Category: 5. Entertainment

Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began is part of The Hyundai Project at LACMA, a joint initiative between Hyundai Motor and LACMA since 2015. The Hyundai Project at LACMA is the longest and largest programmatic commitment from a corporate supporter in LACMA’s history. With a shared commitment to offering new ways to access, understand and experience art, this partnership allows LACMA to make significant strides in two important fields, Art + Technology and Korean art scholarship, which encompasses acquisitions, exhibitions, publications and research.

This exhibition is curated by Diana Nawi, Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, and co-organized with the Columbus Museum of Art.

Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began

October 12, 2025 – March 29, 2026, BCAM Level 2 at LACMA

Presented by Hyundai Motor Company

*These images are approved only for publication in conjunction with the promotion of Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began. Each image must not be cropped, bled off the page, colorized, solarized, overlaid with other elements (e.g., tone, text, another image, etc.), or otherwise altered, except in terms of overall size. Reproductions must include the full credit information adjacent to the image. Use of images for front covers may incur a fee and will require prior authorization from the owner and copyright holder of the work. Please contact the LACMA Press Office for such use at [email protected].

Image Credit:

– Image 1: Tavares Strachan, Six Thousand Years, 2018, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photo by Frazer Bradshaw

– Image 2: Tavares Strachan, Six Thousand Years, 2018, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, photo by Brian Forrest

– Image 3: Tavares Strachan, Inner Elder (Nina Simone as Queen of Sheba), 2023, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist, photo by Jonty Wilde

– Image 4: Tavares Stachan, Galaxy Defender, 2025, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist, photo by Jonty Wilde

– Image 5: Tavares Strachan, A Map of the Crown (Amasunzu Black), 2023, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist, photo by Jonty Wilde

In April, comedian Jena Friedman had a strange encounter in Vancouver airport. She had just performed a Ted talk about the future of comedy and was heading home to the US, when someone she thought worked for airport security quizzed her about her visit.

Thinking he was probing for visa infringements, “I just said I was doing comedy. Then he asked: ‘What do you joke about?’ Stupidly, I lightly flirted with him, and was like: ‘Everything other than airport security!’ He didn’t react at all. Then I realised he was US border control. He asked again: ‘What do you joke about?’”

Friedman is a veteran of The Daily Show and The Late Show, and her standup comedy often features excoriating routines at the expense of the political establishment. “I just froze because I am a political comedian and I didn’t know what to say. Then he said: ‘Do you joke about politicians?’”

She made it home, but the incident stuck with her. Friedman lives in LA, and the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detaining anyone and everyone who looks a certain way” put her on high alert. “It was such a quick, on its face benign, interaction,” she says. “But it did feel like a scene out of The Handmaid’s Tale. I’m a blonde, white woman who looks like a Republican’s wife and I have an American passport. But what if I had said ‘Yes?’ Don’t we want to live in a country where we can joke about politicians, where we can joke about anything?”

Friedman incorporated that moment into her new standup show, Motherf*cker, which she’s performing at the Edinburgh fringe. The show is a change of pace. She’s generally resisted getting personal on stage, resenting the idea that women have to be relatable to succeed in comedy, but this time it felt unavoidable, as she explores the life-changing experience of becoming a parent while her own mother was dying. “It’s about grief, but it’s also political,” she says. “The vibe in certain circles does feel like we’re grieving. So there’s something about my show that’s connecting to the larger moment.”

Friedman is among a crop of US comedians with roots in topical comedy appearing at this year’s fringe. Another stalwart of US political comedy, Michelle Wolf, is back, too, while standup and former Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay is making her festival debut.

Wolf earned her stripes on The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Myers, and gained notoriety with her 2018 set at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in which she roasted Trump and his collaborators. These days, she lives in Barcelona, although returns to the US regularly for comedy work. She’s yet to encounter border trouble but, with reports of people with green cards and citizens being detained, she says: “I’m keeping an eye on it.”

Comedians Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres have both said that the state of US politics has forced them out of the country – O’Donnell to Ireland and DeGeneres to England. O’Donnell has written a show on just that, which she performed for the first week of the fringe. Wolf is happy with her move to Barcelona, and feels her comedy has benefited from other cultural perspectives, but returns to the US because “the audiences are great” and there’s plenty of work. While other US comedians have also discussed the idea of moving to Europe, she thinks it won’t happen until there’s “an impetus to go, something I don’t think is far off, like: you can’t talk about this any more, you can’t talk about that any more”.

