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      ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 7: Lovers and Fighters

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      “The White Lotus” tells us only enough about the characters’ pasts to explain some of the choices they make. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Killer Instincts’One unusual quality of “The White Lotus” is that the show’s creator, Mike White, keeps his characters’ back stories to a minimum. He mainly traffics in types: the swaggering North Carolina money-manager, the vain celebrity, and so on.White tells us only enough about their pasts to explain some of the choices they make. We know a lot about Rick’s past, because his tragic childhood led directly to every move he has made this season. But we know very little about the Ratliff kids beyond the personas they project: the cocky older brother, the rebellious lefty sister and whatever the heck Lochlan is supposed to be. As for what made them this way? We can use our imaginations to shade in the finer details.Most of the time, this approach works well enough. There is a wonderfully wry comic moment in this week’s episode, when Piper gets embarrassed while watching Lochlan struggle awkwardly with his monastery dinner. We know just enough about her to guess what she is thinking. She suddenly seems a lot like her mother, concerned less with her brother’s feelings than with how his clumsiness reflects on her. (See also: Piper’s mildly dismayed expression when Lochlan says he wants to spend the year in Thailand with her.)On the other hand, Saxon’s overall blankness becomes a problem in this episode, leading to one of the season’s clumsiest scenes. The moment occurs at Gary’s party, when Saxon watches his father swill down yet another large glass of whiskey. He asks Tim again if something is wrong back at the office, reminding him that, “My career is totally tied to yours.” Saxon has no interests, no hobbies. “I put my whole life into this basket,” he says. “Into your basket.”Given what we have seen of Saxon this season, I am not sure he is the kind of guy who would give such a self-aware speech, saying things like, “If I’m not a success, I’m nothing, and I can’t handle being nothing.” (I can, however, believe that Tim would answer his son’s very real concerns with a mumbled, “Nothing’s up, kid. We’re all good. It’s a party, get out there.”)It’s a tricky balancing act for White, trying to show more than he tells and letting the audience make assumptions. I thought about this also this week during the Bangkok scenes with Rick and Frank. I figured these two were seasoned old pros, skilled at running cons, and that they would know what they were doing when they met up with Sritala and her ailing husband, Jim (Scott Glenn), at the Hollingers’ house. Instead, Rick and Frank are surprisingly — and ridiculously — unprepared. They try to get by on improvisation; Frank in particular is really bad at it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Warner Bros. Still Awaits David Zaslav’s Promised Renaissance

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      David Zaslav promised to revive the storied film studio when he took over Warner Bros. Discovery. That was three years ago.David Zaslav blew into Hollywood in 2022 like a tornado of fresh air, telling anyone who would listen about his rejuvenation plans for Warner Bros.As a lifelong television executive, he was new to the film business. But the merger of Discovery and WarnerMedia had put him in charge of the most storied studio left standing — a troubled Warner Bros. — and the solution to its woes, he said at the time, was relatively straightforward.Make more movies for exclusive theatrical release. Make a wider variety of movies, not just big-budget spectacles. And then watch multiplexes fill up. “This business could be bigger and stronger than its ever been,” Mr. Zaslav said at a 2023 convention of movie theater owners, to jubilant applause.Yet two years later, the movie business finds itself weaker than it has ever been. Ticket sales are down 40 percent compared with 2019, just before the pandemic sped a consumer shift to streaming, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data.And one reason (among many) involves Mr. Zaslav’s Warner Bros.Warner Bros. has delivered only one homegrown hit over the last year. That was “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which was released in September. Since then, the studio has whiffed five times. “Joker: Folie à Deux” died on arrival in October. “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” fizzled in December. “Companion,” a low-budget thriller, came and went in January. “Mickey 17,” an expensive science-fiction adventure, bombed this month.“The Alto Knights” — a mob drama starring Robert De Niro that Mr. Zaslav personally championed — added to the carnage last weekend. It cost roughly $50 million to make and another $15 million to market, but sold a mere $3.2 million in tickets over its first three days. That made the film a near-complete wipeout; studios and theaters split ticket sales roughly 50-50.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jon Stewart on GOP’s obsession with free speech: ‘It’s such blatant hypocrisy’

