Connect with us

Entertainment

‘The Jennifer Hudson Show’ to debut in fall 2022

Published

on

‘The Jennifer Hudson Show’ to debut in fall 2022

Warner Bros. (which is owned by CNN’s mother or father firm) introduced Wednesday that Academy Award and Grammy-winning artist Jennifer Hudson will helm a chat present that may air on Fox tv stations.

“I’ve skilled a lot in my life; I’ve seen the best of the highs, the bottom of the lows, and nearly all the pieces in between however as my mom at all times instructed me, ‘When you suppose you have seen all of it, simply carry on residing,’” Hudson stated in an announcement.

“Folks from all over the world have been part of my journey from the start — twenty years in the past — and I am so prepared to affix their journey as we sit down and discuss concerning the issues that encourage and transfer us all,” Hudson added. “I’ve at all times liked folks and I can’t wait to attach on a deeper degree and let audiences see the totally different sides of who I’m, the human being, in return. And I could not be extra thrilled to do it alongside this unbelievable workforce. We’re about to have a number of enjoyable and shake issues up a bit of bit!”

Hudson first got here to fame as a contestant on “American Idol” earlier than releasing a number of albums and starring as Effie White within the 2006 movie “Dreamgirls,” a big-screen adaptation of the hit Tony-winning Broadway musical.

Hudson gained a finest supporting actress Oscar for the function.

Advertisement

She suffered an awesome tragedy after her mom, brother and younger nephew have been murdered by her sister’s estranged husband in 2008.

Hudson most not too long ago starred as Aretha Franklin within the movie “Respect.”

The one-hour discuss present will debut within the fall.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Entertainment

Roy Haynes, jazz drummer and band leader, has died

Published

on

Roy Haynes, jazz drummer and band leader, has died

Roy Haynes, a jazz drummer and band leader whose skill and versatility led to performances with such diverse artists as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea and Pat Metheny over the course of his seven-decade career, has died.

A representative for Haynes confirmed to The Times that the prolific percussionist died Tuesday. His daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, told the New York Times her father died after a brief illness. He was 99.

Haynes’ far-reaching résumé boasted expertise in most of the stylistic areas of jazz history. Called upon to play New Orleans music, swing, bebop, avant-garde, fusion, modal jazz, jazz rock, acid-jazz and more, he responded with extraordinary skill and imagination.

“One can hear the essences of all of those bandstands, concert jobs, dances, parties and jam sessions in the freedom of his beat and command of tempo,” critic Stanley Crouch, a drummer himself, wrote for the online magazine Slate. “Haynes,” he added, “has no date on the way he plays. It is and always was contemporary.”

Haynes’ remarkable longevity as a performer was underscored over the decades whenever he played at New York City’s venerable jazz club Birdland. In December 1949, he was the drummer with the group that opened the room — the Charlie Parker Quintet, with guest vocalist Harry Belafonte.

Advertisement

His playing from the ’40s, when bebop was becoming the principal jazz dialect, still sounds remarkable. Along with such contemporaries as Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Sid Catlett, Haynes helped transform the drums from their traditional time-keeping role into a crisp assemblage of percussion and cymbal sounds designed to keep the music alive and thriving.

The high quality of his work from that period is apparent on such classic recordings as Parker’s “Anthropology,” Miles Davis’ “Morpheus” and Bud Powell’s “Bouncing With Bud.” Often called “Mr. Snap, Crackle” in tribute to his brisk, articulate drumming style, he wrote a signature tune with the same name for his own 1962 album, “Out of the Afternoon.”

What made Haynes different from many of his contemporaries, however, was his constant musical receptivity and adaptability. As new attitudes and styles arrived — the avant-garde of the 1960s, the fusion of the ’70s and ’80s — he quickly grasped their techniques and incorporated them into his own persistent musical vision.

Haynes “has a way of being inside the musical moment with a depth that is truly rare,” Metheny told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003. “He has a listening sensitivity that allows him to not only play beautifully every time out, but to make the musicians around him become the beneficiaries of his musical wisdom.”

Roy Owen Haynes was born March 13, 1925 in Roxbury, Mass. His parents, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, had moved to the area from Barbados. Roy was the third of four children, all boys. His older brother Douglas was a trumpet player who introduced him to jazz. Another older brother, Vincent, was a photographer and football coach, and younger brother Michael served several terms in the Massachusetts Legislature.

Advertisement

Haynes was still in his teens when he made his professional debut in the early 1940s. By mid-decade, he was playing with a variety of swing bands, as well as the Luis Russell big band — one of his rare extended associations with a large ensemble.