Last month, satirist Stephen Colbert announced that network CBS had cancelled The Late Show after 33 years. Many thought the timing, three days on from Colbert criticising CBS parent company Paramount for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, was suspect. Fellow late-night talkshow host Jon Stewart criticised the move on his podcast and pointed to wider fear across the industry.: “There are a lot of things that will never be made, that you will never know about, that will be killed in the bed before they ever had a chance because of this chilling effect.”

Friedman’s glad to see Colbert and Stewart speaking out against Trump and his administration – and agrees there’s a “chill”. “The industry has already been less supportive of political comedy than they were under Biden and Obama. However, “seeing the most prominent comedians taking [Trump] to task, like Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] from South Park, Colbert and Stewart, that gives me hope”.

Meanwhile, Michelle Wolf’s standup merges the personal and political and her podcast, Wolf’s Thought Box, tackles current affairs. Her new show, which she’s performing while eight months pregnant at the fringe, explores life and society “through the lens of being a mom now”. There are punchlines on societal pressures for working mothers, home birth, momfluencers, gender inequalities and more. “We’re in an era now where people are talking about motherhood realistically and that’s very refreshing,” she says.

Still, political comedy isn’t absent. “I feel like I have to address the whole America and Trump thing … people expect me to say something about it.” She plans to tailor topical jokes to the day’s news but, “I don’t like making it a large part of my set, because it bores me. There’s always something crazy happening, but it’s hard to come up with creative angles other than: can you believe this?”

It’s been nine years since she first started writing jokes about Trump and, in that time, her life has transformed – she met her partner, moved abroad, and is about to have her second child. Her main feeling now is: “How are we still talking about him? How are we still in the same spot?”

Jay reflects that slow build in her show, We the People, in which she explores the state of America – looking back to the “unconfident whites” who founded the nation. She describes the show as “a fun, risky little ride” as she tries to get to the root of why the US feels so divided, and what we can do to better understand one another. “It’s this broader conversation I’ve been having about America and race,” Jay says.

The whole world feels unsettled right now and there’s an inability to consider other perspectives, Jay says. “How did we get here as Americans? Of course, I think race plays a large part in it. And how did these race relations get to the way they are? Not just blaming white people, but exploring the type of white people we’re dealing with, why they might be the way they are, their roots in England.”

Trump came up plenty during Jay’s time on SNL and appears in her fringe show as a “braggadocious” fool, unable to keep state secrets, yet smartly appealing to the frustrations of America’s poor white communities. But the conditions that created and elevated Trump are more interesting to Jay: “He’s the symptom of this, not the cause. This is a result of years and years of us doing it wrong … it’s been building for a long time and for a lot of different reasons.”

Friedman agrees: “I started working at the Daily Show in 2012, I was at Letterman before that, so I started looking at politics on a daily basis since 2010, and this is a long time coming.” This also means that, among US audiences, not everyone wants political comedy. “They’re always looking for escapism. In the first term, there was definite Trump fatigue,” Friedman says. “As a political comic, I’ve always done better in the UK than the US. It’s the UK audiences who are like: what the hell’s going on over there?” says Friedman.

The mood in US comedy is, Jay says, “the mood in America … chaos. There’s no way to keep up. People are also very desensitised. Shit just keeps happening in more extreme ways that people are losing a metric for it.”

All three agree that comedy can help share differing worldviews. “Even if it’s people we disagree with, the sign of a healthy democracy is when people can safely be on stage saying whatever we want, ideally in good faith,” Friedman says. “I support all comedians, I support freedom of expression and I want to see more of it. I want to see people more open to people they disagree with. Whenever I do political comedy, the goal is not to preach to the choir, it’s to get people to see things slightly differently.”

Jay has said that comedy can be a tool for empathy. “I look at it as a conversation. It can serve a purpose of actual understanding, understanding that we’re all humans trying to figure out a thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense – existing. Everybody is grappling with these things in their own way.”

What does the future hold for US comedians? “It’s too soon to tell,” says Friedman. “But I think everybody exercising the US first amendment in a way that’s funny and disarming is really important right now.”

