Entertainment
Review: Queer Black women shine at timely museum shows by Mickalene Thomas and Simone Leigh
Last week two solo exhibitions bearing voluminous — and timely — insight arrived at Los Angeles museums. Each is a mid-career survey of feminist painting, sculpture and video from the past 20 years, representing two very different artists for whom women’s place in the world is key.
“Mickalene Thomas: All About Love” is a vibrant show of more than 80 paintings, drawings and mixed-media installations downtown at the Broad. Her work builds on a simple but trenchant observation: In the long history of Western painting, monumental portraits of Black women are almost nonexistent. Most of Thomas’ paintings pile on vivid color, brash patterning and lots of sparkling rhinestones, taking an exultant step toward rectifying the omission.
“Simone Leigh,” which is divided between the California African American Museum in Exposition Park and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Mid-Wilshire, features 27 sculptures and three projections. Sober history is essential to Leigh’s often elegant work, which gives equal weight to the two adjectives joined in the term “African American.” Women’s images are abundant, and multiple artistic traditions gracefully entwine.
The fact that both artists are Black adds to the timely relevance. During the Jan. 6 domestic terrorist attack on Capitol Hill, a few Black faces were glimpsed amid the scandalously waved Confederate, Gadsden and “Appeal to Heaven” flags, but it is worth emphasizing that the number of those faces that belonged to women was roughly zero. Today, in a nation exhausted by dealing with the tenacity of systemic racism and riven with conflicts over straight white Christian male supremacy, Black women sometimes seem to be the linchpin barely holding things together.
Journalist Marianne Schnall, founder of the influential website feminist.com, once aptly noted that “Black women are by no means a monolith, and yet as a group have a deep understanding of the relational nature of freedom, precisely because they sit at various intersections of targeted oppression.” Add queer identity to the mix, and the comprehension deepens further.
Simone Leigh, “Cupboard,” 2022; stoneware, raffia and steel armature
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Thomas’ show was co-organized by Broad curator Ed Schad and Rachel Thomas of London’s Hayward Gallery, where it travels next year. (Stops are also planned for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France.) The Los Angeles debut opens with an elaborate stage set that replicates façades of tidy row houses in Camden, N.J., just across the river from Philly, where the artist was born in 1971. More than a mere conceit, the theatrical façades establish domestic settings as integral to Thomas’ aesthetic. On doorsteps, welcome mats are laid out.
Living rooms, rec rooms and finished basements turn up as installation formats throughout the show, while the compositions in her monumental portraits tightly collage figure and ground. The self-portrait in “Afro Goddess Looking Forward” is typical: Black-and-white photographs of Thomas’ eyes, some tabletop greenery and a portion of her torso mix with abundant painted features. The entirety of the figure is part of a dynamic patchwork that incorporates furniture, pillows, wallpaper and other accoutrements of a homey interior. Thomas presents as a Gen X Matisse.
Visually, there’s no separating the artist from her domestic environment, even in the imagination, so dazzlingly exuberant are the two fabrications. The strategy is repeatedly employed in paintings of friends, lovers and family, where figures merge with ground. The union comes across not as a limiting confinement but as a refuge — a contained space of at times boisterous play in which creative exploration unfolds.
Queer artists often regard the private home as a safe place for resourceful invention, given a public realm that puts forward scant models for living a life, not to mention offering abundant danger for doing so. Thomas is no exception. In one room lined with faux-wood paneling and cherry-red ottomans, she even shows herself in each painting twice, dressed in form-fitting animal-print tights and happily engaged in wrestling matches with herself. In another, an elaborate video montage of the brilliant and outspoken singer Eartha Kitt can be viewed from comfortably upholstered furniture in a convivial living room.
Then there’s her trademark use of craft-store rhinestones, which is multipurpose. Hair, body contours and facial features are often lined with the glittery paste, sometimes multicolored. The pictures’ flatly painted skin and two-dimensional patterning in textiles and wallpaper are set into shimmering visual motion. The paintings become performers, like entertainers on TV or the stage.
