recent posts
- Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent: A Cool Brazilian Gets an Oscar Nod
- Now on Oscar’s Short List: Holding Liat, a Documentary about the Harrowing Wait for a Hostage Freed from Gaza
- Paul Thomas Anderson’s Best Film at the 91st NYFCC at TAO Downtown
- Mariska Hargitay, Ken Burns, Alan Berliner: Non-Fiction Filmmakers Award Season
- David Amram: The First 95 Years at Dizzy’s Club
Category: Books
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In The Great Beauty, a gorgeously shot picture of contemporary Rome, albeit fictional, it is refreshing to see that this tourist mecca of monumental historic significance has a shallow center just like all the other important world cities of note. You could say this movie whose central character is a writer of one novel so…
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After much buzz on the festival circuit, including Sundance, Venice, Toronto, to name a few, Kill Your Darlings opens the Hamptons International Film Festival tonight. Before there was Neal Cassady to whom the writer Jack Kerouac was in thrall, there was Lucien Carr. A St. Louis friend of William Burroughs, Carr was a fast and…
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The biggest revelation in the new documentary Salinger is that The Catcher in the Rye author was not a recluse. Rather fame averse and a champion of innocence as his signature books show, he simply removed himself to a New Hampshire retreat and wrote more books without a plan for their publication. The second reveal,…
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Among the many pleasures of the Grease-themed benefit for the Prostate Cancer Foundation this weekend in Wainscott, was seeing Michael Milken in a letter sweater like the reformed Danny Zuko at the end of that 1978 movie set in 1959. At East Hampton Studio, a vintage Chevy parked outside, women channeled either Sandy in bobby…
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By the time we got there, the tent at Gardiner’s Farm was chockablock with browsers and book buyers, especially at one table where Gwyneth Paltrow signed copies of her It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great. Oglers snapped shots of her and Apple and Moses and Chris…
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As emcee at the Nantucket Film Festival’s Tribute ceremony, at a former casino in Siasconset, on the island’s far end, mild mannered Brian Williams brought down the house riffing on an unfortunate white Buick Enclave rental, local produce like urine cheese, and pervasive V necked cashmere. Such was the truth-telling, even preppie WASPs lost control…
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For those of us who remember the thrilling violence enacted by James Chance & the Contortions, the muted manifestations of “punk” at the Metropolitan Museum are outrage mediated, excitement without menace, and a study of how revolution passes into history. The crafted looks of Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Dolce & Gabbana, and others, including Guido…
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At B. B. King’s on Sunday night, at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony, amidst a lot of foul-mouthed laughs and sober minded speeches, writer/ director Nora Ephron was remembered. As a young novelist, Meg Wolitzer attested, she received a most important recognition when Nora Ephron called to say she wanted to adapt her…
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Back in the day, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was all the rage. Paperbacks of A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) could be seen stuffed in jean pockets on college campuses, on subways. Even mainstream readers who were not particularly into poetry loved the surreal imagery of this verse. A decade later, books by Allen…
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Even in the age of terrorism, the terror of the last century’s The Holocaust, has not lost its hold on the artistic imagination. As the victims of The Shoah are remembered at the United Nations and in synagogues worldwide, films continue to shed light on that darkest hour of the twentieth century. The Jewish Film…
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Kerouac aficionados will have a fine time teasing out details director Walter Salles and scriptwriter Jose Rivera took from the 1957 On the Road publication vs. the 1951 scroll text, the ur-Road first published in 2007. For example, the first line of the new movie focuses on the father, but then the story flips to the fictional characters…
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En route to L.A. for its West Coast premiere, Director Walter Salles introduced a private screening of his new film, On the Road, last week, pointing out that as a teen in his native Brazil, he was drawn to the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novel; they represented a freedom foreign to his homeland, where writing…
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If Penny Marshall’s honking nasalese leaps off the pages of her memoir, My Mother was Nuts, it’s not because she wrote the book. Rather, this is the work of a ghost writer, the best in the business, Todd Gold, said Marshall’s literary agent Daniel Strone of this well known secret. If he is writing Ann-Margret,…
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“Non-fiction for sale here,” hawked comedian Robert Klein, seated in a row of writers under the Author’s Night tent at Gardiner’s Farm this past Saturday. Readers crowded about, one wanting to know whether the location in his memoir’s title, The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue, was in Brooklyn or the Bronx. The Bronx, said Klein,…
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“Hey Meg-a-la,” shouted Rosie O’Donnell, trying to get Meg Ryan’s attention at, yikes, Alice Tully Hall, just after the memorial tribute to writer, director Nora Ephron. Gathering in the lobby for pink champagne, the crowd looked like a who’s who of film, theater, and media: Bette Midler, Charlie Rose, Matthew Broderick, Rob Reiner, Larry David,…
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I am pleased that the reports from Cannes about the On the Road, Walter Salles’ film are mainly favorable, although I have taken note that some say there is no inner world for the characters, that the film has no discernable plot, that it is overlong. I have been following this progress for at least a decade. When…
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Wednesday evening at the Metropolitan Museum was meant to be a correspondence, an exploration of words and music featuring the Kronos Quartet and the writers Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner, but to most ears there was a friendly cacophony. Salman Rushdie, president of PEN introduced the much anticipated event noting that the World…
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Well, The Daily Show funnyman John Oliver did not exactly recommend stealing the six rather heavy looking, grand crystal chandeliers at the St. Regis Hotel, but he did refer to them a few times, as emblematic of the posh surroundings at the same time that he advised the gown and tuxedo clad crowd to follow…
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Woody Allen may have won this year’s Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for his whimsical movie, Midnight in Paris, with its time tripping to the 1920’s when Gertrude Stein held court in her salon. But Paris had another literary heyday in the mid-century when another round of Americans, among them George Plimpton, James Baldwin, Peter…
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Languishing on a beach chair in my winter outpost by a turquoise sea, I have only books on my mind, for me the most portable item from before the age of kindle or even a recent dinosaur, the ipod nano. So here are a few that have pleased and provoked:
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Alan Rickman warned me about this: In his new play at the Golden Theater on Broadway, Seminar by Theresa Rebeck, directed by Sam Gold, Rickman plays a well-established teacher of a private writers’ workshop. He cajoles and humiliates his students, sleeps with them, getting his point across.
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The fans outlying MoMA for the New York premiere of The Rum Diary were quadruple deep, awaiting the arrival of the star, Johnny Depp. Too bad the Titus I screening room was three quarters filled. Apparently the star did not want a full house. Why? Let's call it the vagaries of stardom. I had met…
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You could feel the weight of the occasion at the Milk Gallery in the Meatpacking on Thursday night, the site of a portrait exhibition and screening of a documentary marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Not that NYC was lacking in remembrance, but these photographs of key players in the event and after by Marco…
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The revival of Enter Laughing that opened Saturday night at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor had me howling so hard I nearly needed my own reviving. That's because Richard Kind is impossibly funny, and Josh Grisetti matches him zany move for move in the role of David Kolowitz. A cross between PeeWee Herman and…
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After the American writer Jack Kerouac's On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957, its characters were instantly immortalized, but not as fictional creations. Much to the author's horror, they became fodder for the needy mid-century Zeitgeist, heroes of an alternative lifestyle. You can read shy Kerouac's Big Sur, an account of his nervous…
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