Jay says: “Once I’m on stage, I’m gonna say what I’m gonna say. If I can’t come back as a result, I’ll just have to have my girlfriend come meet me in Scotland.”

An astronaut plays a pastel blue piano. Perched at the bottom right corner of a large canvas, he’s dwarfed by a terrestrial sludge: whirls of paint in mouldy hues that interrupt a patterned field of basketballs and contour lines. The painting, David Huffman’s Whenever I’m Around You (2025), is on view in his solo show ‘A Brilliant Blackout’ at Jessica Silverman in San Francisco. Informed by Afrofuturism, this show of ‘Traumanaut’ works – many of which the Bay Area artist painted in the past year – depict Black astronauts who wander through space, as if leaving Earth-bound troubles for more peaceful galaxies. The gallery is packed with paintings; large canvases line the walls while smaller works hang, like panels in a comic book strip, along the half-walls framing the entrance. From a distance, the collisions of colours evoke a tub of rainbow sherbet, or the planet Jupiter. Up close, each discrete work is a world unto itself – with lines that wave and bend with a mysterious sense of purpose, evoking, at times, the motion and scale of Helen Frankenthaler’s brushstrokes.

Combining abstraction and figuration with psychedelic flair, Huffman gives an intergalactic backdrop to terrestrial elements like plants and animals, real and invented African sculpture and, everywhere, the Traumanauts. Dripping pastels, geodesic patterning and non-ironic peace signs metabolize Berkeley in the 1960s, knitting together the countercultural collectives of People’s Park with the actions of The Black Panther movement (for which Huffman’s mother, the activist Dolores Davis, designed a logo). These scenes are rendered through an array of media: acrylic, oil, gouache, colour pencil, spray paint and glitter, as well as collaged elements made of paper, textiles and photographs.

Cast in various narratives, Huffman’s voyagers appear mid-action, as if in film stills. In Together We Are More (2025), four Traumanauts wander a green, white and black plane in which paint has been laid atop a paisley print. Similarly boxy in their suits, these figures hover together over the untethered abstraction of this strange landscape. Their neutral expressions suggest a kind of weariness, a kind of resolve – and a remove that is not synonymous with alienation. The image recalls the intergalactic physicists in Phillip K. Dick’s novel Ubik (1969), who move backwards in time after a lunar explosion triggers their own disintegration, deteriorating with such speed that they can only be with one another in their eclipsing, shared present.

Hanging in the gallery window is Huffman’s Sideshow (2009). Traumanauts, gathered on a strip of concrete, put on a show by shredding the tires of Chryslers, Cadillacs and Oldsmobile sedans, leaving circles imprinted on the ground. Clipped photographs of signs advertising car washes, payday loans and the fast-food staple Jack in the Box are collaged into the painting to locate the scene in East Oakland. In Boots Riley’s 2023 miniseries I’m a Virgo – another fictive sideshow by an Oakland-based maker – a nearly four-metre-tall Black teenager rolls a car on its half axis, producing an image of freewheeling joy that is both recognizable and surreal at that scale. Similarly, Huffman’s scenes of extraterrestrial pleasures are simple interventions that require the use not of cutting-edge technologies, but of experimental thought.

While Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) predicted a future California that has reinstituted slavery through indentured servitude and runs rampant with pyromancers, Huffman proposes a future in which cosmic technologies are untethered from the dominant power structures of the present. Often, the time-travellers he depicts idle in nature – that other, older intelligence – suspended in an alternate world bound to this one only by the presence of humanity. The speculative future, Huffman suggests, is not fixed, and may look quite different from how we imagine.

David Huffman’s ‘A Brilliant Blackout’ is on view at Jessica Silverman, San Francisco until 30 August

^{Main image: David Huffman, Sideshow (detail), 2009, acrylic, oil, glitter and collage on paper, 137 × 313 × 6 cm (framed). Courtesy: the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco; photograph: Phillip Maisel}

“This process is similar to my acting,” says Timothy Olyphant. “It’s a little something I call winging it.”

