Latest news with #catharsis
ABC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Mountainhead review: First film from Succession creator promises 'eat the rich' but neglects to feed the audience
The "eat the rich" subgenre has been so well covered in the past decade that it's become overexposed. But the trope du jour does still offer a singular cinematic delight: watching entitled, horrible, rich people get what's coming to them. What: Four tech billionaires hide out in a palatial mansion while their creations tear the world apart. Starring: Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, Jason Schwartzman Directed by: Jesse Armstrong When: Streaming now on Max Likely to make you feel: like you've already seen this story Whether they end up bankrupt, castaways or as human s'mores, there is a catharsis to seeing billionaires suffer in fiction because they so rarely receive their comeuppance in real life. In Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's first foray into writing and directing a feature film, he asks: "What if I did an eat-the-rich film, but just give the audience 'the rich' part?" Mountainhead is a very long bottle episode of TV, set in the most expensive bottle you've ever seen. Tech creator Hugo 'Souper' Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) — short in both stature and standing (his net worth is less than $1 billion) — invites three of his closest frenemies to his steely, sprawling, secluded compound for a weekend of poker. Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) — net worth $63 billion — is the oldest of the bunch and he can feel it. Multiple doctors have diagnosed him with an incurable cancer which he rejects, dismissing his latest physician as a "simpleton". Venis 'Ven' Parish (Cory Michael Smith) — net worth $221 billion — has just pushed a frightening new AI-generative feature onto his omnipresent social media platform, Traam. Ven's actually only on the trip because he needs to schmooze Jeff Abredazi (Ramy Youssef) — net worth $59 billion and quickly climbing — owner of an AI company whose code way outstrips Traam's version. In a classic horse-before-the-cart move, Traam's AI isn't so great at sorting fact from fiction, leading to unverifiable videos that flare political tensions internationally. Ven needs Jeff's superior tech to fend off faceless federal forces that are putting pressure on Ven to fix his platform before fake videos tear the planet apart. Because all these man-child characters have the emotional intelligence of an egg, Ven can't quite muster the humility to ask for Jeff's help. As the quartet trade barbs and only semi-literate technobabble in Armstrong's trademark galloping, insult-a-minute dialogue, real-time disasters trickle in from their smartphones: Gangs in South America are killing innocents after deep fake videos called them informants; AI-generated deep fakes of ideologically fuelled violence have inflamed conflict between multiple countries. In response, the four men cast themselves as kings of the new world, indulging in casual debate over who is going to be installed as leader of which impoverished country. The world crises in Mountainhead were so true to life that Youssef says he found it difficult to differentiate between the horror filtering in from his prop phone and his real phone. "At a certain point, I didn't really know which was which, and unfortunately a lot of these things started to blend together," he says. "I think our emotions were definitely tested with how escalating everything in the real world is right now." And therein lies the real problem with Mountainhead. In a world where almost indistinguishable headlines are shrieked at us from all angles, why on earth would we want an uncanny recreation as entertainment? In the past week, AI-generated deepfake videos shared widely across Twitter and Facebook inflamed the conflict between India and Pakistan, with experts claiming the platforms didn't do enough to temper the misinformation. Youssef points to Armstrong's strength of tone — which kept millions engaged in the abhorrent actions of his Succession characters — as the saving grace of this purported comedy. "It never felt like we were making fun of what was happening. We were more making fun of the people who are so reckless," he says. Which could work, if any of the characters did or said anything half as disturbingly comical as their real-life counterparts. Randall takes obvious inspiration from billionaires like US venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, who is perhaps more well-known for his radical attempts at "anti-aging". But absolutely nothing Randall says in his ample screen time is as hilariously dystopian as Johnson taking a whole litre of his 17-year-old son's blood to put in his body in an attempt to reverse aging, only to turn around and say the process had "no benefits detected". Ven, with his problematic social platform, weird connection with his infant child and direct line to the president, is reminiscent of Elon Musk. But the character's cringe displays pale in comparison to Musk's gamut of baffling behaviours or squirm-worthy jokes — from setting up a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn to his obsession with 420 gags. Mountainhead was turned around at an astonishing rate. According to Armstrong, he pitched the film to HBO in December last year and production was wrapped by April. This kind of accelerated birth should make the comedy feel fresh and relevant. Instead, Armstrong makes observations and comedy that feel not just dated, but unnecessary. His visual metaphors — like the cold, cruel design of Souper's "home" and the constant, overflowing tables of food (TikTok creators identified luxury grub as the new status symbol ages ago) — are cartoonish in a way that makes you cringe for the creator. The machine gun