Day: September 21, 2018

Black Cinema, Entertainment, Film Projects

‘Tyrel’: Trailer Released For “Get Out-‘Esque Race Drama Starring Jason Mitchell

After bowing at Sundance and later picked up by Magnolia Pictures, we’ve got the first trailer for Tyrel. 

The film, starring Jason Mitchell, bowed at Sundance this year.

The official description: Tyrel follows Tyler, who joins his friend on a trip to the Catskills for a weekend birthday party with several people he doesn’t know. As soon as they get there, it’s clear that (1) he’s the only black guy, and (2) it’s going to be a weekend of heavy drinking. Although Tyler is welcomed, he can’t help but feel uneasy in “Whitesville.” The combination of all the testosterone and alcohol starts to get out of hand, and Tyler’s precarious situation starts to feel like a nightmare.
The film also stars Christopher Abbott, Michael Cera, Caleb Landry Jones, Michael Zegan, Philip Ettinger, Ann Dowd and  Reg E. Cathey also star.

Watch the trailer below and read our conversation with Mitchell at Sundance earlier this year about the film.

Culture, Fashion

Beauty Is More Diverse Than Ever. But Is It Diverse Enough?

In an era of makeup collections with 40 foundation colors and more spokesmodels of color than ever before, diversity at the beauty counter would seem to be accepted, even celebrated.

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Yet if you ask influential makeup artists, hairstylists and photographers about it, the answer is more likely: It’s a start.

Compared with fashion, beauty has been quicker to act on matters of inclusivity. Driven by social media, beauty has, in the last five years, moved to welcome, and to represent, customers all along the spectrum of skin shades and gender identities.

Consider the smashing success of Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line, which has been credited for the new 40-foundation standard and which proved just how myopic many beauty brands had been.

Clearly women of color make up a market that is far from niche. The days when Iman, a supermodel of the 1970s and ’80s, had to blend her own foundation on photo shoots seem archaic. (She later started her own cosmetics line, ages before Rihanna, to address those very issues.)

“You don’t have the excuse anymore that the product isn’t available,” said Nick Barose, a makeup artist whose clients include Lupita Nyong’o, Priyanka Chopra and Gugu Mbatha-Raw. “Younger, older, darker, lighter, different undertones — you should be able to look at the face in front of you and match.”

Similarly, change is taking place in hair care. Led by influential stars like Yara Shahidi, Sasha Lane and Tracee Ellis Ross, who wear their hair unprocessed, “wild, kinky, frizzy texture” is redefining Hollywood glamour, said the hairstylist Nai’vasha Johnson, who styles Ms. Shahidi and Ms. Lane.

READ MORE:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/style/beauty-diversity.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fskin-deep

Fashion, SOCIAL MEDIA

For Capitalism, Every Social Leap Forward Is a Marketing Opportunity

Brands are now racing to capture the market of young people who strive to live gender identities that fit.

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They are the new beautiful people and their pronouns are they, their and them. Fashion courts them. Publishers pursue them. Corporations see in them the future of consuming, as generations come of age for whom notions of gender as traditionally constituted seem clunkier than a rotary phone.

Why settle for being a man or a woman when you can locate yourself more exactly along the arc of gender identity? And, on another axis, why limit your sexual expression to a single definition when you can glissade along the Kinsey scale?

“It’s all about letting go of gender so you can be everything in between,” said Terra Juano, a model with 100,000 Instagram followers who track the booming career and amatory antics of this androgynous Mexican-Filipino beauty with a shaved head, a mile-wide smile, an affection for cowboy hats and an uninhibited tendency to go top free.

In the evolving language of gender expression, Terra Juano, though assigned female at birth, identifies as nonbinary. And in business as in life, TJ, a native of Stockton, Calif., has lighted out for a new territory. It is one in which the conventions of both homo- and heteronormative expression are called into question daily.

READ MORE:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/style/gender-nonbinary-brand-marketing.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ffashion&action=click&contentCollection=fashion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront

Fashion, Lifestyle

When Digital Nightmares Make Great Clothes

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MILAN — Earlier this summer Apple unveiled a new retail concept in Milan: a store beneath a glassed-in cascading fountain in a piazza just around the corner from the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, the shopping thoroughfare that connects the Duomo and the Piazza San Babila. That was just a little more than month before Starbucks invaded the historic environs of the city’s former central post office with its first outpost in Italy, a Reserve Roastery. Thus the world turns.

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READ MORE:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/fashion/prada-moschino-milan-fashion-week.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ffashion&action=click&contentCollection=fashion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

Cultural Events, DANCE, Lifestyle

Review: Hear the Beat of Dancing Feet, Right in Times Square

Of all New York City’s classic attractions, a stroll through Times Square may be the one that least appeals to people who live in New York, especially at rush hour. But on Thursday evening, there was reason to brave the crowds, the noise and the invitations to take a photo with Spiderman. Danspace Project, an East Village organization housed at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, had come to Midtown.In Danspace Project at Times Square, presented with Times Square Arts through Sunday, three new works — by Laurie Berg, Luciana Achugar and Full Circle Souljahs — allow even the most jaded New Yorker’s to see the city’s commercial epicenter through fresh lenses, sometimes literally.

