Entertainment

Kelsea Ballerini can't stop telling the truth

Published

2 days ago

October 28, 2024

Kelsea Ballerini can't stop telling the truth

The way Kelsea Ballerini sees it, people expected her to do two things on her high-wire act of a new album: “One, to go pop,” she says. “And two, to go soft.”

The pop move has been anticipated since this 31-year-old country singer and songwriter emerged about a decade ago in the wake of Taylor Swift, a foundational influence whose early embrace of Ballerini as an heir apparent left many waiting for an inevitable “1989”-style crossover moment of her own.

Says Ballerini with a smile: “They can keep waiting.”

As for the assumption that she’d go “all lovey-dovey,” as the singer puts it? “It’s because they see me happy,” she says — one result of her relationship with the actor Chase Stokes, whom she began dating after the public divorce she chronicled in brutal detail on last year’s Grammy-nominated “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” EP.

“But going pop and getting soft — I very intentionally did not want to do either of those things.”

What she pulls off instead on “Patterns,” which came out Friday, is a pair of difficult tricks: She writes about personal growth with a degree of emotional acuity most songwriters reserve for heartbreak and she makes room for sonic and structural innovations within an unabashedly commercial country-music framework.

Take “First Rodeo,” a sleek midtempo track with twangy guitars and blipping synths in which Ballerini extends a metaphor about getting back on the horse further than you’d think possible without breaking it. Or take “Sorry Mom,” an almost uncomfortably forthright note to her mother about the let’s-call-it-scenic route Ballerini took to becoming “a woman that you’re proud of.” (“Showing up again on Sunday morning / You just made the eggs and turned your head,” she sings, which — oof.)

Then there’s “Wait!”: three minutes of psychological drama in the mind of someone “with a nasty habit leaving before I get left.”

“That’s the last song I wrote for the album,” Ballerini says on a recent morning in a sunny West Hollywood hotel suite. Wrapped in a cozy gray cardigan, she’s sitting cross-legged on a sofa, shoes off, with an overstuffed pillow in her lap. “I felt like it was a missing part of the story, where I was the bad guy, you know? It’s easy to show the unraveling of a relationship. But then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait — part of this was my fault.’”

Ballerini has been in Los Angeles for a few months shooting “The Voice,” the long-running TV singing competition on which she’ll serve as a coach when the show’s next season premieres in February. She used to hate L.A., she says, but given the time she knew she’d be spending here, she resolved to try to make the city feel more like home by renting a place in Los Feliz, which reminds her of her Green Hills neighborhood back in Nashville; she filled the house with the same candles she burns at home and she cooks dinner as many nights as she can. She brought her dog Dibs too, only to discover after getting here that the 9-year-old pup has cancer.

“I just dropped him off for chemo on the way here,” she says, scrolling through the many photos of Dibs on her phone to find one to show off. “It’s gutting, but he’s in good spirits. If I was out here, and this was happening in Nashville, I’d feel so displaced.”

In addition to “The Voice,” Ballerini recently shot a guest-star spot on “Doctor Odyssey,” the new cruise-ship medical drama from producer Ryan Murphy. For years, acting was a “hard no,” she says. “I was terrified of failing and embarrassing myself. But the last couple years, I’ve done a lot of things that I was really scared of, and everything turned out all right.” What links the women Ballerini admires most — “Shania, obviously, Reba, Reese Witherspoon” — is that they’re all “multifaceted,” she says. “They’re women known for doing several things, and that inspires me.”

Even so, “Patterns” showcases the deepening of Ballerini’s core talents as both a singer and a songwriter. In “Two Things,” she finds the ragged edge of her honeyed voice to put across the exasperation involved in a love-hate relationship; in “We Broke Up,” she realizes that closure is available only to those who are ready for it: “I could take a deep dive in the details / I could hide, I could cry till I throw up / Take a stroll, camera roll, old emails / But it’s as simple as, ‘We broke up.’”

After years of screwed-tight Nashville songcraft, Ballerini achieved a more conversational aspect on “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” that carries through to the new album. (Among her touchstones was SZA’s wonderfully digressive “SOS.”) “I used to think the only great songwriters were the cleverest ones — the Shane McAnallys,” she says, referring to the prolific country hitmaker she describes as “a god” at turning a phrase just so. “But I let that go during ‘Welcome Mat’ — I didn’t even care if things rhymed — and that gave me so much more of a canvas to work with.” Now, she says, a song’s success is less about its hookiness or wordplay than about “whether you go, ‘Oh my God, I literally texted that to my friend yesterday.’”

Kelsea Ballerini will serve as a coach on the next season of "The Voice."