By the late ’40s, he had become a member of the group of arriving new young players associated with bebop. In a remarkable string of gigs, he successively played with Lester Young, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and Thelonious Monk. In the ’50s, he was with George Shearing, Stan Getz, Kenny Burrell and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. From 1961 to 1965, he filled in as Elvin Jones’ substitute in the John Coltrane Quartet.

In his early career, Haynes was not as highly visible to the broader jazz audience as Max Roach, his senior by a little more than a year. In part, that can be attributed to the fact that Haynes rarely led his own groups, spending most of his time as a first-call sideman. He once jokingly pointed out that he was far more concerned with making sure his mortgage payments were made than he was with establishing himself as a leader.

But Haynes was always universally admired by other drummers.

“What Roy has as a musician is a very, very special thing,” drummer Jack DeJohnette told Smithsonian magazine in 2003. “The way he tunes his drums, the projection he gets out of his drums, the way he interacts with musicians onstage: it’s a rare combination of street education, high sophistication and soul.”

Advertisement

Despite his relatively low visibility, Haynes’ complex but always swinging style has had a significant impact — first upon the playing of such otherwise highly original drummers as Jones, DeJohnette and Tony Williams and in more recent years on Jeff “Tain” Watts, Eric Harland, Matt Wilson and others.

Small and compact, always fit, Haynes balanced his sophisticated drumming with an equally stylish wardrobe. Esquire magazine, in 1960, listed him as one of the best-dressed men in America, along with Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.

In the last of his playing years, Haynes frequently led a changing group of musicians in a band known as the Fountain of Youth. It was an appropriate title, given the fact that the musicians he chose to work with were often three and four decades younger. But from his seemingly ageless perspective, when it came to making music, there were no differences.

“When we get on the bandstand,” he told the Albany, N.Y., Times Union in 2007, “we all become one age — the same age. It has nothing to do with how old you are or where you’re from, it’s what you can do musically.”

Haynes, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1995, is survived by his daughter and two sons: Graham, a jazz cornetist, and Craig, a drummer. His grandson Marcus Gilmore is also a drummer. Haynes’ wife, Jesse Lee Nevels Haynes, died in 1979.

Advertisement

Heckman, a longtime jazz critic for The Times, died in 2020. Staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.

Continue Reading

Movie Reviews

Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe Anime Movie Review

Published

on

Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe Anime Movie Review

Modern folklore-focused anime and manga owe a huge debt to the work of 1960s manga Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s artist and writer Shigeru Mizuki. A second world war veteran, the traumatic amputation of his left arm, due to an air raid explosion, never held back his pre-existing artistic ambitions. An avid researcher of international folklore, he poured his encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural not only into his wildly influential manga, but also into countless factual tomes – some of which are available in English. Mizuki made his journey to the otherworld in 2015, at the age of 93, leaving an unparalleled legacy that this movie attempts to do justice to, acting as a prequel to the most recent anime adaptation and as an entry point for newcomers.

I’ll admit it now – before watching this, I was only familiar with Kitaro, and Mizuki’s work in general. Mainly on the strength of Scotland Loves Anime’s presenter Jonathan Clements‘ urgings, in preparation for this review I sought out several volumes of the original manga and episodes of the 2018 TV anime. It appears I am now very much a Mizuki fan, though not necessarily due to this movie.

Oddly, while Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s TV incarnation is aimed primarily at children (with a theme song that claims it’s more fun to be a ghost because school attendance isn’t required), Birth of Kitaro is a grim and gritty horror film targeted at an adult audience. It loosely adapts a short manga chapter from 1966, however only uses the most basic of elements from it, crafting a mostly original story, tonally removed from the progenitor TV show. There’s even an “uncut” version, released only very recently in Japan, that dials up the already bloody violence even further. Birth of Kitaro has an unusual pedigree: it’s written by Hiroyuki Yoshino of Macross Frontier and Dance in the Vampire Bund, while directed by Gō Koga, best known for Precure and Digimon.

We’re first subjected to a baffling non-sequitur of a prologue that clumsily attempts to tie into TV show continuity with an appearance from Kitaro and pals in the “modern” day before jarringly segueing into the film’s primarily historical setting – it’s not a promising start. Most of the action transpires in 1956, during Japan’s post-war Showa-era economic recovery. Protagonist Mizuki (who is apparently a stand-in for author Mizuki himself) is an ambitious middle-management businessman who works for the “Imperial Blood Bank,” a company run by the mysterious Ryuga family. When the family head dies, Mizuki is summoned by his boss to the Ryuga’s remote mountain village estate to observe the transfer of power to the deceased head’s nominated heir. As expected from this genre, events don’t exactly proceed according to plan.