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Full Circle Souljahs presented “Behind the Groove — Times Square Edition,” a showcase of hip-hop styles.

Before watching Ms. Berg’s enchanting “scape,” in Duffy Square at 47th Street, viewers were encouraged to grab a pair of 3D glasses. As seven dancers appeared, walking calmly through the throngs with linked hands, you could see — but only through these frames — messages printed on their vibrant patterned costumes (the work of Liliana Dirks-Goodman, Jaime Shearn Coan and the designers at Print All Over Me). Some read as subtle calls to action (“Is it a show? Show up.”), others as checks on our scattered attention (“Look again.”).

READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/arts/dance/review-danspace-project-in-times-square.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fdance&action=click&contentCollection=dance&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Advertising Reviews, Culture, Lifestyle, TECHNOLOGY NEWS

The iPhone XS and XS Max Review: Big Screens That Are a Delight to Use

Apple’s new smartphones start at $999 and $1,099, but their superb cameras and screens make them worth the high prices, our reviewer writes.

iphoneFor the past few years, I have been a naysayer on one feature of smartphones: their growing size. My position was unusual given the increasing prevalence of larger screen devices. The world’s top phone makers have all added more substantial glass screens to stretch from one edge of their smartphones to another, on the theory that people can better enjoy their apps and content on an ample display.

Apple helped seal the deal last week when it announced that its new phones this year — the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max — would have screens that measured between 5.8 inches and 6.5 inches diagonally, compared with 4.7 inches and 5.5 inches two years ago. In fact, the 6.5-inch screen on the iPhone XS Max is Apple’s biggest ever. (The original iPhone in 2007 started with a 3.5-inch screen.) I have been troubled by this trend. These devices spend a lot of time in your pocket and your hand, and there are often compromises in portability and comfort when the screens balloon in size. For those reasons, I never liked the Plus phones, the line of iPhones that Apple introduced in 2014 with 5.5-inch screens. They felt impossible to use with one hand and far too bulky in a pocket.

So it’s humbling to come to you now with another confession: The iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max may be making me a convert to bigger smartphones.

READ MORE:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/technology/personaltech/iphone-xs-max-review.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fpersonaltech

Commentary, Legal Issues, NCAA, Sports

The College Recruit and the Downfall of a Hall of Fame Coach

Should a high school star be prevented from playing college basketball because his father was accused of taking a bribe?

collegeBrian Bowen Jr. was one of the top high-school basketball players in the senior class of 2017. He grew up in Saginaw, Mich., an economically depressed Rust Belt city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation. It is also a basketball hotbed, where players take pride in their scrappy, physical style of play. Draymond Green, an intense, sharp-elbowed All-Star with the N.B.A. champion Golden State Warriors, is among the pros who have come from Saginaw.

Bowen, however, was not hardened by either his city or its tough-edged basketball tradition. There is a sweetness about him, a shy smile, an engaging manner. He was given the nickname “Tugs” as an infant because he pulled on his mother’s hair with his tiny fingers, and that is what his family, friends, teammates and coaches have called him ever since. His mother chauffeured him around, fed him and made his schedule. Even after he reached high school, she could sometimes be seen kneeling or sitting at the bottom of the bleachers as she laced up his sneakers before a game, like a figure-skating mom tightening the laces of her child’s skates. In his free time, he liked to build elaborate Lego structures. The worst that was said about him, an only child, was that he could seem a little sheltered.

His father, Brian Bowen Sr., a former high-school player, groomed him for basketball almost from birth. When Tugs was just 9 months old and holding onto furniture for balance as he began to walk, his father made sure he alternated between his right and left hands — while rolling a ball with the opposite hand — so he would be able to dribble and shoot a basketball with both. A few years later, the family moved into a house with a basketball court in the backyard. The court was where Tugs would begin to learn the game, and as he got older, it attracted serious players in Saginaw. They came to work, not play. Brian Bowen Sr., a former police officer who had retired on medical disability, stood watch on the sideline, offering instruction and keeping the games as clean as he could.

The surface was originally concrete, but he covered it with VersaCourt, a softer synthetic material that came in sections fitted together like puzzle pieces. “He was looking ahead even back then,” his son told me last fall, the first time we talked. “If it would have stayed cement, I would have wrecked my knees, and I wouldn’t have been able to amount to anything.”

READ MORE:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/magazine/college-basketball-recruiting-bribery-case-rick-pitino.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=The%20New%20York%20Times%20Magazine