In person, Ballerini is warm, chatty, slightly gossipy — a veteran star who has retained an essential down-to-earth quality but who also knows through experience how to create a sense of emotional intimacy with an interlocutor.

“Kelsea’s not a pop robot,” says Adam Levine of Maroon 5, the longtime “Voice” coach who’s working with Ballerini on the show’s upcoming season. “Talking to her, you feel like you’re girlfriends.”

Ballerini, who calls herself “a classic oversharer,” grew up in a religious family in Knoxville, Tenn., but moved to Nashville at 15 to pursue music; she signed a record deal a few years later and scored a No. 1 country-radio hit with her debut single, 2014’s earnest “Love Me Like You Mean It.” More chart-toppers followed — including “Dibs,” whose title provided her dog’s name, and “Peter Pan,” about the danger of falling for a charming man-child — as did a Grammy nomination for best new artist.

“I sounded so young,” she says now of her early work. “For the first five years of my career, I still had such a baby face.”

In 2017, when she was 24, Ballerini married Morgan Evans, an Australian country singer she’d met when the two co-hosted an awards show in Brisbane. Her career continued to grow after the wedding — she tried out new sounds with the Chainsmokers and Halsey and cut successful country duets with Shania Twain and Kenny Chesney — yet her relationship with Evans eventually withered.

On “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” which came out just a few months after the couple finalized their divorce in late 2022, Ballerini sings that they “had to get drunk to ever really talk”; in one song she recounts a breakfast by herself in Big Sur while her husband was on tour in Europe: “The pictures look pretty,” she sings, “at least they do on your Instagram.” (Evans offered his side of the story in his plaintive 2022 single “Over for You,” in which he sings, “It kills me to know you were drifting alone” and wonders, “Was it something I was missing, or is there someone else?”)

“I’m so f—ing proud of the songwriting on ‘Welcome Mat,’” Ballerini says of the EP, which came out amid a wave of divorce albums by female country stars, including Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce. “I feel like I proved to myself my credibility — not just to myself, but especially to myself.” Yet she also realizes that her candor — in her music as well as in a very dishy episode of the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast — came “at the expense of a lot of things,” she says. Meaning? “I hurt some people.”

Ballerini describes herself as "a classic oversharer."

With “Patterns,” Ballerini’s fifth studio LP, her ambition was to maintain “the level of honesty that I unlocked” last time while “editing myself a little bit in terms of what I share about my real life.” For help she assembled a team of experienced songwriters: Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon, Karen Fairchild (of Little Big Town) and Alysa Vanderheym, who produced “Welcome Mat” and went on to produce the new album.

“They’re all amazing writers, but they’re also my friends,” Ballerini says, “so it felt comfortable to go in and just throw paint at the wall and figure it out.” The crew held a retreat at a friend’s farm to start the creative process and came up with “Sorry Mom,” “Two Things” and “Baggage,” in which Ballerini admits, “I don’t abide by that 50-pound limit.”

The fact that the team was all women meant that “we could definitely say things we would never say in other writing rooms,” Vanderheym says. “There was wine involved, and there were some very late nights. We were just spilling our guts.” For Ballerini, the liberation was sufficient to drop an F-bomb in one tune — hardly a given in country music. “I remember she was like, ‘Am I gonna have a little E on my record?’” Vanderheym says, referring to the symbol used by streaming services to show that a song contains explicit lyrics. (Ballerini also credits a woman not present for the retreat: “I would not have put ‘f—’ on this record,” she says, “had Taylor Swift not put ‘f—’ on a record.”)

The singer and Vanderheym recorded much of “Patterns” in Vanderheym’s living room in part because the singer is no fan of a professional studio’s vocal booth. “It just feels like I’m walking into a cubicle with a Dell computer that I don’t know how to work,” she says with a laugh. “When I do vocals now, I’m crisscross applesauce on the floor with a mic in my hand.”

For the album’s lead single, “Cowboys Cry Too,” Ballerini enlisted Noah Kahan, the folk-rock singer-songwriter from Vermont, whom she met at the Grammys in February. “I totally fan-girled on him, and then he asked me about ‘Peter Pan,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘How do you even know that song?’” In “Cowboys,” Ballerini addresses the effects of “toxic masculinity,” as she puts it, but she felt the song would be more powerful “if it’s me opening the door and then a man actually talking about it from his perspective. So I just shot my shot and texted it to Noah.” Kahan wrote a moving verse about a guy un-learning the stoicism he inherited from his dad.

Says Ballerini: “Noah is what the song talks about, which is a man who’s not afraid to be cracked wide open and gush out.”