The 57-year-old, a cultural fixture since the late ’90s who’s claimed to have found the absolute “sweet spot” of fame, is discussing his approach to ceramics at his Westside studio. And like that dig at his Hollywood career, he’s being modest. Olyphant majored in Studio Art at USC. If you frequent Los Angeles galleries, you might have spotted him — likely in a cowboy hat. “What a cry for attention,” he jokes. “The guy that’s played a cowboy most of his career wears a cowboy hat.”

After donning Western gear for lead roles in Deadwood, Justified and Fargo, the guy just looks good in a wide brim. But Olyphant, who shares three grown children with his wife of 34 years, is more than just a cowboy and budding ceramicist. He just recurred as a villainous golfer on the Apple TV+ comedy Stick and signed on for the sequel to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel (this one directed by David Fincher).

Up next: FX’s Alien: Earth, out Aug. 12, on which Olyphant reteams with Fargo’s Noah Hawley and goes about as far against type as possible. In fact, Hawley cast him as a dry, platinum blond robot in the ambitious TV take on the Ridley Scott films. Over an hour in late July, he talked about the new role as well as his misunderstood relationship with Justified co-star Walton Goggins, the projects he passed on and his deep affection for reboots. Cynics be damned.

You’ve played a lot of cowboys. In Alien: Earth, I’d describe your role as “dry, sassy android.” This is a real left turn for you.

Spot on. In the script, as I recall, Noah wrote something to the effect of, “Kirsh, a dry, sassy android enters room.” If that’s how you describe it, that’s what I’ll give you.

Noah said he gave you this role in return for making you play another lawman in Fargo. What’s a type that Hollywood still hasn’t asked you to play that interests you?

At the risk of sounding a little bit unmotivated, more of the same. I like the jobs I’ve had, and I like the people I’ve been allowed to work with. I’d be happy to just work with them again in whatever capacity they’ll have me.

How have you handled the jobs you didn’t like?

Well, I’ve been fired more than once, and I think at least one of those times I wanted to quit, but I refused to because I wanted to be paid. Well, maybe the polite way is I was “replaced.” I’ve told those stories. I don’t know if I want to dig ’em up right now. [For one, Olyphant was recast with Aidan Quinn in 1998’s Practical Magic.]

You famously turned down the blockbuster role in Fast & Furious that eventually went to Vin Diesel. I understand why it might not have been appealing, but do you ever look at the box office returns when those sequels come out and think, “Damn”?

The pitfall here is that it’s very hard to answer that question without feeling like I’m offending somebody. So, if I start saying, “No, it’s never occurred to me,” or “No, I’ve never seen those movies,” it just starts to sound like … ugh, let’s say I didn’t ever say that. I love those movies. I’m thrilled that they worked for everybody involved.

I don’t think it’s bad not to have seen a movie. I imagine you’ve not seen some of your own.

That’s true. So, no, I’ve never had a moment. I love attention as much as the next guy in the Screen Actors Guild. Hell, I’m talking to you right now. But mostly — and let me stress mostly — I’ve thought to myself, “Thank God I am not any more famous than I am.” I just think it would be bad for everybody involved.

What do you like about your level of fame?

I don’t have famous people problems, and yet I get to work with you name them. It’s a sweet spot, and I may finally be ruining it with these next couple gigs. But at this point in my life? Fuck it.

So when did you get into the sweet spot? Because I’d imagine, before you find it, there’s a long period of aspiration and struggle. 

On the Deadwood set. I was like, “This is all I need. I’m just going to show up and work for this man [David Milch] and marvel at the opportunity to be with these actors. It was a thrilling experience. And there were opportunities around that time where it was like, “Oh, look at this bright shiny object!” And those opportunities, some of which I took, were not nearly as satisfying as showing up for Deadwood. Justified was the same situation, and I was able to live at home and go to all of my kids’ tennis and music lessons. I just just felt like, “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this.”

As someone who has revisited several roles, do you ever worry about the risk of diminished returns? You’ve already reprised Justified’s Raylan Givens, and you’ve said you’re open to doing it again.

Every experience I’ve had revisiting characters or working with the same people again, I’m batting a thousand in terms of it being really gratifying. I highly recommend it. And I don’t have a problem with people remaking or rebooting things. I mean, everybody goes to Broadway to see the same couple plays every few years. It’s such a dumb, shallow argument to say Hollywood has no new ideas just because they’re rebooting things.