references to "going to the moon" and bunkers in New Zealand are groan-worthy. His filming style — all shaky cam and quick zoom-ins — ape the reality-TV feel of Succession, but can't pull anything out of Mountainhead's characters except insufferably flat reaction shots. It's clear Armstrong thinks his dip into the world of wannabe tech oligarchs is clever and new, but it quickly becomes repetitive and boring. You can recreate the same effect by doomscrolling Twitter for 20 minutes and you might see a cute cat gif. There are going to be Succession-heads who thought the show deserved 10 more seasons and will likely christen Mountainhead meaningful satire. However, if you do not fall into this group, I implore you to go for a run, touch grass, hug a loved one, draw a picture, bake a cake — all of these actions are more radical in their defiance of dangerous billionaires than watching a rushed recreation of our current societal woes. Mountainhead is streaming on Max now.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Why Women Are Leaving This Broadway Show in Tears
I cried the first time I saw the play 'John Proctor Is the Villain,' set in a high school in small-town Georgia during the height of the MeToo movement, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks. On social media, I saw other women reacting similarly, leaving performances in tears. This past weekend, I went a second time with a friend. As the houselights went up, she was crying, as was the woman in the row in front of us. They spontaneously hugged, which is something I've never seen before at a Broadway show. Outside the theater, two women were sobbing. At least since the time of Aristotle, catharsis has been understood as one of the chief purposes of theater, but it's been a while since I've experienced it so viscerally, and I kept wondering why this play is having such an intense effect on so many. (No other play has received more Tony nominations this year.) One reason for its power, I suspect, is that it transports the viewer back to a time when MeToo still felt alive with possibility, the moment before the backlash when it seemed we might be on the cusp of a more just and equal world. It's not an uplifting play — an innocent girl is punished, and a guilty man is not — but it is still shot through with a kind of hope that's now in short supply. 'John Proctor Is the Villain' takes place in 2018 and revolves around an honors English class studying Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible.' The girls in the class are smart and ambitious; they're also, like many teenagers everywhere, swoony and bursting with contradictory emotions. They're so excited about the MeToo movement that they want to start a feminism club at their school, which school officials do not, at first, want to allow. Tensions in the community, their guidance counselor tells them, are too high. Those tensions soon creep in to the high school and start to shake the girls' solidarity. The father of one of the girls is accused of sexual harassment by two women, which leads her to question MeToo. 'We can punish the men if they're proven guilty, but if we find out the girls are making it up they should get punished just as bad,' she says. Another girl, Shelby — played by the 'Stranger Things' star Sadie Sink — returns from a mysterious absence with her own destabilizing accusation. Their drama is refracted through their engagement with 'The Crucible.' In 'John Proctor Is the Villain' the increasingly common idea that MeToo was a witch hunt is turned inside out. The playwright, Kimberly Belflower, had been captivated by the MeToo movement when it revved up in 2017. 'It just felt like, 'Oh, my God, we're doing this. We're naming these things,'' she told me recently. It gave her a new lens on her own adolescence in rural Georgia. 'I didn't have the vocabulary for this then, but I do now,' she said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Review Geek
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Review Geek
Mayday Parade – Sweet
Track List By The Way 4,000 Days Plus The Ones I Don't Remember Who's Laughing Now This Personified Who We Are Natural Towards You Pretty Good To Feel Something Mayday Parade show emotion on larger scale, providing cathartic songs which hit the right notes in terms of poignancy and grit. The pop punk act has been around for a while now, learning and honing their craft all the way, making every note, chord and melody mean something. Their output has been consistent, and on Sweet they have written some great elements to go with interesting tones and melodies. The words they have used here hit bitterness, telling us that the band are in the ascendancy while trying to navigate through a rough ride. Pop punk has its haters but its adapted well over the years, cementing its status as a genre which gains traction and has appeal. Sometimes these tracks can sound the same, but on Sweet, Mayday Parade do well to keep things tidy and fresh. Melody is key, deeply rooted in the work of this band and there are some real gems that come into the frame – which this EP features in great abundance. Who's Laughing Now prepares for more to come, as it blasts through the speakers on high alert. The vocals here are pop-punk personified, breaking into the atmosphere with a song of pain and days gone by. Who We Are meanwhile, tackles drunkenness and demons. The riff is pleasing, arching in, and creating melody while lyrically, the song conveys desires for drugs and mania. By contrast, Natural opens with groove and tenacity, ruffling the edges, and exploring love while also dabbling in sadness, pain, and despair. That chorus blends it all together and makes for a great listen. Mayday Parade draw the cards here and while not everything is glamorous, but they are on a mission and that shows through with this effort.