Forget Hobby Lobby. This sparkly craft-store aesthetic perform a vernacular consecration of the women she paints (and she paints only women). Rather than tacky, the rhinestones are beguiling. They make you smile.
Mickalene Thomas embeds her portraits of Black women in decoarative interiors
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Elsewhere, Thomas incorporates queer predecessors in paintings of abstract heads. A borrowed Andy Warhol “Flower” becomes an eyepatch, while topsy-turvy eyeballs, pushed to the margins of a face, recall Jasper Johns’ borrowing of similar elements from Picasso’s “Woman in a Straw Hat.” Thomas is identifying family.
Sometimes the pictorial setting is layered into the exhibition’s physical installation. One gallery filled with potted plastic plants features collage-style paintings of pin-up nudes from Jet magazine. Thomas has installed several of them on a wall dominated by a photo-enlargement of a pointedly empty closet. Jet cheesecake photos were surely made with male subscribers in mind, but she identifies lesbian desire as a vital element within the magazine’s audience. Black diversity is real.
Over at CAAM and LACMA, “Simone Leigh” is a traveling exhibition organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, where it was seen last year. Included are several sculptures shown in the American Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where Leigh, now 56, represented the United States. As at the Broad, male figures are nowhere to be seen.
Leigh has said that her work represents a “creolization” of art, mixing prominent European and Black traditions. Some of what is implied by the term is evident in the remarkable “Martinique.”
Simone Leigh, “Martinique,” 2022; stoneware
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Five feet tall, the cobalt blue stoneware figure of a lifesize headless women in a voluminous, bell-shaped skirt shows her cupping aggressive, bullet-like breasts in her hands. Titled for the island of Martinique, a former French colony in the Caribbean that legend held was once occupied solely by women, Leigh’s 2022 sculpture derives from a mid-19th century monument in the capitol, toppled during Black Lives Matter protests two years earlier.
The destroyed monument was a marble figure by French Salon artist Gabriel Vital Dubray that celebrated Martinique native Joséphine Bonaparte, first wife of Emperor Napoleon, who was instrumental in reviving slavery on the island despite its abolition in France. Dubray’s mediocre statue had already been beheaded three decades ago — a symbolic decapitation that couldn’t help but recall Marie-Antoinette’s actual fate at the guillotine. The sculpture stood headless in a public park until July 2020.
Think of Leigh’s subsequent sculpture as a monument to its headless-ness — at once a mockery of Joséphine’s thoughtless ignorance and a captivating salutation to the actual power of symbolic resistance. The volumetric, jug-like form of “Martinique” emphasizes clay’s eternal role as a vessel, which the artist fills with new meanings by virtue of her chosen forms and referents.
Clay is the medium most often encountered in Leigh’s art, whether in glazed form or as the raw material for works then cast in bronze. Shiny stoneware sphinxes in modulated natural hues, an 11-foot mound of raffia crowned by the feminine symbol of a cowrie shell, a suspended cluster of several dozen breast-shaped terracotta gourds with golden nipples and pierced by metal antennas — sculpture’s most ancient substance is typically made sleek and modern in her hands.
Mickalene Thomas installed pin-up paintings on a photo blow-up of an empty closet
(Joshua White)
Much of the work is a hybrid of female and architectonic forms — literally, woman as shelter.
“Herm” remakes an ancient Greek boundary marker or signpost, historically composed of a squared stone pillar with a carved male head on top. Leigh’s version employs a cruciform bust of a woman instead. A simple vertical slit is in front where a Greek phallus would protrude, and a shapely striding leg extends from the rear, together feminizing the bronze. Her signpost sculpture stands more than eight feet tall. Amazonian in scale, it insists that a viewer look up to the boundary it marks.
A bronze “Sentinel,” its surface featuring a rich black patina, transforms a traditional sphinx motif. A horizontal, corrugated body (think of the shape as a sheltering Quonset hut or nourishing grain shed) is topped at one end by a female head, its Afro hairstyle smoothed into a turban form. Incongruously, this watchful guardian’s face has no eyes, a motif common to all but one sculpture in the exhibition. The internalized, inward-looking result merges with a blank screen, onto which viewers project their own perceptions. Leigh’s best work generates a sense of intimate connection, even when its size approaches monumental.