To your point, nobody ever questions it when they roll out Glengarry Glen Ross with a new cast every couple of years.

Ralph Fiennes is doing Hamlet again? Hasn’t that been done? (Laughs.) I’m not comparing what we’re doing on the Disney lot with Hamlet, but why not revisit stories? If someone wants to redo something, God bless ’em. Just do something new with it. If I’m not mistaken, that Luke Skywalker guy is reminiscent of a Bible story that everybody likes. I think Iron Man went into a cave and came out reborn, too. I wonder if that’s why it works so well? You know what? If we do another Raylan story, I’m putting that fucker in a cave and he’s coming out reborn.

After Justified, you know better than most about how Walton Goggins works. I’m curious what your take was on all that press …

Shoot. (Laughs.) Don’t even write “Olyphant laughs.” That’s not fair. (Laughs again.)

You’re laughing!

No, I’m not. That was a performance. Let me tell you something: Walt Goggins is one of my favorite actors I’ve ever worked with. I love him. I would even say I have a deep friendship with that man, and so I only care about the things that he and I say directly to each other.

OK, you’re talking about the alleged feud that you’ve both publicly denied several times. I was talking about how his press for The White Lotus focused on how he can get into a really dark headspace while filming. You probably knew about this before a lot of people.

Yeah, I know. God bless him. There are a lot of different ways of [doing this job], and he has his. We were in Bangkok for Alien when he was in Ko Samui for The White Lotus. My wife and I went down specifically to hang out with him. Anytime you see a friend on the other side of the world, it’s like, “Hey, look at us!” He seemed to be having a good time to me.

I like to fact-check weird Wikipedia mentions. Are you really a descendant of the Vanderbilt family? And, if so, have you met Gloria’s son, Anderson Cooper?

You’re goddamn right I am, and somebody owes me money. (Laughs.) It’s on my to-do list to head to upstate New York and see if I can get the keys to the house. I’ve never met Anderson. I assume that’s just because I keep missing the family reunions due to work and the kids. But now that I’m an empty-nester, I hope we’ll be having drinks soon.

Before I let you go, why ceramics?

I don’t know if you know this, but the future is in ceramics.

Seth Rogen’s had a lot of success with ceramics. He’s selling ashtrays.

Case in point. And I am riding that man’s coattails. So, that’s where all my chips are. Any young people out there [reading], jump on the train now, before it’s too late.

Every movie director has a cinematic signature, visual and thematic cues that define their oeuvre; you expect grit and crime from Martin Scorsese, maudlin sentimentality from Pedro Almodovar and mind-bending innovation from Christopher Nolan.

Kemi Adetiba, famous for King of Boys, is engraving hers with cinematic offerings that cast a harsh searchlight on the seedy and the shady. That signature is apparent in her new offering which has topped the charts on Nigerian Netflix for over a month.

To Kill a Monkey, her eight episode series, is wide-ranging and conceived on a grand scale, blending family stories, poverty, insanity and the underworlds of cybercrime and corruption.

The story follows Efemini – “Efe” (William Benson) – a brilliant tech graduate stuck in a dead-end job in Egbeda, Lagos. Bereft of opportunities, he suffers indignities as he strives to cater for his family while nurturing dreams of selling his artificial intelligence and malware software to a tech company.

But life has other plans. When he meets a charismatic cybercriminal, Oboz (Bucci Franklin), an acquaintance from his university days, Efe is drawn into a crime syndicate. Tired of humiliation and ignominy, he weaponises his brilliance to become the gang’s tech mastermind.

Meanwhile, the activities of the syndicate have caught the attention of the Nigerian Cybercrime Commission. Inspector Motunrayo “Mo” Ogunlesi (Bimbo Akintola), haunted by personal loss, becomes obsessed with “The Monkey Case”. Her pursuit of justice clashes violently with a compromised system, and with Efe, whose moral compass has lost its true north.

How much can a man take?

To Kill a Monkey is a revelatory and cautionary tale on how failures of policy can destroy ambition and corrupt morals. This is explored through Efe’s descent. Efe doesn’t wake up wanting to be a fraudster; he’s pushed deeper into moral ruin by a cocktail of escalating disappointments and indignities. Watching him get beat down by life and people, one wonders how much one man can take before he snaps?