ABC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
You Need To Hear: Fool Nelson - 'Bad Dreams'
Don't be duped, Fool Nelson are the real thing. While 'Bad Dreams' is about grappling anxiety, it's bright, optimistic and anthemic. Like a deep breath of fresh air with warm sun on your skin, this one is as cathartic as finding your way out of the fog. For fans of: calling friends calling friends catharsis catharsis coping strategies coping strategies crisp air
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Nothing on Broadway Hits Harder Than Audra McDonald's ‘Rose's Turn'
Eight times a week at the Majestic Theater in Manhattan, the entire, harrowing arc of a classic tragedy is delivered in 4½ minutes that are as exhilarating as they are upsetting. All the textbook components of tragedy according to Aristotle are vigorously at work here: self-delusion and self-knowledge, pity and terror, and the sense that what is happening is somehow both unexpected and inevitable. And all of this — right down to that climatic, rushing release called catharsis — is provided, near the end of a delectably tuneful show, by a lone woman performing a single song in what is generally regarded as the cheeriest of theatrical forms, the American musical. Yet by that number's conclusion, Audra McDonald, the Tony-nominated star of George C. Wolfe's Broadway revival of 'Gypsy,' has the flayed-skinless appearance of a figure in a Francis Bacon portrait. And while most hardcore lovers of musicals have surely heard this song before, they are likely to sense that something new is happening here — something harsher, rawer, more wondering and ultimately more devastating. An old standard is providing fresh and unsettling revelations, while an unconventionally cast, mold-cracking performer is shedding surprising light and shadow on one of the best-known characters in the genre. No wonder that audience members leave the Majestic looking as if they had just been sucker punched. A visit to the show in late March inspired the Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty to call McDonald's interpretation of the song 'if not a religious experience, then a spiritually transfiguring one.' And a friend of mine, who is not generally a fan of musicals, emailed me after a Wednesday matinee that she 'was so gutted by that number that when I walked out of the theater I really didn't know where I was or which direction to turn.' Such is the experience of watching McDonald sing 'Rose's Turn' in 'Gypsy,' the 1959 story by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne about one very determined stage mother named Rose in the dying days of vaudeville. It's the kind of number that makes you entirely rethink both the show you've been watching — one you may have felt you knew all too well — and its central character. At the same time, it reaches you on a deeper, visceral level than any song being performed on Broadway at the moment. Wolfe described it as the process of 'a character stripping away and stripping away and stripping away and stripping away, and she doesn't even know how much she's stripping away.' Andy Einhorn, the show's musical director, said, 'It's like watching something crawl out of the heart.' To explore the road map to what McDonald calls a leap into 'an abyss of rage, sorrow, abandonment,' I sat down last month with McDonald, Wolfe, Einhorn and Camille A. Brown, the show's choreographer, to discuss how they devised a descent that, as McDonald said, takes her 'all the way down, like Dory Previn says, down to where the iguanas play.' The elements involved in this precipitous journey include a speech from Tony Kushner's 'Angels in America,' the neurotic dissonance of clarinets from the show's original orchestrations, an interpolated key change, dance moves for young children and the happy existence in the Majestic of the catwalk known as a passerelle. There is also the resonant emotional use McDonald came to make of being the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway. The sum effect — as delivered on that passerelle, a place that as Wolfe puts it, leaves you 'nowhere to hide' — comes uncannily close to that passage from 'Angels in America' that Wolfe had McDonald read, in which one character asks another how people change. It says in part: 'God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out.' Introspective portraiture McDonald is a singular performer, perhaps the most gifted musical theater star of her generation and the record-holding winner of six competitive Tony Awards for acting. And 'Rose's Turn' is a singular solo, a number that — written at the end of the organic musical's golden age — anticipated the corrosive, introspective portraiture of song-and-dance numbers to come, which Sondheim perfected a decade later in 'Company' and 'Follies.' A so-called 11 o'clock number, which occurs shortly before the final curtain, the song finds the hitherto dynamic, positive-thinking Rose in a rare moment of self-reckoning. She is fresh from a quarrel with her daughter, the celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (Joy Woods), who has told the mother who pushed her into stardom that she no longer needs her. The number begins as an angry yelp of defiance as Rose, in her mind, at last claims the spotlight for herself and imagines the star she could have been. 