One moving work is a wall-size, single-channel video projection of a recumbent Black torso, seen from behind, the head obscured beneath a stony pile of gray rubble. Made in tandem with Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh — when they work together, the duo goes by the name Girl — it turns the European tradition of a reclining female nude inside-out, making the gender ambiguous and burying the figure’s gaze. (A wistful musical soundtrack, all wind instruments and drums, was composed by Kaoru Watanabe.) Look closely, and the mountainous image, seemingly static, is gently breathing. Whether the barely rising and falling ribcage represents restorative sleep or a dying breath is hard to say.
In both parts of the show, a bothersome hunt is required of visitors to find object labels too discreetly printed in black typeface against dark brown walls (a phone flashlight comes in handy). The only real downside, though, is the bifurcation between two venues located across town from each other. The split diminishes the retrospective punch.
The more satisfying presentation is at CAAM, where the 13 works span two decades, allowing for some sense of artistic evolution and reverberation. At LACMA, all but four of the 17 pieces date from just the past two years; the installation is lovely, but it’s more like a contemporary gallery show than a museum survey.
Simone Leigh, “Sentinel,” 2019; bronze
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
The prominence of the exhibitions by Thomas and Leigh — highly accomplished, queer Black women — is crucial, however, especially as June’s Pride celebrations commence. At least 515 anti-LGBTQ bills, a record number, are pending in state legislatures across the country, representing an unspeakable mass of public hate. Misogyny, a core driver of homophobia, is deeply embedded in American life.
It has been since at least 1692. That was the year Bridget Bishop was ascertained to be a witch by frightened, conformist Puritan religious elders in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Bishop, a thrice-married mother of four, was hauled away and lynched on Gallows Hill in Salem Village after a bizarre eight-day trial.
Three centuries later, as a criminally convicted former U.S. president bellows “witch hunt” into every available microphone, the madness endures, the cruelty continues. When Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his cohort stripped women of bodily autonomy in overturning long-settled abortion rights two years ago, the conservative Catholic jurist resurrected the discredited opinions of British judge Matthew Hale for support. Hale, a Puritan sympathizer and later Lord Chief Justice of England, sent two women to their doom as “witches” after a trial in 1664.
Alito’s absurd citation of a notorious misogynist was widely greeted with a mix of disgust and ridicule, but not surprise. (Even though a nearly two-thirds majority of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, we live in a country where rule by a political minority is the norm.) Thomas and Leigh, judging from their generous and eloquent paintings, sculptures and videos, are unlikely to have been shocked. Saddened, for sure, and no doubt even scandalized — but not shocked.
More’s the pity. And more’s the reason for their bracing art.
Girl (Simone Leigh and Chitra Ganesh), “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell. . . ,” 2011; single-channel video, color, sound, 7:14 min.
(Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times)
Mickalene Thomas and Simone Leigh
Mickalene Thomas
Through Sept. 29 (closed Mondays) at the Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., L.A. (213) 232-6200, www.thebroad.org
Simone Leigh
Through Jan. 20 (closed Mondays) at the California African American Museum, Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, L.A., (213) 744-7432, www.caamuseum.org; and also the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000, www.lacma.org
Movie Reviews
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man review – Tommy Shelby returns for muddy, bloody big-screen showdown
After six TV series from 2013 to 2022, which caused a worrying surge in flat cap-wearing among well-to-do men in country pubs, Peaky Blinders is now getting a hefty standalone feature film, a muscular picture swamped in mud and blood. This is the movie version of Steven Knight’s global small-screen hit, based on the real-life gangs that swaggered through Birmingham from Victorian times until well into the 20th century. Cillian Murphy returns with his uniquely unsettling, almost sightless stare as Tommy Shelby, family chieftain of a Romani-traveller gang, a man who has converted his trauma in the trenches of the first world war into a ruthless determination to survive and rule.