When he entreats Oboz to “abeg cut soap for me” we see a man who has reached the end of his tether.

But in his capitulation lies a moral conundrum.

Despite its compelling premise, the series suffers, in places, from overwrought writing. Adetiba complicates the narrative by introducing new plotlines and characters. Parts of the show could have benefited from refinement, such as more precise editing, restrained acting, tighter subplots, and more polished dialogue.

The introduction of the Teacher (Chidi Mokeme), a brutal crime boss, is meant to raise the stakes, but it jars.

The pacing of To Kill A Monkey varies considerably. The first and second episodes do a nice job of establishing Efe’s dilemmas. However, the middle episodes feel a bit drawn-out, slowing down the momentum. The final episode, by contrast, rushes through to its conclusion.

Performances range from captivating to excessive. William Benson’s portrayal of Efe is convincing and his slow descent into an immoral abyss is deeply affecting while Bucci Franklin brings charm and menace to Oboz, whose Mephistophelian manipulations compel attention. Stella Damasus returns to form as Efe’s long suffering wife.

To Kill a Monkey is an important if flawed exploration of a nation at a crossroads between innovation and potential downfall. What emerges at the end is a bold, bruising and thrilling revelation of a society where talent collides with circumstance, and survival often means embracing what you once loathed.

Crunchyroll, Sony‘s anime streaming service, is laying off a number of employees as part of a restructuring to shift resources toward high-growth markets outside the U.S.

The scope of Crunchyroll’s layoffs could not be determined. Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini announced the news Tuesday in a memo to staffers that was obtained by Variety. The business has more than 1,000 employees but has not disclosed an exact headcount number. Crunchyroll is making the changes to increase its focus on fast-growing markets such as India, Brazil, Mexico, Europe and Southeast Asia.

“As we look toward the next three to five years, we believe the right path forward is a new organizational model that supports regionally-empowered teams to lean into anime fandom even further,” Purini wrote in the memo. As such, “some of our colleagues will be departing the company, some will be expanding their scope, and some will be assigned new roles.” He said the layoffs are “not a cost-cutting measure or driven by financial performance.”

Job cuts are occurring across Crunchyroll’s 13 offices in nine countries in North America, Europe and Asia. L.A.-based Crunchyroll currently has more than 100 open job positions worldwide and expects to add even more roles over the next several months.

As part of the reorg, Crunchyroll is building engineering hubs in the U.S., Mexico and India, according to Purini. In addition, Crunchyroll will invest in growth opportunities beyond its core anime biz, such as in collectibles, other merchandise and manga.

The company is looking ahead to new initiatives and releases. That includes Crunchyroll’s plans to launch a digital manga service as part of its subscription tier later this year. In addition, anime movie “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle” debuts Sept 12 in the U.S. and Canada, featuring Channing Tatum and Rebecca Wang as part of the English dub voice cast.

As of the end of the first quarter of 2025, Crunchyroll had more than 17 million paid monthly subscribers. Crunchyroll is a joint venture between U.S.-based Sony Pictures Entertainment and Japan’s Aniplex, a subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment (Japan), both subsidiaries of Tokyo-based Sony Group.

Sony in 2017 had acquired anime streamer Funimation. It bought Crunchyroll in 2021 for $1.18 billion in cash from AT&T and the following year folded the Funimation brand and merged the content into Crunchyroll.

Read Purini’s memo:

Team,

As anime fandom continues its incredible growth and Crunchyroll continues to deliver tremendous value to fans, we have taken a deep look at our organizational structure to ensure it can support that growth and our ambitions now and in the future.

As part of this analysis and subsequent changes, some of our colleagues will be departing the company, some will be expanding their scope, and some will be assigned new roles. These changes are effective today for those in the U.S., and the process in other countries will be managed according to local employment laws and timelines. We are sharing this information here, first, so all team members receive it at the same time, and we appreciate your patience during this sensitive process today.

I’d like to share the context behind these changes.

As we look toward the next three to five years, we believe the right path forward is a new organizational model that supports regionally-empowered teams to lean into anime fandom even further.

At the same time, Engineering will benefit from centers of excellence that create more alignment to spark innovation and fuel transformation. These new locations will be based in the United States, India, and Mexico.