According to Ballerini, “Cowboys Cry Too” is “one of the two most country-radio-friendly songs I’ve ever put out.” (The other one is “If You Go Down [I’m Goin’ Down Too],” a cut from 2022’s “Subject to Change” LP that Ballerini co-wrote with McAnally.) Yet four months after it was released, “Cowboys” is stuck down in the high 30s on Mediabase’s closely watched country chart.

The singer is philosophical about “Cowboys’” performance. “I’ve had seven No. 1s on country radio, and now I can’t get one anymore,” she says. “Things just change, right?” She adds that she may never win female vocalist of the year at the Country Music Assn. Awards — a prize she’s been nominated for seven times, including at next month’s CMAs ceremony. “That’s probably the truth,” she says.

“But I’m in this phase of my career where there’s abundance in different ways,” not least the TV gigs and the concert she has booked Tuesday night at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where she plans to perform “Patterns” from beginning to end. “I’ve had to rewire exactly what success looks like. I’m working really hard, and I’m showing up, and that matters to me,” she says. “Whatever this ends up looking like, I’m open to it.”

Movie Reviews

Lucky Baskhar Review: Luck Favors Baskhar

Published

1 hour ago

October 30, 2024

Press Room

Lucky Baskhar Review: Luck Favors Baskhar

BOTTOM LINE
Luck Favors Baskhar

RATING
2.75/5

CENSOR
U/A, 2h 30m

dulquer-salmaan-lucky-bhaskar-telugu-movie-review What Is the Film About?

Baskhar (Dulquar Salman) is an ordinary guy with a near-poor life. He works as a cashier at Maghada Bank in Bombay. The financial circumstances around him eventually force him to take the wrong path. The movie’s basic story is what happens when Bashkar takes the wrong route and how it impacts him and his family.

Performances

Dulquar Salman perfectly fits Baskhar’s role. The film offers him dual shades primarily and other small variations making it a well-rounded affair for him.

It also helps that Dulquar Salman’s is the only character in the movie with a proper character arc. From a simple guy to a greedy ultra-rich person, the transition is neatly and naturally conveyed without any exaggerated emotions. He sails through the proceedings with his natural charm and style and with subtle emotions. Be it anger, frustration or extreme happiness, there is always an economy in emotion and it’s well captured.

Meenakshi Choudhary gets a decent role. She looks good and has a couple of moments to show her dramatic skills. They are simple and do the trick for her.

Analysis

Venky Atluri of Tholi Prema and Sir fame directs Lucky Baskhar. It is a rags-to-riches narrative which also includes the side effects of becoming greedy. Basically, it is a tale of greed and the retribution of a common man.

Lucky Baskhar takes time to establish the world the story is set in. It has two distinctive tracks within it, one is the family and the other is related to the banking sector. These two form the core plot elements the movie handles, they are family emotions and financial crimes.

The family emotions aspect of the movie is routine. We have seen it many times before. However, the good thing is the director swiftly moves through this predictability without too much lag. The birthday sequence where the wife gets hurt, the tearing up of the pocket, for example, conveys it clearly.

The criminal aspect offers freshness to the routine setup. The first half deals with smuggling via importing stuff. These parts offer newness as a background, but narrative speaking they happen very conveniently for the hero. He faces no challenge at all and is prepared well in advance.

What that does is, despite the fresh backdrop and something new on offer, the depth is missing and therefore the expected high is not reached. A flat sense prevails. Again, like the emotional track, there is hardly any lag. Things move swiftly with a smooth screenplay which keeps the curiosity alive. The pre-interval and interval segments help in maintaining the same.

Post-interval is where things get exciting as the stakes become higher. The financial crime aspect adds to the novelty. The business jargon is used just enough to make things look a little authentic and not overdone to make things confusing. A balance is achieved which helps navigate the proceedings without taxing the brain much.

Things go on a predictable path, but some of the payoff related to the ‘monetary’ aspect that’s established previously helps the flow. The spending of 69 lakhs in a single day is such a sequence.

The real deal with the movie arrives via the character arc of Baskhar during the second half. The change in personality due to greed, the realisation and the eventual transformation to normal are neatly done. The scene with the father during this portion is the clincher as far as Lucky Baskhar’s fate with the audience goes. What happens later is just icing on the cake tying all the threads. The stretch towards the climax is a little lengthy but satisfying.

Overall, Lucky Baskhar has a straightforward story that is easy to predict. There’s no real challenge for the hero, but the engaging screenplay and interesting narrative make up for it by keeping us involved in how the events unfold. Watch it if you like crime narratives with routine drama embedded in them.