As we join the story some years after the curtain last came down, it is 1940, Britain’s darkest hour and Tommy is the crime-lion in winter. He now lives in a huge, remote mansion, far from the Birmingham crime scene he did so much to create, alone except for his henchman Johnny Dogs, played by Packy Lee. Evidently wearied and sickened by it all, Tommy is haunted by his ghosts and demons: memories of his late brother, Arthur, and dead daughter, Ruby, and working on what will be his definitive autobiography. (Sadly, we don’t get any scenes of Tommy having lunch with a drawling London publisher or agent.)
But a charismatic and beautiful woman, played by Rebecca Ferguson, brings Tommy news of what we already know: his malign idiot son Erasmus Shelby, played by Barry Keoghan, is now running the Peaky Blinders, a new gen-Z-style group of flatcappers raiding government armouries for guns that should really belong to the military. And if that wasn’t disloyal and unpatriotic enough, Erasmus has accepted a secret offer from a sinister Nazi fifth-columnist called Beckett, played by Tim Roth, to help distribute counterfeit currency which will destroy the economy and make Blighty easier to invade. Doesn’t Erasmus know what Adolf Hitler is going to do to his own Romani people? (To be fair to Erasmus, a lot of the poshest and most well-connected people in the land didn’t either.)
Clearly, Tommy is going to have to come down there and sort this mess out. And we get a very ripe scene in which soft-spoken Tommy turns up in the pub full of raucous idiots who cheek him. “Who the faaaaaack is ‘Tommy Shelby’?” sneers one lairy squaddie, who gets horribly schooled on that very subject.
In this movie, Tommy Shelby is against the Nazis, and he can’t get to be more of a good guy than that. (Tommy has evidently put behind him memories of Winston Churchill from the first two series, when Churchill was dead set on clamping down on the Peaky Blinders.) The war and the Nazis are a big theme for a big-screen treatment and screenwriter Knight and director Tom Harper put it across with some gusto as a kind of homefront war film, helped by their effortlessly watchable lead. Maybe you have to be fully invested in the TV show to really like it, although this canonisation of Tommy is a sentimental treatment of what we actually know of crime gangs in the second world war. Nevertheless, it is a resoundingly confident drama.
Running free during a game of catch on the empty field at SoFi Stadium is a fantasy most Angelenos will never experience. For comedians Jo Koy and Gabriel Iglesias, it’s just a warm-up to a dream that’s been a lifetime in the making.
Gripping the football with fingers covered in Filipino tribal tattoos extending in a sleeve up his arm, Koy looks across the expanse of emerald green turf at his son jogging toward the south end zone of the Inglewood stadium on a recent afternoon. “To be able to throw at SoFi is crazy,” Koy said with a sparkling grin of bright white veneers.
The 54-year-old comedian with a beard full of gray stubble drops back to pass, launching a tight spiral underneath SoFi’s massive technicolor halo scoreboard hovering above a sea of empty stands. Joseph Jr. — a wiry 22-year-old with a head full of curly dark brown hair — runs briskly toward the goal line with a black cast on his left arm. He raises his right arm just in time to scoop it into his chest for a touchdown. The imaginary crowd goes wild.
“Yes!!!” Koy shouts, his excitement echoing in the stadium. He jogs over to Joseph in his navy blue coverall jumpsuit and L.A. Dodgers cap to deliver a satisfying father-son chest bump.
A few yards away, Iglesias is watching Roka, his tiny black chihuahua, dart around the field like four pounds of rambunctious entitlement. The plus-sized comedian — better known as “Fluffy” — is sporting his typical loose-fitting vintage Hawaiian shirt, denim shorts and black flat cap. Whenever they stand together, the duo’s dynamic is like a modern-day Laurel and Hardy.
Nearly 70% of tickets for Koy and Iglesias’ SoFi show sold within days, making this the largest stadium stand-up performance to date.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“The fact that we’ve known each other as long as we have is wild … we’ve known each other since we both had hair,” Iglesias, 49, says as they both lift up their caps in unison, laughing and exposing their shiny bald heads.
