Latest news with #Ulman
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ulman to step down in June as Maryland Democratic Party chair
Maryland Democratic Party Chair Ken Ulman. (Photo by Emily Condon/Capital News Service) Maryland Democratic Party Chair Ken Ulman, a longtime player on the state political scene, announced Wednesday night that he plans to resign effective June 13. Gov. Wes Moore (D) intends to nominate Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman (D) to replace Ulman when the state Democratic Central Committee next meets at its regularly scheduled meeting late next month — shortly after the state party holds its annual fundraising gala June 12 in Baltimore County. The party's first vice chair, Charlene Dukes, does not intend to seek the top job but will remain in her current post. Ulman, a former Howard County executive, has told top Democrats that he wants to return full time to his development consulting company, Margrave Strategies, which is involved in several high-profile economic development projects across the state. He has served as state party chair since November 2023 Ulman announced his intention to resign in a Zoom call Wednesday evening with county chairs, before sharing it during a meeting with the state party's trustees — an advisory group of top donors. 'I am grateful to Ken for his willingness to lead us through an intense and demanding election,' Moore said in a statement. If Pittman is elected state chair — and he is unlikely to be the only candidate for the position next month — he too would split his time between his full-time gig as county executive and the state party post. Moore called Pittman 'the right leader for this moment.' Pittman is termed out of office in December 2026 and has been pondering his next political move. Heading the state party would enable him to stay in the political arena — though he has also been mentioned as a possible candidate to succeed veteran U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-5th) whenever Hoyer decides to end his 60-year political career. 'With an all-out assault on our state and our values underway from Washington, D.C., I know Steuart Pittman will put his experience and his moral clarity to work to defend our state, fight back against the Trump administration, and ensure Democrats win elections,' Moore's statement said Ulman and Pittman did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. The state party in the 2026 election cycle will be preoccupied with reelecting Moore – who could face a tough race, especially if former Gov. Larry Hogan (R) runs again – and other statewide elected officials, who should be on firmer political ground. Party leaders are also determined to field a strong challenger against the state's lone Republican member of Congress, Rep. Andy Harris (R-1st); Jake Day, the secretary at Maryland's Department of Housing and Community Development, is actively exploring a bid. Ulman's looming departure from the Maryland Democratic Party ends a short-lived reentry into the state political fray. Ulman, 51, was considered a rising political star after four years on the Howard County Council and eight years as county executive. He was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014, losing in an upset to a Republican ticket headed by Hogan Ulman launched his development firm shortly after that election and, before becoming state chair, worked on the fringes of politics, using his contacts to firm up development projects. As state chair, Ulman helped now-U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D) win her first term in 2024, kept the Democrats' 7-1 advantage in the state's congressional delegation, helped defeat several conservative school board candidates throughout the state, and raised more than $5.5 million for the state party. Pittman was a political novice when he ran for Anne Arundel executive in 2018, when better-known Democrats chose to skip the race. He ousted Republican incumbent Steve Schuh in an upset. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX A former community organizer in Chicago, where he met a young Barack Obama, and in Des Moines, Iowa, he has proven to be an unconventional politician but has also been an effective messenger on policy and big-picture political matters. The state party is having its annual gala on June 12 at Martin's West, a catering hall that regularly hosts political events. U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), who, like Moore, is a potential presidential candidate in 2028, is the featured speaker. Hoyer's annual bull roast is scheduled for the next night in Mitchellville. Attendees may be looking for clues as to whether the congressman, who turns 86 the next day, will decide to seek a 23rd full term in 2026.
Los Angeles Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Magic Farm,' viral video makers go off the grid but can't escape the algorithm
The prickly comedy 'Magic Farm' is a trip to rural Argentina that feels like flipping through a carousel of ironic souvenir postcards. The latest bit of mischief by filmmaker Amalia Ulman ('El Planeta'), it's about how making the world smaller hasn't widened our curiosity as much as shrunk it into snarky bites — in short, it's about going everywhere and seeing nothing. Chloë Sevigny plays Edna, the host of a globe-trotting web series that seeks out human interest stories: Bolivian teenage exorcists, Mexican fashionistas in scimitar-shaped boots and now, a singer called Super Carlitos who dresses like a bunny and bops around a village called San Cristobal. The joke is that Edna and her production staff are fundamentally close-minded. Crew members Elena (Ulman), Jeff (Alex Wolff), Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Dave (Simon Rex) claim they make documentaries, but they really only want catchy headlines and traffic. (It may remind you of Vice Magazine, which covered the same Mexican footwear trend in a 2011 article titled 'Look at These F— Boots!') The film's own director, however, is a sharp and clever social critic who investigates insincerity. Ulman is something of an online anthropologist-slash-modern artist. Her 2014 breakout took place on Instagram, where she spent months pretending to be an aspiring L.A. 