We are also re-evaluating how to make our 360 fan experience businesses stronger than ever. They continue to be a strength and differentiator in the industry, and some re-imagination in these areas is important as we move forward. Our commitment to the 360 fan experience remains resolute and unchanged.

This decision is the culmination of very thoughtful discussions and planning with leaders throughout the organization and is not a cost-cutting measure or driven by financial performance. There is a tremendous opportunity ahead of us and these changes are about proactively setting up for scale and success.

To those who are leaving, I sincerely want to thank you for your service and commitment to our fans and our brand. You’ve contributed meaningfully to our mission and culture, and we will support you in every way we can through this transition.

I know this is difficult, and appreciate the space you will give for grace, respect and kindness to one another. We’ll regroup as a team at the end of the day and tomorrow morning to talk more about what this means and what comes next. I am confident we are well poised for Crunchyroll’s role in serving anime fans around the world.

regards,
Rahul

In Vasenka, a fictional town under military occupation, a deaf boy is shot by soldiers and the town’s inhabitants become deaf in response. The opening of Deaf Republic – the remarkable second collection by the Ukrainian-American poet and translator Ilya Kaminsky – sets in train a narrative of resistance through silence, as “deafness, an insurgency, begins” and the soldiers start executing the citizens of Vasenka, who refuse to hear their orders.

Since its publication in 2019, Deaf Republic has won multiple awards and been critically lauded for what Andrew Motion has described as “a folk drama that feels archetypal, yet is deeply revealing of our here and now”. That quality of being current, urgent in its commentary on war yet as timeless as a fable, appealed to Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd, co-directors of theatre company Dead Centre, who have adapted the work for stage.

“Kaminsky’s genius is to make the reader feel they understand more than they do,” says Kidd in between rehearsals in Dublin. “Yet some of the poems are inscrutable. The choice to use a story, the narrative of what happens to the townspeople, is important. Then he drops in his lyric poems and you’re stopped short. There are two things going on formally, and it suggests itself as a piece that could be adapted.”

Kaminsky, who lost his own hearing as a child and did not have hearing aids until he moved to the US in his teens, also incorporates sign language symbols into his text, which are a mixture of American and Ukrainian signs. In the book he wanted to reflect his experience of being an immigrant in the US, while also frequently returning to Ukraine.

“I was living with one foot in both places,” he says, speaking online from the US. To reflect this, the central narrative is bookended by two poems – We Lived Happily During the War and In a Time of Peace – that echo each other and transpose the image of the body of a dead boy lying on a pavement from the fictional Vasenka to the US today.

“What is complicated is seeing these images of violence in one of the poorest countries in Europe [Ukraine] and one of the richest countries in the world,” says Kaminsky. “I realised I needed to change the genre I’m writing in. I needed a genre that speaks to both sides of my life. So the book is a kind of fairytale, it’s dream time, a fantasia. A fairytale was a necessity, to speak about both these landscapes, Ukraine and the US.”

“There are layers of theatre-within-theatre in it,” Moukarzel says. “The way it is presented, with the first line ‘Our country is the stage’, the list of dramatis personae of townspeople and the puppet theatre run by the character of Momma Galya, all this adds theatricality. We were intrigued. But we wondered if it was ethical to adapt it: was it our story to tell, especially the deaf experience? That gave us pause. We needed to build the right team.”

Thankfully, the two directors have history when it comes to pushing boundaries on stage. Their show Beckett’s Room told the story of the apartment in Paris where Samuel Beckett lived with his partner Suzanne during the second world war without using any live actors.

In this production there will be an ensemble created from deaf and hearing actors, along with aerial performers, live cinema and poetry, using a mix of spoken English, British Sign Language (BSL), Irish Sign Language and creative captioning. On the day I sat in on a rehearsal, there was also a slightly out of control drone and some beautifully crafted string puppets making a tentative appearance.

Watching keenly was Zoë McWhinney, a deaf poet and actor who co-authored the script with Kidd and Moukarzel. “We gave each other a lot of freedom from the start,” McWhinney says, speaking through an interpreter. She used BSL to work on the rough script, recording herself on video. “In some ways, it is BSL-led, rather than spoken English,” she says. McWhinney also brought in Visual Vernacular (VV) – a form of performance art that draws on sign language, mime and theatre.