On March 21, this stadium will be filled with more than 70,000 guests as the pair takes center stage at the Super Bowl of comedy — the largest stadium stand-up show to date. Koy and Iglesias are now part of a small fraternity of comics, including Kevin Hart, Dane Cook, Bill Burr and Larry the Cable Guy, who’ve sold out stadiums across the country.
The one-night-only show, which won’t be televised or recorded as a special, is meant to be one giant party for comedy fans who’ve supported Koy and Iglesias since their early days. The comics will be passing the mic back and forth throughout the night, which will feature special guests, surprise moments and plenty of other unplanned interruptions that will make for a roughly four-hour show. Though the L.A. comedy scene tends to exist in the shadow of Hollywood, this feat managed by two of its biggest names puts a historic spotlight on stand-up.
“It’s more sweet because it’s taken so long,” Iglesias said. “This wasn’t an overnight thing. Nowadays, everybody wants everything so fast. Between the two of us, we’ve got about 60 years of comedy experience.”
“It’s insane. I can’t explain it,” Koy adds, staring up at the stadium’s glass roof, preparing to crack it with decibels of laughter. “Every time we come in here and look up, I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a stage here the size of the end zone.’ We took the stage from the arenas that we normally play and injected steroids into it.”
For comedians who’ve witnessed their ascent, which now literally includes hands and feet cemented in front of TCL Chinese Theatre and a star for Fluffy on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the journey has been incredible to watch.
“It’s huge for stand-up, it used to be just in dingy clubs and bars and always something small and intimate and kinda like an afterthought,” said fellow comedy star Tiffany Haddish, a longtime friend to both Koy and Iglesias. “To be honest I never thought comedy would be this big.”
Jay Leno, a confidant to Iglesias and the man who inspired him to start his own insane car collection and offered Koy his first late-night appearance on “The Tonight Show,” agrees that a show like this is a huge step for comedy.
“My attitude when I came to this town was if you can’t get in through the front door, go in the back door,” Leno said. “And they didn’t do it the traditional way, they got to where they are as comedians, one audience member at a time.”
For the two L.A. comedians, the historic milestone represents decades of work and signals comedy’s arrival in mainstream entertainment venues.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
When the pair of arena-selling comics announced last year they’d be joining forces to perform at SoFi, the task of filling the massive concert venue and football stadium seemed laughable. But within a week, it clearly wasn’t a joke. Nearly 70% of the tickets were sold just days after going on sale. Now, weeks before the gig, the show is completely sold out with more seats being added. If there’s one person who is not necessarily surprised, it’s Iglesias. By his calculations — including his ability to sell out Dodger Stadium twice for the filming of his 2022 Netflix special, “Stadium Fluffy,” and Koy’s ability to sell out the Forum a record-setting six consecutive times (more than any other comedian) — the math checked out.
“At a certain point it’s like we’ve been doing [huge stand-up shows] for so many years, it becomes normal,” Iglesias said. “What do you do to change things? What do you do to grow? The worst thing that happens is it fails. But at least we know we tried it. Then we know what our ceiling is. But as of now, this isn’t the ceiling.”
Despite the logic, looking at the stadium’s massive seating chart during an initial meeting with the venue made the task feel akin to climbing Mt. Everest.
“SoFi is the size of like five Forums. That seating chart on a wall was the most discouraging thing I could possibly look at,” Koy said. “And then looking at the amount of money it was gonna cost us even before we sell one ticket. Me and Gabe should’ve been looking at that and been like, ‘What … are we thinking? Hell nah we ain’t doing this … !’”
It took more than a little convincing from Iglesias to get Koy on board. “[Jo] does not like change. I had to break down the math for him and I pushed it a lot,” Iglesias said. “And I’m glad we did because now that it’s sold out, the hard part is over. We just have to show up and deliver a kick-ass show. And then we can both celebrate after, crack a couple bottles and I know I’m taking a week off after that.”