Performances by Others Actors

Lucky Bashkar is filled with artists. You have many people filling up different worlds. But, none among them have well-defined parts. They are bits and pieces roles and chip in as per the requirement and then disappear, to then appear much later reminding us of their presence.

Among the many, Tinu Anand, Rajkumaar, AVPL Tatha etc manage to register. They all have minor parts but play a key role in taking things forward.

Music and Other Departments?

GV Prakash provides the music and background score for the movie. The musician doesn’t deliver on the songs front, but makes up for it a little bit via the BGM. It is loud and blaring, but serves the purpose.

Technically the movie is slick with neat cuts, frames and art work. The cinematography is consistently good and adds to the vintage feel. The editing is neat. The predictable moments, especially in drama, don’t overstay to cause irritation. The writing is adequate. Nothing stands out, but there isn’t much to complain about as well. The production values are good. The movie bears a visually striking look.

Highlights?

Dulquar Salman

Backdrop

Second Half

Pre Climax

Drawbacks?

Predictable Narrative

Parts Of First Half

No Real Threat For Hero

Did I Enjoy It?

Yes

Will You Recommend It?

Yes

Final Report:

Lucky Bhaskar is a decently engaging watch set against the backdrop of financial crimes. Dulquer, the performer makes a straightforward story interesting enough with his acting. The writing and presentation are decent but convenient for the most part. The film certainly makes for a one-time watch in theaters.

First Half Report:

Bhaskar’s hurdles may be complex, but the solutions seem very convenient. The good part is that the interest is alive and keeps the story moving forward. Dulquer is driving it single-handedly. The interval stop point is interesting. Overall, it’s a decent first half so far.

Lucky Baskhar opens with Bhaskar’s family facing financial difficulties. Stay tuned for the report.

Stay tuned for Lucky Baskhar Review, USA Premiere report.

Lucky Bhaskar, directed by Venky Atluri, caught attention with a good trailer, and Dulquer Salmaan, despite being a Malayalam hero, has strong acceptance in Telugu, which turned out to be a plus. Let’s find out if the movie lives up to the hype.

Cast: Dulquer Salmaan, Meenakshi Chaudhary

Writer & Director: Venky Atluri

Music: GV Prakash Kumar
Cinematography: Nimish Ravi
Editor: Navin Nooli
Art Director – Banglan

Producer: Naga Vamsi S – Sai Soujanya
Presenter – Srikara Studios
Banners – Sithara Entertainments & Fortune Four Cinemas

USA Distributor: Shloka Entertainments

Lucky Baskhar Movie Review by M9

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Entertainment

Sophie Turner says she longed for London while wed to Joe Jonas: 'My life was on pause'

Published

3 hours ago

October 30, 2024

Press Room

Sophie Turner says she longed for London while wed to Joe Jonas: 'My life was on pause'

Sophie Turner has made a living playing memorable characters in “Game of Thrones” and “Dark Phoenix,” among other screen projects. But the role the she’s missed most? Being a London resident.

“It felt my life was on pause until I returned to England,” Turner told Harper’s Bazaar in her first interview since finalizing her divorce from singer Joe Jonas last month. “I just never really feel like myself when I’m not in London, with my friends and family.”

The 28-year-old actor got candid about the next phase of her career, motherhood and the factors that led to her U.K. homecoming following a contentious split with the “Cake by the Ocean” pop star last year. In September 2023, Jonas filed to divorce Turner, stating in legal documents that their marriage was “irretrievably broken.”

The divorce was a mutual decision, but the custody battle over their two young daughters took a litigious turn. Turner sued her ex-husband for allegedly unlawfully keeping their two daughters in the U.S. but, months later, asked a judge to dismiss the case. Amid a “legal process right now where I can’t really say much,” Turner told the magazine the separation “was incredibly sad.”

“We had a beautiful relationship and it was hard,” she said.

Turner married Jonas, one-third of the Jonas Brothers, in 2019 and lived in Los Angeles before moving to Miami. “I was away for so long,” she said, adding she felt she missed out on major milestones for both herself and friends. For example, Turner grieved that a close friend said they never got to touch the actor’s baby bump when she was pregnant. She welcomed her first daughter in 2020, then her second two years later.

Turner said she sought out British shops in new cities she visited with Jonas and would “stock up on a month’s worth of chocolate.” She said she was also at odds with the state of U.S. politics including the reversal of Roe vs. Wade and rampant gun violence. After the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in 2022, Turner said it was “time to get the f— out.”

The Emmy-nominated actor, now back in London and dating British aristocrat Peregrine Pearson, also shared that motherhood had helped her shed her “depressed and anxious” side.