“BSL is for conversation, for prose, whereas VV is much closer to poetry,” says McWhinney. “There is a rhythm and pace to it. Through gesture and movement, facial expressions, hand movement, you can see the image: you’re almost personifying the language.”

For Kaminsky, it was Dead Centre’s innovative approach to adapting nonfiction that appealed to him. “The way they spoke about implicating the audience was fascinating to me. I thought, ‘I’m getting an education here, keep it coming!’ I didn’t want to see a Xerox copy of my book. It’s up to them to create their own art form; otherwise the energy gets stiff. And I want the energy to be electric.”

KPop Demon Hunters, the hit Netflix animated feature and soundtrack, is headed back to select theaters with a sing-along event set for screenings across North America on Aug. 23 and 24.

The KPop Demon Hunters A Sing-Along Event will see fans of Huntrix and Saja Boys join along to sing chart-topping songs like “Golden” and “Your Idol.” Netflix is also looking to fill theaters later this month for extra revenue after the movie became a surprise hit for the streamer since debuting in June.

The project centers on the adventures of Huntrix, a girl group comprised of three members who just happen to also fight monsters from the underworld. The movie’s soundtrack also made the top 10 list for the Billboard 200 chart, with “Golden” becoming a number one hit.

A synopsis from the producers of KPop Demon Hunters reads: “When they aren’t selling out stadiums, Kpop superstars Rumi, Mira and Zoey use their secret identities as badass demon hunters to protect their fans from an ever-present supernatural threat. Together, they must face their biggest enemy yet – an irresistible rival boy band of demons in disguise.”

Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans directed the animated feature for Sony Pictures Animation, based on a screenplay by Danya Jimenez, Hannah McMechan, Kang and Appelhans. The ensemble cast includes Arden Cho, Ahn Hyo-seop, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo, Yunjin Kim, Joel Kim Booster, Liza Koshy, along with Daniel Dae Kim, Ken Jeong and Byung Hun Lee

The original songs for KPop Demon Hunters were performed by EJAE, Audrey Nuna, REI AMI, Andrew Choi, Danny Chung, Kevin Woo, samUIL Lee, Neckwav and Lea Salonga, while Jeongyeon, Jihyo and Chaeyoung performed their own original song.

Oscar-winning film director Martin Scorsese threatened to buy a gun when in a rage at a film studio, according to a new docuseries about his life. After suggested edits to his 1976 movie Taxi Driver, which starred Robert De Niro, he flew into such a fury that he began threatening to take the law into his own hands.

“Marty was very upset,” says Steven Spielberg. “We get a call at the office: ‘Steve, Steve, it’s Marty. Can you come over to the house? They want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut the guy who loses his hand.’”

“He was going crazy,” adds fellow director Brian De Palma. “I mean, the story is he wanted to kill the head of the studio.”

Scorsese himself claims that his plans were slightly less extreme, even if he did claim at the time that he had every intention of buying a weapon. “I don’t know. I was angry. I said I was going to threaten them, or maybe just shoot or something. I had no idea,” he says.

Instead, the director’s actual plan involved a different sort of crime. “What I wanted to do – and not with a gun – I would go in, find out where the rough cut is and break the windows and take it back,” he explains.

“They’re going to destroy the film anyway, so let me destroy it. I’ll destroy it. But before destroying it, I’m going to steal it.

“Spielberg said: ‘Marty stop that! Marty, you can’t do it!’ And the more they said no, the more I said I was going to do it.”

The scenes come from an Apple TV+ documentary series, Mr Scorsese, which looks at the director’s life and work drawing on access to his private archives. It features interviews with family, friends and colleagues including De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sharon Stone, Margot Robbie and Mick Jagger.

It was not the first time that the director uttered violent threats during the production of Taxi Driver. He also infamously appeared in the movie as a passenger who planned to murder his wife after discovering her infidelity, performing a calm monologue strewn with racist language and threats of gun-related violence.

Ultimately, a compromise to the editing crisis was struck, meaning that Taxi Driver was able to retain controversial blood-soaked scenes. In the words of Spielberg: “It saved the movie because he didn’t have to cut any of the violence. He just had to take the colour red down to a colour brown.”