Unlike a typical arena show, which takes several months to coordinate, their big night at SoFi required a full year of planning. The production and stage will be three times the size of the comedians’ normal stages and will be managed by the same team that produces stadium shows for acts like Los Bukis and Bad Bunny.
“It’s more sweet because it’s taken so long,” Iglesias said. “This wasn’t an overnight thing. Nowadays, everybody wants everything so fast. Between the two of us, we’ve got about 60 years of comedy experience.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“It’s almost like a chessboard,” Iglesias said. “You got to do a bunch of moves in order to pull something like this off, it’s not just we’re gonna do it. This took a lot of planning, a lot of coordinating.”
When asked how the tickets could’ve possibly moved so fast, outside of typical avenues of good marketing and promotion, Koy says it was really comedy fans making a statement of support for them and for stand-up.
“There’s no such thing as marketing on this one, to me it’s a phenom,” he said, noting the pride both he and Iglesias have to see the excitement and support from local fans, especially Filipino and Latin communities across L.A. that have been a major part of their respective fanbases. “That type of reaction and that response to us saying we’re gonna be at SoFi is almost like a bragging right and it’s ‘our night, we’re gonna be there, I don’t care where we’re sitting.’”
The SoFi gig was conceived in February of 2024 during Koy’s sixth sold-out show at Kia Forum. In the hoopla of Koy breaking his own audience record at the venue, Iglesias crashed the show, presented his friend with a plaque and laid down the gauntlet in front of 17,500 fans. When Iglesias asked Koy if they should contemplate performing “across the street” together, the crowd erupted with excitement.
“Our agents and managers were like, ‘Are you sure you wanna do that?’’’ Iglesias said. “I think they missed a couple bonuses. But at the end of the day, it’s part of history.”
“That’s what’s beautiful about Gabe, he’s not scared to take on those big risks,” Koy said. “But the whole thing was a risk. We gotta alter our tour dates and sacrifice other opportunities to make this happen.”
“Every time we come in here and look up, I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a stage here the size of the end zone,‘” Koy said about the upcoming SoFi show on Mar. 21. “We took the stage from the arenas that we normally play and injected steroids into it.”
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
For Koy, a life of comedy was a risk inspired by his heroes while growing up in Tacoma, Wash. He traces it back to being 15 and seeing Eddie Murphy perform at Climate Pledge Arena during his “Raw” tour in Seattle. He remembers taking a panoramic look at the sold-out crowd roaring in the darkness before the leather-suited legend even took the stage. “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, this guy got this many people in here?’ I just thought that was the most impossible thing,” Koy remembers. “And now I get to share this moment with my son and let him walk with me and let him see that this is possible.”
When Koy was moving up the comedy ranks under his real name Joseph Glenn Herbert, the thought of calling himself a comedian felt like a pipe dream. Koy, the son of a white father and Filipina mother, saw comedy as a way to channel an overactive personality and need to make people laugh into a career. Going from coffee shop open mics in Tacoma to clubs and casinos in Las Vegas in 1989, Koy scratched out a living doing random jobs to move to L.A. in 2001 with hopes of making it big.
Working at a bank or Nordstrom Rack offered some stability as he drove up and down Sunset Boulevard in his battered Honda Prelude with one broken headlight, looking for a way forward to pursue his passion. Haddish, his longtime friend, spent years working with Koy, who served as her mentor at the Laugh Factory. Between sets on stage, the two would often take breaks to fantasize about fame.
“Jo and I would sit outside of the Laugh Factory and have these conversations and we’d be eating hot dogs wrapped in bacon and we’d be dreaming about being in a big movie, playing big theaters and helping people heal through laughter,” Haddish said. “Now here we are.”
“At the end of the day, this is a big stamp. And I think it also lets other comics know, ‘Hey, man, step up your game. Let’s grow this,’” Iglesias said.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Pulling off a show of this magnitude is jaw-dropping to think about, Iglesias said, even after having achieved a similar feat just a few years ago at Dodgers Stadium where he filmed his special over the course of two shows. He also set a record for fines incurred by a performer for going over his allotted time slot (a hefty $250,000 for not leaving the venue until 4 a.m.). The SoFi gig leaves him only one shot to get it right. This time around, Iglesias feels infinitely less pressure despite the bigger venue.