It’s immediately obvious this village is a strange place – accessible only by dangerous, unmaintained mountain roads, even locals from nearby areas avoid it entirely. Mizuki’s arrival is viewed with either novelty (from a village child), interest (from the main female character), or outright hostility (from most of the rest of the cast). His status as an unwelcome outsider is constantly reinforced by various senior Ryuga family members. Once poor Mizuki realizes he’s now trapped in a Hinamizawa/Twin Peaks/Royston Vasey-esque situation, it’s too late. This section of the film is slow-moving, perhaps as an attempt to build dread, but so many characters involved in random mafia/yakuza movie-style politicking are introduced that it’s extremely hard to follow. Eventually, this doesn’t matter, as most of the extended cast are murdered horribly anyway. There’s a lot of death in Birth of Kitaro, probably unsurprising for a character that fans already know will be born from the corpse of his mother, as the last of his kind. (So, spoilers for the uninitiated… I guess?)

Advertisement

Kitaro himself only barely appears in this prequel – instead, the focus is on the horribly-out-of-his depth Mizuki who finds an ally in the mysterious, white-haired, googly-eyed interloper he named “Gegero”. (The Japanese sound “ge” typically means “creepy” or “icky”, and when repeated like “gegege” it adds emphasis.) Gegero is really Kitaro‘s father, Medama-oyaji, who is destined to become a talking, disembodied eyeball who resides in Kitaro‘s empty left eye socket.

Mizuki and Gegero investigate the creepy Ryuga family’s secrets to discover the truth of “Substance M,” an experimental blood product marketed by Mizuki’s employers. It doesn’t take a doctorate in hematology to intuit that the Ryuga are up to no good. Once all of the narrative pieces are in place (and various Ryuga family members are either impaled by trees or otherwise mutilated horrifically), the plot finally rushes headlong into batshit insanity. The final forty minutes or so are a relentless descent into stunningly animated violent hell, with some truly breathtaking action sequences. A particular highlight is Gegero’s battle with an army of armored ninja dudes atop a multi-leveled tower, depicted with stylish, fluid, incredibly kinetic animation. A final confrontation centered around a demonic underground tree almost reaches Evangelion-esque levels of surreal metaphysical nonsense.

Birth of Kitaro‘s ultimate antagonist is somewhat difficult to take seriously (the audience audibly laughed when they revealed themselves), but really isn’t that incongruous when viewed in the context of the often goofy manga. I do wonder that if there had been a bit more of that unselfconscious goofiness added to this film, it might have been more entertaining. Without author Mizuki’s more whimsical influence, at times Birth of Kitaro feels disappointingly like a more by-the-numbers anime horror without much personality of its own. Its overall seriousness meshes uncomfortably with its more outlandish character designs (such as the Mizuki-accurate cartoony undead, who appear later on), and its overly complex story really doesn’t amount to anything by the end, considering the literal mountain of corpses left in the film’s wake.

birth-of-kitaro-1.png

Japanese folklore fans will enjoy the glimpses of yokai, like the water-borne Kappa who briefly appear, while there are plenty of rich cultural references likely to fly over the heads of most Westerners. By the time Kitaro himself arrives, we’ve seen so much death and destruction that we’re almost numb to it, so his birth scene plays as more silly than tragic. That part is adapted more or less panel-for-panel from the original manga, even if the circumstances leading up to his birth are completely different. A bookending flash-forward epilogue re-contextualizes the odd prologue in a genuinely emotionally affecting way – but doesn’t make up for the tonal disconnect that makes the opening so off-putting. It would have been better to move the prologue to the end, uniting it with the epilogue.

Advertisement

While I enjoyed the action aspects of Birth of Kitaro, I can’t say it works that well as an entry point for new fans. Tonally, it’s completely different from both manga and TV shows, plus it’s also quite dull and plodding in its first half. Existing fans might get a kick out of this darker, more violent incarnation of the franchise, but I’d recommend newcomers start with the manga or 2018 TV series, which a lot more fun.

Continue Reading

Entertainment

Rainn Wilson and Aasif Mandvi are waiting for 'Godot' at Geffen Playhouse

Published

on

Rainn Wilson and Aasif Mandvi are waiting for 'Godot' at Geffen Playhouse

Aasif Mandvi, one of the leads in a new production of “Waiting for Godot” opening Thursday at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse, is sitting on a couch, recalling the dearth of roles for South Asian actors in 2003, when he played a Taliban minister in Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” Mandvi’s co-star, Rainn Wilson, leans in.

“I thought you were Cuban!” Wilson deadpans.

Mandvi doesn’t miss a beat.