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      Late-night hosts talked conservatives’ hypocrisy over free speech and the Trump administration accidentally texting an Atlantic editor its war plans.Jon StewartJon Stewart was back in old-school Daily Show mode on Monday evening, pointing out the hypocrisy of Republicans in power. But first, he mocked the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, whose group text on Signal regarding the administration’s plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.“Back in my day if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you had to work the sources, meet them in a dark garage, earn the trust, pound the pavement,” Stewart said. “Now? Just wait for the national security adviser to be distracted by The White Lotus while he’s setting up his Bomb Yemen group chat.”Stewart went on: “There are certain hypocrisies and absurdities that we find in our cultural moment that make for great fodder for humorous dialogue: a facial expression, a nod and a wink. Then there are pronouncements by our elected officials, other actions by our government that are so baldly bullshit, even though you know it will have no effect, and that these powerful creatures have been genetically modified to resist shame or self-reflection of any kind, you just can’t help yourself but to go old-school Daily Show gotcha.”He specifically referred to conservatives’ obsession with “free speech” and the liberal “thought police”, while arguing in the same breath for CNN to be banned from the airwaves, among other proposed cancellations and censorship.“Generally, you’ve gotta search the archives for contradictions on one’s stated principles, dig through policy papers to uncover private actions that are undermined by someone’s public stance, but this is so blatant,” said Stewart. “I can’t wrap around it. It’s not even the hypocrisy, it’s that they so fetishize free speech, this thing that they do not in any way actually practice.”Stewart cited Trump banning the AP from the White House for refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America”, and the detainment of Columbia student protester Mahmoud Khalil.“These guys don’t give a fuck about free speech,” he said. “They care about their speech. It’s such blatant hypocrisy.”Stephen Colbert“Our nation is a beautiful pastry spread of freedom and opportunity,” said Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. “And yesterday, I got a closeup look at one of the donuts that Trump has been licking” at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Colbert and a number of comedians attended in support of Conan O’Brien, who received the Mark Twain prize for American humor.“It was a great night full of life and love and laughs,” he said, but the mood in DC was “still grim”. Last week, Trump held his first official meeting with “all of his hand-picked flunkies” that appointed him to the board of the Kennedy Center, “so he knows that they’re all 100% loyal to him”.During the meeting, which was recorded and leaked to the press, Trump said he wanted to make the Kennedy Center programming “slightly more conservative” and feature more “non-woke musicals”. “Non-woke musicals, also known as any musical you take your dad to,” Colbert joked.Besides rambling on about his love for the musical Cats, Trump also put his name forward as a potential host for the annual Kennedy Center Honors. “Man alive, you could’ve given me a thousand guesses, and that would’ve been all of them,” said Colbert, himself a three-time former host of the ceremony. “I tell you what, sir, I’m willing to trade – you host the Kennedy Center Honors, I’ll be president.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also mocked the administration putting sensitive military information in a group chat with Goldberg. “In other words, our national security is being guarded by a bunch of doofs you wouldn’t trust to throw your cousin a surprise party,” he said. “No one on the chain thought to ask: ‘Who is JG? What are these initials?’ They could’ve been leaking secrets to Jeff Goldblum, for all they knew.”“If Joe Biden’s top military team accidentally texted these plans to a journalist, Laura Ingraham’s erection would be so rock strong, it would break through the wall like the Kool-Aid man,” he added.“This is a crazy mistake by any definition, but you have to remember: Pete Hegseth, our secretary of defense, three months ago was a weekend host on Fox & Friends.” So his former cohost “looked at the bright side” of the story on-air.As Fox’s Will Cain put it: “What you will see is dialogue between vice-president JD Vance, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and many more, in a very collaborative, open, honest, team-based attempt to come to the right decision after years of secrecy and incompetence. If you read the content of these messages, I think you’ll come away proud that these are the leaders making these decisions in America.”“If you read the content of these messages – the point is we’re not supposed to read the content of these messages!” Kimmel exclaimed. “That is a real beauty of a spin.” More

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      ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: The Morning After