“I think I live my life for them,” she said of her children, adding that she wants them to see her doing well professionally and socially.

Turner currently stars as diamond thief Joan Hannington in the ITV1 series “Joan,” wrapped production for the thriller “Trust” and is even circling the lead role of Lara Croft in Amazon’s “Tomb Raider” live-action series, according to Deadline. Harper’s Bazaar also named Turner one of its 2024 Women of the Year.

“I’ll come back and say, ‘This is why Mummy was away,’” she said, painting a picture of the holidays with her kids. “It’s because she’s doing this for you, so Father Christmas can come with a big bundle of presents.”

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: A musical, pulpy crime thriller, ‘Emilia Pérez’ swings for the fences

Published

9 hours ago

October 30, 2024

Press Room

Movie Review: A musical, pulpy crime thriller, ‘Emilia Pérez’ swings for the fences

There is so much going on in “Emilia Pérez,” the audacious musical/melodrama/crime-thriller from filmmaker Jacques Audiard, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer ambition of it all.

There is obvious craft and moments of true transcendence, beauty and horror. Set around Mexico City, this is a movie about family, about ambition, about the possibility of change, cartels, human disappearances, gender-affirmation, money and corruption.

Sometimes the characters break into fantastical musical numbers: Some are filled with rage, others with joy and hope. Other times the songs come out in barely a whisper. And yet even with all that life and color and passion on screen, there’s a distinct rift between all those big emotions that the characters are cycling through and what the audience is feeling, which is practically nothing. It’s almost as if “Emilia Pérez” forgot to invite us along for the ride.

And it is quite a ride: One day a cartel boss named Manitas ( Karla Sofía Gascón ) has a smart, but undervalued lawyer Rita Mora Castro ( Zoe Saldaña ) kidnapped. Manitas wants gender confirmation surgery, and for Rita to handle the logistics: Hiring the discreet surgeon, faking Manitas’ death and transporting the wife, Jessi ( Selena Gomez ) and two kids to their new home in Switzerland. In return, Rita will get rich. Somehow, this is only the first act.

Four years later, Rita’s gotten a glow up. Gone are her bush eyebrows and frumpy suit, replaced with the kind of grooming only money and genetics like Saldaña’s can produce. And she’s leading a cosmopolitan life in London, something that we get to see all too briefly, when she meets another woman who’s gone through a major transformation, Emilia Pérez (Gascón).

Audiard plays briefly with the idea that Rita assumes Emilia is there to kill her, to rid the world of any remaining evidence of those who know what happened. In actuality, she just misses her kids and wants them back in Mexico to live with her. It’s up to Rita to get them to move once more, in with Emilia, posing as an aunt they’ve never met before if you’re wondering where all those “Mrs. Doubtfire” comparisons come into play. ( The bloody “Sicario” stuff is yet to come).

Saldaña lends a captivating fierceness to Rita, despite being a terribly underwritten character. It’s strange to spend so much time with someone and feel entirely detached from who they are and what they want. She just follows others around, a receptacle for everyone else’s decisions with little arc or agency of her own.

Saldaña in a scene from “Emilia Pérez.” (Shanna Besson/Netflix via AP)

Early on in the film Rita debates (in song) with a plastic surgeon in Hong Kong about whether or not changing the body has any effect on the soul. He doesn’t think so. She does, and even goes a step further, singing “changing the soul changes society, changing society changes everything.” It’s a lovely idea that the film handles clumsily in its maximalist, go-for-broke way that values massive set-pieces and high drama over authentic emotion.

At first Emilia seems entirely changed, no longer the vindictive, jealous, violent cartel leader she once was. She is soft spoken, empathetic and happy. She starts a foundation to find all the disappeared people and give their families the chance of a proper burial and farewell. She even finds love. And yet she can’t handle watching Jessi move on. It’s the stuff of soap operas — and not necessarily the fun ones. Here, it could even read as dangerously reductive.

Gomez in a scene from “Emilia Pérez.” (Shanna Besson/Netflix via AP)

Jessi sometimes feels like she’s part of an entirely different film, or rather a music video that seems to be paying homage somehow to Pedro Almodóvar, David Lynch and Robert Rodriguez. It is fun and wild at times, and Gomez fully commits to the bit of this woman who is being gaslit into insanity. But she and the film crescendo into absurdity, with little in the way of relief or catharsis. After all those big ideas, all those grand themes and genre-subverting gestures, we’re left with shockingly little to hold on to.

“Emilia Pérez,” a Netflix release in theaters Friday and streaming on Nov. 13, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “some violent content, sexual material, language.” Running time: 132 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.