“[Dodger Stadium] for me was grueling,” Iglesias said. “I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know how it was gonna go. Every day we were pulling our hair out trying to figure it out. Fortunately we were still able to pull it off and we learned a lot from it. This time around, believe me when I tell you the stress of this show is not even there.”
Iglesias, a native of Long Beach, has spent over 30 years rising up the comedy ranks. Among his accomplishments are seven major comedy specials, a TV show (“Mr. Iglesias”) and becoming the first Mexican American comic with a top-grossing worldwide tour. Like Koy, who also has seven major specials, Iglesias went through a lot of metamorphosis on stage prior to finding his calling as a gregarious, fun-loving comedian with a penchant for doing cartoon-ish voices.
Leno says one of the key factors in Fluffy’s mass appeal is his likability.
“The great thing about Gabriel is that the kindness comes across, there’s not a mean spirit in his body,” he said. “There’s a lot of comics who are really funny but people don’t like them because they think they’re mean-spirited. … When you watch Gabe even when he does something that’s not fall-down hysterical, you smile because you like him. … I find him a joy to watch.”
Much of what Iglesias learned about marketing himself was inspired by the WWE. The costumes, witty banter and theatrics of the wrestling ring influenced his consistent look and even allowed the name “Fluffy” to become his calling card.
Comedians Gabriel Iglesias, aka, “Fluffy,” in front, and Jo Koy are photographed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on February 10, 2026, ahead of their March 21st show.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
“There is a certain level of pandemonium, as they say in wrestling, that’s needed to get people excited,” Iglesias said. “Then there’s the marketing and the way that you do it — so I did study wrestling a lot.”
Handing the kingdom of SoFi over to the court jesters for a night is a feat worthy of celebration.
“At the end of the day, this is a big stamp. And I think it also lets other comics know, ‘Hey, man, step up your game. Let’s grow this,’” Iglesias said. “And it’s not, ‘Step up your game,’ like we’re competing with each other. It’s more so like, ‘Let’s elevate the game of comedy.’”
Right now Koy feels plenty elevated, as though he’s floating every time he enters the stadium and looks up at the stands — like the night he saw Eddie Murphy all those years ago.
“You should’ve heard the whispers me and Gabe had to ourselves walking out of the stadium tunnel, like, ‘Yo, is this really happening?!’” Koy said with a megawatt smile. “Coming from an open mic night at a coffee house, never in my wildest dreams did I say, ‘Someday, a football stadium’ … we’re literally living our dreams right now.”
That’s both a promise and a challenge she delivers, since what follows may rub some viewers the wrong way. Yet Gyllenhaal’s full-throttle commitment to her vision is compelling in and of itself, and she has marshalled an absolutely smashing-looking and -sounding production. The story proper begins in 1936 Chicago, which, like everything and everyplace else in the movie, has been luminously shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher and sumptuously conjured by production designer Karen Murphy. Her involvement is appropriate given that her previous credits include Bradley Cooper’s A STAR IS BORN and Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS, since among other things, THE BRIDE! is a nostalgic musical. Its Frankenstein (Christian Bale), who has taken the name of his maker, is obsessed with big-screen tuners, and imagines himself in elaborate song-and-dance numbers. (Considering the reception to JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX, one must applaud the daring of Warner Bros. for greenlighting another expensive film in which a tormented protagonist has that kind of fantasy life.)
THE BRIDE! may be revisionist on many levels, but its characterization of its “monster” holds true to past screen incarnations from Karloff’s to Elordi’s: His scarred appearance masks a lonely soul who desires companionship. Frankenstein has arrived in Chicago to seek out Dr. Cornelia Euphronious (Annette Bening), correctly believing she has the scientific know-how to create an appropriate mate for him. Rather than piece one together, Dr. Euphronious resurrects the corpse of Ida (Jessie Buckley), whose consorting with underworld types led to her brutal death. Previously chafing against the man’s world she inhabited in life, she becomes even more defiant and unruly as a revenant, apparently possessed by the spirit of Shelley herself, declaiming in free-associative sentences and quoting rebellious literature.