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      Drinks were drunk, decisions were made. This week’s episode was all about the consequences.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Denials’This “White Lotus” season moved at a lulling pace early on, putting the viewers in the same head space as the vacationers, feeling equal parts enchanted and dazed by an exotic, sun-splashed locale. The show’s creator, Mike White, then cranked up the energy considerably over Episodes 4 and 5, in which several characters made sudden, fateful choices — perhaps without fully understanding what they were doing.This week? It’s hangover time.In terms of narrative progress, this episode inches along. It ends just before three significant events begin. Saxon and his parents (and maybe Belinda?) are about to attend a dinner party hosted by the dangerous Gary. Rick and Frank are walking into their meeting with Sritala’s husband in Bangkok, which could very well turn violent if Rick follows through on his need for revenge. And Piper and Lochlan are spending a night at the Buddhist temple, at Victoria’s request.But while there is more anticipation-building than action this week, White does develop the season’s major themes in ways that help them strike a little deeper. Over and over, as they face crises mostly of their own making, many of these characters find themselves asking: Is there a better way to live?The Ratliffs are the most in need of a new path. When last we saw Tim, he had Gaitok’s pistol by his side and had just finished writing a suicide note. By the end of this day, he still has not pulled the trigger. But he does imagine shooting himself, and he perhaps stops himself from doing it for real only because he also imagines Victoria and Piper finding his body. Later, he imagines shooting Victoria and then killing himself, thus sparing his wife from having to live on in shame and poverty.At the moment though, Tim is leaving his options open. He stashes the gun in a chest of drawers and spends the day on an assignment handed to him by Victoria. She wants him to check out Luang Por Teera (Suthichai Yoon), the senior monk whom Piper is planning to spend a year following. (“He better be the best Buddhist in China,” Victoria harrumphs.)Victoria expects that Tim — her confident, successful, morally upright husband — will give this phony guru a good dressing-down. But instead, Tim is captivated by Teera’s thoughts on the inescapable pain of everyday existence, which he blames on an insatiable hunger for self-gratification born of a spiritual emptiness and a loss of connection with nature. Teera also describes death as the end of suffering (“a happy return, like coming home”). Which may not be the best thing to say to a suicidal man.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Severance’ Season 2 Finale Recap: Mark vs. Mark

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      The season ended with a bizarre but moving episode that found the Lumon employees’ inner and outer selves at cross purposes.Early in the Season 2 finale of the acclaimed, much-memed Apple TV+ series “Severance,” a man has a spirited debate that ends up encapsulating much of what keeps the show’s fans watching. The person he is talking to? Himself, via an old video camera. Mark (Adam Scott) records messages for Mark. And Mark replies.Created by the writer Dan Erickson in collaboration with the producer and frequent director Ben Stiller, “Severance,” which was just renewed for another season, is centered on a cultlike company named Lumon that allows employees to “sever” their work lives and their home lives via a chip surgically inserted into their brains. The people who clock in every day — the “innies” — have no idea what their “outies” do after quitting time, and vice versa.At the end of Season 1, Mark’s innie led his office-mates Dylan (Zach Cherry), Helly (Britt Lower) and Irving (John Turturro) in a mini-rebellion, executing “the overtime contingency,” which allowed them all, very briefly, to live their outies’ lives. This is how Mark learned that his outie’s wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) — presumed dead in the outside world — was still alive as an innie at Lumon.Season 2 has been primarily driven by outie Mark’s efforts to reintegrate his consciousness with innie Mark, in hopes of rescuing Gemma from Lumon. In the finale, the two Marks argue over whose needs are more important: If Gemma leaves Lumon, will outie Mark terminate his employment there — and in the process terminate innie Mark?“Severance” Season 1 arrived not long after the pandemic, at a time when people were questioning how much of their lives were being spent in an office — and how much needed to be. As the story has expanded into more existential mysteries, it has spoken more to the “rise and grind” mind set sweeping through much of the modern world, where having relationships or hobbies — or even a good night’s sleep — is considered somewhat suspect. The Season 2 finale brings to a head some of the story lines inspired by our increasingly out-of-whack work-life balance.At the end of Season 1, Helly learned her outie is Helena Eagan, the daughter of Lumon’s chief executive Jame Eagan and the granddaughter of the company’s founder Kier Eagan. Before getting severed again, Helly gave a public speech as Helena, excoriating the inhumanity of Lumon’s severance program.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: ‘Barbecue’

