Ali Gallo), the series’ only regular white character. (There is fondue, the whitest of all foods.) Justin and Keisha come from different sides of the tracks , or “the 10,” in L.A. psychogeography; his family has a big modern mansion in the hills, while she lives with her mother, Shelly (Xosha Roquemore), in an apartment down around Slauson and Crenshaw.
Playing Justin’s (Michael Cooper Jr.) parents are Wood Harris and Karen Pittman.
(Elizabeth Morris / Netflix)
Keisha is an A student (and track star) whose friends call her Urkel; her mother struggles to pay for the Catholic school to which she’s recently transferred. A full-ride scholarship to Howard University is in her sights, and there’s no reason to think that she won’t get it, even with a sex tape that’s gone around.
Justin, who has “a learning difference” and problems with “executive function,” struggles in school, but his mother, Dawn (Karen Pittman), a successful executive — it’s one of those jobs that requires barking into a phone while walking quickly through a room — has supplied him with tutors and wants big things from him; he’s not sure what he wants. (Mother and son alike may be putting perhaps too much faith in Justin’s ability to shoot three-pointers when it comes to college admissions.) His father, Eric (Wood Harris), who cooks for the family and runs restaurants — including, in this TV reality, the real-life Linden, a Hollywood center of Black society — and never went to college, is more easygoing. (“Life works things out when it’s supposed to,” says he.)
The kids are honest and sincere, not stuck up, not phony. Keisha seems a little more on top of things, life-wise, though she will jump to conclusions. Justin, less interested in whatever high-powered business future his mother imagines for him, dreams of a career in music, which in this context means “making beats.” Though Simone and Cooper are not actual teenagers, they are fresh-faced and radiant and youthful; they’re pretty adorable. Their parents, too, are likable, loving, hard-working people, a little bossy now and then, but genuinely concerned for their children. As in the real world, the kids handle some of their business better than their elders, and sometimes the elders prove wiser than the kids. (Not too often though — this is a series aimed at young viewers, who won’t have come for a lecture.)
Keisha and Justin bumble into and out of a bad first date, but before too long, he’s texting her, “think I woke up with a girlfriend can u confirm” and she is replying “how can I be ur girlfriend if u haven’t asked me.” (He will.) Things get better and worse and better, happier and sadder and so on, as the couple travels through eight episodes of mostly ordinary drama — jealousy and insecurity, mopiness and mooniness, desolation and elation, miscommunication and reconciliation — on the way to maturity. They’ll get into minor trouble with school and parents. The infamous sex tape — something shot by Keisha’s former boyfriend, Christian (Xavier Mills), but distributed by an offscreen character — leads to a conversation or two, but is more or less old news by the time story begins. Justin isn’t bothered.
Interestingly for a modern teen show, nobody’s getting drunk or doing drugs, apart from a couple of pot-smoking adults and flirty old friend Shannon (Zora Casebere), who comes on to Justin during the family’s annual summer decampment to Martha’s Vineyard. “I want you to be my first,” she says, “It would be awkward and we would laugh through it.” He thinks love should have something to do with it.
As a coming-of-age story, it’s more about the electrifying present than the unwritten future, however often that future comes up for discussion. Ultimately, it leads our heroes to the common enough question of what happens to their union after graduation. Not to give anything away, but anyone who’s survived their youth will understand that the title is ironic — or, with Blume’s ellipses, reattached for the title of the final episode, at least inconclusive.
Sacramento — Facebook executives and a New York developer are hoping that their major development projects could get built years sooner than planned under last-minute legislation at the state Capitol.
The tech company and Millennium Partners, which are each proposing large, mixed-use developments in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, respectively, are asking for relief under the California Environmental Quality Act, commonly known as CEQA, which forces developers to disclose and reduce a project’s effects on the environment. The measure, Senate Bill 699, would force any CEQA lawsuit against a project to wrap up within nine months — potentially saving years of costly litigation.
If it passes both houses of the Legislature before lawmakers adjourn for the year Sept. 15, the shortened court-decision timeline would be available to any developer with a project that costs more than $100 million to build, provides union-level wages for construction workers and meets strict targets for greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy. Developers would apply to Gov. Jerry Brown, who decides if the projects qualify for the faster court decision.
In July, Facebook announced an expansion of its Menlo Park headquarters to include grocery, retail, office space and housing, an effort the company says is needed to address the state’s housing affordability problems as well as a lack of amenities surrounding its offices.
“Facebook supports extending the ability of the governor to ensure timely review of environmentally responsible projects that create economic opportunity and community benefits,” said Ann Blackwood, Facebook’s head of public policy for Western states, in a statement.
The Millennium Hollywood project, proposed by New York-based Millennium Partners, has a long history. The Los Angeles City Council approved the building in 2013, despite concerns over its proximity to an earthquake fault line. But a Los Angeles Superior Court judge tossed that approval in 2015 through a CEQA lawsuit from nearby residents upset over the traffic the development would generate. At the time, developers proposed 39- and 35-story towers. No representative of Millennium Partners was immediately available to comment on the legislation or whether the project had changed.
Lawmakers first authorized the shortened court-decision deadline for major projects in 2011 but included in the law a provision for it to expire. SB 699’s author is state Sen. Cathleen Galgiani (D-Stockton), who also wrote successful legislation last year extending the 2011 law through 2019. This year’s bill would continue the measure through 2021, and a spokesman for Galgiani confirmed Millennium Partners was pushing for the legislation.
In the past year, Brown has certified that two other large mixed-use projects in Hollywood, one at the corner of Yucca Street and Argyle Avenue and the redevelopment of the Crossroads of the World complex, can receive the shortened legal review.
Efforts to amend CEQA or exempt projects from its rules have spurred perpetual debate at the Capitol, though attempts at making wholesale changes have sputtered. Environmental and union interests are staunch CEQA supporters, crediting the law with preserving the state’s natural beauty and providing an avenue to push for higher worker pay and other labor rules.
What does ultimately get passed often is limited in scope, including the measure speeding court-decision deadlines. Of the eight projects that have qualified previously, none so far have resolved any lawsuits within the nine months prescribed in the bill. Still, developers have credited the legislation with quickening construction of their projects.
Under that measure, Senate Bill 789, any transit project related to the Olympic bid would be exempt from CEQA entirely, meaning the projects wouldn’t be at risk for a lawsuit, and the Clippers arena would get the same shortened court-decision deadline outlined in SB 699. The arena would also receive help from an additional provision that would halt a judge’s ability to block the project, even if the judge found its environmental review didn’tadequately study traffic problems or had other flaws.