Buckley, currently an Oscar favorite for her very different literary-inspired role in HAMNET, tears into the role of the Bride (who now goes by the name Penny) with invigorating abandon that bursts off the screen. Unsure of her identity yet overflowing with self-confident bravado, she’s the opposite of the sensitive “Frank,” but they’re united by the world that stands against them. That becomes literal when a violent incident sends them on the lam, road-tripping to New York City and beyond, on a trail inspired by the films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), Frank’s favorite song-and-dance-man star.
With THE BRIDE!, Gyllenhaal has made a film that’s at once her very own and a feverish homage to all sorts of cinema past and present. It’s a horror story, a lovers-on-the-run movie, a crime thriller, a musical and more, and historical fealty be damned if it makes for a good scene (as when Penny and Frank sneak into a 3D movie over a decade before such features became popular). In-references are everywhere: It might just be a coincidence that the couple’s travels take them past Fredonia, NY (cf. “Freedonia” in the Marx Brothers’ DUCK SOUP), but it’s certainly no accident that the former Ida is targeted by a crime boss named Lupino, referencing the actress and pioneering filmmaker whose works included noirs and women’s-issues stories. Penny’s exploits lead legions of admiring women to adopt her look and anarchic attitude, echoing the first JOKER (while a headline calls them “Twisted Sisters”), and the use of one Irving Berlin song in a Frankensteinian context immediately recalls a classic comedic take on the property.
Whether the audience should be put in mind of a spoof at a key point in a film with different goals is another matter. At times like these, Gyllenhaal’s pastiche ambitions overtake emotional investment in the story. As strong as the two lead performances are (Bale is quite moving, conveying a great deal of soul from behind his extensive prosthetics), it’s easier to feel for them in individual scenes than during the entire course of the just-over-two-hour running time. The diversions can be entertaining, to be sure, but they also result in an uncertainty of tone. The dissonance continues straight through to the end, where the filmmaker’s choice of closing-credits song once again suggests we’re not supposed to take all this too seriously.
There’s nonetheless much to admire and enjoy about THE BRIDE!, and this kind of risk-taking by a major studio is always to be encouraged (especially considering that we’ll see how long that lasts at Warner Bros. once Paramount takes it over). Beyond the terrific work by the aforementioned actors, there’s fine support from Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz as detectives on Penny and Frank’s heels, with Sandy Powell’s lavish costumes and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s rich, varied score vital to fashioning this fully imagined world. Kudos also to makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey and to Chris Gallaher and Scott Stoddard, who did those honors on Frank, for their visceral, evocative work. Uneven as it may be, THE BRIDE! is also as alive! as any film you’ll likely see this year.
Michigan to distribute marijuana tax revenue: What your city will get
Body part found in Shirley, Massachusetts pond, police suspect foul play
Minnesota Wild Acquires Defenseman Jeff Petry from the Florida Panthers | Minnesota Wild
Leaders throughout Mississippi remember JSU’s Elayne Hayes-Anthony
Missouri Supreme Court reviews airport property tax deduction
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Map: 4.9-Magnitude Earthquake Shakes Louisiana
Paxton vows he’s ‘staying in this race’ even if Trump backs Cornyn in Texas GOP clash
Which Kurdish groups is the US rallying to fight Iran?
Man accused of plot to assassinate Trump testifies Iran pressured him, says Biden and Haley were other possible targets
DHS defends McLaughlin against allegations husband’s company profited millions from ad contracts: ‘Baseless’
-
World1 week agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts1 week agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Wisconsin4 days agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
-
Maryland5 days agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
-
Florida4 days agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Denver, CO1 week ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Massachusetts3 days agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
-
Oregon6 days ago2026 OSAA Oregon Wrestling State Championship Results And Brackets – FloWrestling