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      Our new arrivals smell something sizzling in the woods. Here comes a meal with all the fixin’s.Season 3, Episode 7: ‘Croak’R.I.P. Edwin. We hardly knew you.The timid herpetologist (Nelson Franklin) who finds the Yellowjackets dancing by the fire in their cannibalistic ritual meets a quick end this week.Almost immediately after his cheery greeting — followed by his revulsion upon discovering Ben’s decapitated noggin — Lottie creeps up behind him and whacks him in the back of the head with a hatchet. That’s what the Wilderness wants, she declares. All the other Yellowjackets are rightfully upset. Finally, they have contact with the outside world, and she immediately goes and murders someone? What gives?But Edwin wasn’t the only visitor to the Yellowjackets camp. He arrived with two other souls who end up in the Yellowjackets’ custody: His girlfriend and fellow scientist, Hannah (Ashley Sutton), and their guide, the mysterious loner Kodiak (Joel McHale, even more sardonic and surly than usual). If the end of Episode 6 was a thrilling tease, Episode 7 is the confirmation that “Yellowjackets” is moving its plot forward both in the past and the present.All of that revolves around the arrival of these new figures, whom we’re introduced to in a prologue of sorts that begins three days before they meet our deranged soccer team. Edwin and Hannah are deep in the woods studying the mating habits of “Arctic banshee frogs.” The hilariously-named Kodiak is their guide.Hannah is intrigued and somewhat aroused by Kodiak. Edwin is deeply suspicious of him. One night, after smelling what he thinks is “barbecue,” Edwin goes wandering off looking for other souls in this forest. He finds the Yellowjackets.He instantly dies thanks to Lottie. Kodiak shoots Melissa with one of his arrows and he and Hannah start running, pursued by our girls and Travis with torches. Their hunt for Kodiak and Hannah has a double purpose. On one hand, they can’t leave any witnesses behind; on the other, they need people to get back to civilization.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Sudden Weirdness of TV Presidents

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      Today’s political dramas have conspiracy, murder and supervolcanoes. But their conventional White House protocols and procedures might be the most disorienting aspects.You can’t say that TV’s fictional presidencies lack for drama today.In “Zero Day,” the former President George Mullen (Robert DeNiro) sleuths out the source of a debilitating cyberattack. In “Paradise,” the feckless nepo baby President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) shoulders responsibility for humankind after an extinction-level volcanic eruption (and, no spoiler, gets murdered in his postapocalyptic underground shelter). In “The Residence,” a White House state dinner becomes a crime scene.Yet watching these political series lately, I am now struck by the same nagging feeling. This is all wrong, I think. It feels too normal — even the series that takes place in an enormous subterranean city.It’s not just that TV dramas can’t compete with the show we’re watching unfold on the news. Increasingly, they seem to operate in a parallel universe.Historically, TV’s presidents — Jed Bartlet on “The West Wing,” David Palmer on “24,” Fitzgerald Grant on “Scandal” — tend to share certain familiar traits. They are concerned with the appearance of stability and normalcy. They treat federal enforcement and intelligence agencies as part of a system to manage, not as internal enemies to be conquered. They make measured statements. They scold, even explode, but behind closed doors. They even have an aesthetic: a cool formality that speaks of quiet power without ostentation.Compare them with our reality. President Trump erupts into a shouting match with Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, a nominal ally, in front of live cameras, ending the altercation by saying, “This is going to be great television.” He renames the Gulf of Mexico, goes on the attack against Canada — a literal plot element from the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”— and stages a Tesla ad on the White House grounds.To watch presidential fiction today is to feel how the polarity has suddenly flipped. The base line assumptions about how power works and presidents behave — about what America is in the world — have changed. And the details that TV series relied on to seem politically realistic suddenly make them feel like transmissions from an alternative timeline.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Tina Louise, Escape, Finally, From ‘Gilligan’s Island’

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      Ms. Louise would prefer to not to talk about Ginger, her breathy sitcom character from the 1960s. Luckily, to the children she tutors, she’s just Ms. Tina.The green-eyed TV star with the beauty mark on her cheek shows up at a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan every Wednesday. For an hour, Ms. Tina, as the students and teachers call her, devotes herself to a pair of 7-year-olds who are struggling with reading. They’ll go through whatever books the teacher gives her, like “All Aboard!” or “How to Catch a Witch.” When her time is up, she’ll head home.None of the children will have any idea that Ginger from “Gilligan’s Island” — in real life, the actress Tina Louise — just spent the best 60 minutes of her week with them.Ms. Louise does not like to talk about the television show that made her a household name. She has no desire to revisit the years between 1964 and 1967, when she was marooned with six oddballs and a trunk full of slinky, sequined gowns.Through its run of 98 episodes, “Gilligan’s Island” was a prime-time success and became a Gen X touchstone in reruns. (The question of “Ginger or Mary Ann?” can still evoke passionate debate among men of a certain age.) As for Ms. Louise, she can barely utter the name of the program, referring to it as “G.I.” or “The Series.”CBS, via Getty ImagesIt’s not that she regrets it, although she and the cast never received residuals. “I’m very grateful for all the things that have happened to me and the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said in a recent conversation from her modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. She is the show’s last living cast member, and she recently celebrated a birthday she’d prefer not to discuss. (“I’m 29,” she said coyly.) She still has the signature beauty that made her famous, now on display in jeans and a black T-shirt instead of fancy gowns.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More