'And then,' as Wolfe put it, 'she foolishly and unconsciously starts to ask the questions. And they're brutal questions.' Rose segues into a recapitulation of all the rejections of her life, wondering, 'Why did I do it? What did it get me?' And as Styne's score turns into an increasingly fragmented echo chamber of melodies used throughout the show, Rose enacts what is probably the first full-fledged nervous breakdown in American musical history. With the right actress, 'Rose's Turn' can't fail to bring the house down, an achievement memorably realized by stars like Ethel Merman (who originated the role) and Patti LuPone (who starred in the 2008 Broadway revival). But in most of the versions I've seen, the song becomes a heightening of what we've already sensed in a monomaniacal character driven by the desire to be noticed; it's Rose with the volume turned up to new intensities. What McDonald does is expose a woman you hadn't known existed, but who when you think about it later was always there. In the song's stormy preface, Rose speaks of 'what I been holding down inside of me.' That turns out to be something more than the wounded, outsize ego of someone who believes she should have been a contender. The resentment and jealousy that Rose feels toward Gypsy and her younger, runaway daughter, the beloved and cosseted June (Jordan Tyson), are transformed into a more far-reaching fear of abandonment. And it all hinges on what Wolfe refers to as one 'dreaded word.' That's 'momma,' two syllables that are repeated with increasing desperation in 'Rose's Turn.' In meetings with McDonald and Einhorn at Wolfe's home in the Gramercy Park neighborhood last summer, the director had her speak the lyrics to each song. McDonald recalled that he stopped her at the point in 'Rose's Turn' when the character, in the fantasy burlesque act she's performing, says, 'Ready or not, here comes Momma!' As Wolfe told her, Rose has now said 'the dreaded word' one too many times; her last defenses are shattered. When McDonald performed 'Rose's Turn,' in concert at the London Palladium in 2022, she discovered she could use the anxiety in her own life generated by her elder daughter's leaving home for college. (When first going over 'Rose's Turn' with Einhorn, she got to the lyrics, 'One quick look and each of them leaves you,' and started sobbing, and hers may indeed be the most fully maternal Rose I've encountered.) Later she and Wolfe began to focus on an unseen character from another generation: Rose's mother, to whom she refers earlier in the show as having walked out on her when she was a child. For McDonald, it's not just an imagined theater audience but also Rose's absent mother for whom she is performing by the song's end. In her dressing room before a Thursday night performance, McDonald described that 'cathartic moment' when she imagines Rose thinking, 'You see me, mommy? See what I could do? Look at me, mommy.' McDonald had to break off. 'Oh, Ben,' she said, 'you can't have me crying before I start the show.' 'Singing it with my voice' McDonald said she couldn't have done Rose without Einhorn, with whom she's been working since 2011 and who knows her voice inside-out. Her classically trained soprano, which soared to the heavens in her Tony-winning performance in 'Porgy and Bess,' made McDonald a less than obvious choice vocally for the inveterately brassy Rose. 'I realize that I don't sing it like everybody else sings it, that people don't think I'm a belter,' she said. 'Whatever. I don't care. I'm singing it with my voice, and in a way that keeps my stamina up so I can do it eight times a week.' Yet McDonald's soprano is unleashed in 'Rose's Turn' only in its last section. That's where the one modulation occurs, and it is, Einhorn said, 'a good third higher than the original.' That allows an 'emotional lift,' he said, that wasn't happening with the score as written, and that the audience is hungry for. In restoring the original orchestrations from 1959, Einhorn discovered 'some really interesting dissonances,' including those nervous clarinets, appropriate to a woman who is falling apart. When Rose starts to dance distorted versions of the choreography she had created for her children years earlier — variations that Brown said she wanted 'to come from the body and have a connection the ground' — the score suggests a nightmare music box. Einhorn and Wolfe encouraged McDonald to make 'Rose's Turn' slower than is customary. She now freezes and takes her time when Rose first asks the big questions: 'Why did I do it? What did it get me?' McDonald said 'the first time I stood still and did it, I was like' — she inhales convulsively — 'everything came up.' McDonald sometimes deploys a guttural, almost raunchy voice in 'Rose's Turn,' summoning the great blues singers of the early 20th century. And she said part of what Rose has been 'holding down' is the fury and frustration she can't reveal because 'Black women are supposed to behave in a certain way.' One night McDonald learned at intermission that former Vice President Kamala Harris was in the audience, and by the time she got to 'Rose's Turn,' 'just everything came up through our ancestors, and the roots all the way from the bottom of the earth.' That night, she said, was singing 'for the collective' of all Black women. Afterward, she realized she had blown her voice out. At any performance, 'Rose's Turn' is a hard song for McDonald 'to recover from.' She said that sometimes, before the first-act curtain rises, she can't think about what's waiting for her in those final moments, 'or I'd never set foot at the stage.' At the number's conclusion, she looks as raw and depleted as a person can. And the three times I've seen this 'Gypsy,' I've always been astounded to discover McDonald transformed into the archetypal gracious and glamorous star for her curtain call only moments later. She said I would be amazed at what she has waiting for her backstage to restore her for those bows: 'There's a cold towel, a warm towel, there's anti-bac, there's tissues, there's a fan, there's everything just so I don't look so awful. 'But that's fine,' she murmured, suddenly sounding very tired. 'It's fine. It's the job. It's the job.'