'It' girl — even faking a boob job — for a three-act tragedy she later called 'Excellences & Perfections.' Her pieces operate on three levels: the superficial, the sarcastic and, buried deep beneath those, an outrage that she holds tight to her chest. Fluent in posturing and hypocrisy, Ulman looks like an influencer and thinks like Luis Buñuel. She's always sniffing out the scam. Ulman also acts in 'Magic Farm' as Edna's producer, Elena, with a biography parallel to her own: Argentinian-born, Spanish-raised, cool and detached. Elena comes across as the most together, but what looks like serenity is actually disdain. As the only team member who speaks Spanish, Elena is aware that only she can keep the others from looking like the idiots that they are. She's often too lazy to bother. In her absence, Rex's Dave pleads at a desk clerk, 'Do you have vape charger para aquí?' The Super Carlito expedition is doomed to failure. The group isn't just in the wrong town — they're in the wrong country. (As is the way of things, Jeff dumps the blame on an offscreen intern he's schtupping.) Adding to the confusion, their on-site contact Marita (Abuela Marita) has disappeared, possibly in connection with her apocalyptic Christian temple. No one thinks to poke into this with a follow-up question like, 'She thinks the world is going to end? When?' Instead, these American Americans, as the Yankees call themselves, are distracted by the personal dramas they bring to this poor farmland. Justin, a sunny Dirk Diggler clone, has daddy issues that mushroom into a crush on Guillermo Jacubowicz's nameless hotel receptionist, a humble single father. Meanwhile, narcissistic heartbreaker Jeff snags the attention of San Cristobal's resident glamour girl Manchi (Camila del Campo), who spends her nights taking selfies for OnlyFans and her days scaling trees to get enough cell service to send them to her subscribers. It would be a mistake to assume the locals are victims. Their polite English only makes them sound accommodating — they've all got their own secrets and desires. Plus, the language gap works in Jeff's favor, with Manchi fantasizing about him in bed while she tunes into his voice on a podcast, pleasantly oblivious to how he's prattling on about a bad sushi dinner. Jacubowicz and Del Campo are amazing discoveries. He has the tender, shining eyes of an ingenue while Del Campo, who has a striking birthmark on her cheek, is a femme fatale able to hold her own against Wolff's selfish, useless playboy. Flopping around like a boiled noodle, Wolff should be too big for the movie. His performance is the loudest thing in it by an amplitude of 10. (When Edna accuses Jeff of taking too much of the horse tranquilizer ketamine, he whines, 'Maybe I am a pony!') But he and Ulman are having so much fun making fun of Jeff and the faux-woke wastrels he represents that his squawking nonsense comes to harmonize with Burke Battelle's score, a funky cacophony of synthesizers that sounds like someone bouncing on a duck. None of these journalists believe they're serving a higher purpose other than content farming. But Ulman has strung together a net of interesting observations: glances, insults, mistaken presumptions and gaslighting fibs. Nearly all of her characters — including the locals — are spending too much energy creating things for online consumption. They're all tangled up in a worldwide web. Every scene has a delight: Manchi stabbing balloons with a knife, Edna's out-of-place cloven-toed high heels, the lilt in Justin's voice as he smiles at a street mutt and says, 'What's up, dog?' Cinematographer Carlos Rigo and editor Arturo Sosa groove along with eye-catching colors and skateboard-video-style visuals, even inserting B-roll from a camera strapped to a horse's head and doing a dramatic zoom to a sheep. You might wonder if the acid-neon grass is too green. These pseudo-reporters won't notice. Pay attention to everything they ignore — the buzzing airplanes out of view, the offerings of bottled soda instead of water, the casual background conversations about cancer and death — and you'll spot that Ulman has seeded another story underneath her comic surface, one about how the people in this town are getting crushed by big business and bad government. It turns out there's plenty worth covering in San Cristobal. But Ulman is too skeptical to suggest these yahoos could redeem themselves by ferreting out the real problems happening in her home country. She has zero faith in their interest in real news and not much more in our own. What's the point of telling the truth if no one will click on it? And how smart to hide her own sincerity inside this marvelous romp.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Magic Farm' Review: A Droll Delight
A New York City documentary crew sets up shop in rural Argentina in 'Magic Farm,' an Americans-abroad satire that teeters between pop treat and indie trifle. It is the second feature from the writer, director and actress Amalia Ulman ('El Planeta'), who across her work shows a knack for droll humor, a soft spot for pretenders and a penchant for play. The story follows Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Elena (Ulman), crew members hoping to salvage a TV segment about quirky subcultures after a gaffe lands them in the wrong country. In the movie, Ulman makes use of a more famous cast — including Chloë Sevigny as a vexed TV anchor — although it is the film's lesser-known actors who stand out. Apollonio, as a man-child with a crush, is a wry delight, as is the newcomer Camila del Campo, who plays a pouting local coquette. Ingeniously simmering under the folly is a health crisis that has afflicted the agricultural area for decades. This is the film's joke: If the crew could only get their heads out of their rears, they would uncover a gonzo documentary gold mine. At points, 'Magic Farm' idles so heavily that one wonders whether Ulman suffered her own preproduction blunder, stranding her cast and crew in South America without the material to back up her vision. But by pairing the loose subject matter with a curlicued visual style — at one point, she straps the camera to a dog's head — Ulman suggests that she knows what she's doing.