“I’ve told you a million times, I’m not Cuban,” he says with mock exasperation.

“You could play Cuban,” Wilson says.

Advertisement

“I’ve played Cuban, but I’m not Cuban,” Mandvi says.

“You should change your name, you really should,” Wilson persists. “Like, Antonio Mandivosa. You would work nonstop.”

Mandvi shakes his head, ribbing Wilson right back.

“You’re so white right now,” he says.

They both laugh.

Advertisement

The two men are in the midst of recounting their early days in theater, when Wilson didn’t make more than $17,000 annually for years and Madvi toured Florida with a production of “Aladdin” for kids so young they occasionally peed their pants during the performance.

Aasif Mandvi photographed at Geffen Playhouse in October.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

For his first show in New York, Mandvi played Hector in Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida.” The production took place at the back of a restaurant in Brooklyn, and the audience consisted of maybe a dozen people. The mother of the guy who played Troilus made all the costumes, Mandvi recalled, and so he came out onstage with a cardboard sword with a crease in it.

Advertisement

“I’d been through drama school, I was a professional!” Mandvi says with a laugh. “It was the most insane thing. But this is to say that you just get onstage and do whatever you can to get seen, to build your résumé.”

It’s funny to think of a time when either actor still needed to build his résumé. As two of modernist theater’s most iconic misfits — Vladimir (Wilson) and Estragon (Mandvi) — the actors will take the stage as bona fide stars. Although Wilson will always be associated with the gullible and weaselly Dwight Schrute on NBC’s “The Office,” and Mandvi recently won a devoted fan following for his portrayal of the science-minded skeptic Ben Shakir in “Evil” on Paramount+, both men refer to theater as their first — and biggest — love.

“The entire reason I came to Los Angeles, and I am not even exaggerating one iota, is I knew that if I ever wanted to play Mercutio at the Public Theater, I was gonna need to be on a TV show,” Wilson says. “That’s just the reality of New York theater. They want to sell tickets.”

Rainn Wilson stands, one hand resting on an open door, the other on his hip

Rainn Wilson at Geffen Playhouse on Oct. 29, 2024.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

Wilson has stayed in L.A., but he still talks about going back with the goal of playing some of those great roles. Which is why he jumped at the chance to work on “Waiting for Godot.” He performed a scene from the play in acting class at the University of Washington in 1986 and ended up marrying his scene partner, writer Holiday Reinhorn. Since then, he’d always dreamed of revisiting it. Mandvi also performed “Godot” in acting class long ago, and the play has long been on his bucket list.

The Geffen production is exciting to both actors because it’s presented in association with the Irish theater company Gare St Lazare Ireland, which specializes in Beckett’s work.

“I’ve rarely been this challenged before as an actor,” Wilson says. “I played Hamlet in college, and I will say this is harder because everything is subject to interpretation.”

Wilson throws out an example. He has a line in the middle of the play that reads, “In an instant, all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more in the midst of nothingness.”

“You could play that line with all the darkness and sincerity that you can muster, and it might really strike a chord in the the heart of the audience, or you could put a tiny little spin on it and get a big laugh,” he said, thinking about it for a moment. “Yeah, and I’m not sure which way I’m even gonna go with that right now.”

Advertisement

Beckett wrote “Waiting for Godot” in the late 1940s after World War II, during which he was part of the French Resistance. The play, which centers on two ragtag characters waiting in vain for a man named Godot, delivers some of 20th century theater’s most closely parsed lines. It premiered in1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris and ever since has been endlessly analyzed and explained by academics, critics and theater lovers bent on uncovering its meaning.

“It presumes the ultimate thesis, which is, we don’t know what we’re doing here, or why we’re here,” Mandvi says. “We just pass the time.”

Mandvi and Wilson are the same age, 58, and shared the same agent in the mid-’90s when they were starting out, but they had never worked together.

“It just sounded like a blast, right?” Mandvi says. “ I was like, ‘Oh, I get to work with Rainn who I’ve always admired and watched and —’”

“Been oddly attracted to,” Wilson interrupts.

Advertisement

Mandvi nods slowly.

“Been oddly attracted to,” he repeats before adding emphatically, “which has really diminished.

“He’s one of the few people where the more you know him, the less you like him,” Mandvi continues. “The less you lust, I should say.”

“It’s true,” Wilson agrees.

Up next, the actors suggest: A mashup of “The Office” and “Evil” where the Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. is haunted. Hollywood producers, take note.

Advertisement

‘Waiting for Godot’

Where: Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday; ends Dec. 15

Tickets: $49-$159

Information: (310) 208- 2028 or geffenplayhouse.org

Advertisement

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (one intermission)

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Trending